Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (1988): Surprisingly, Not a Single Ninja.

A rare example of a Godfrey Ho megamovie that doesn't feature a single ninja!


As I was saying, if you're familiar with Godfrey Ho then you must also be familiar with his extravagantly outfitted and garishly colored ninjas, the faceless stars of movies like Ninja in the Killing Fields, Ninja Terminator, Ninja Champion, Tough Ninja the Shadow Warrior, Ninja the Protector and on and on. Another aspect of Thunder of Gigantic Serpent that stands out is that the film actually lives up to its title. You wouldn't be out of place assuming that with a title like that the plot probably revolves around a crocodile run amok or a skinny halfwit named Gigantic Serpent or another similar copout. So I was mildly surprised to discover a bounty of enormous snake footage.

Godfrey Ho himself definitely deserves a longer introduction and explanation (something which I'm only partly qualified to attempt given that the man is something of a mystery) but suffice to say that Ho and his producer Joseph Lai churned out film after film after film, all of which share the same distinct style. In spite of the fact that both men exemplify hackwork at its worst, they also embody the auteur theory, inasmuch as one can instantly recognize their work and clearly see their fingerprints all over the movies they released. This is despite both men using various aliases throughout their careers. For instance it was 'Charles Lee' that directed Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (but we know better). In short the distinguishing characteristic of Ho's movies is that they are comprised of 80% recycled footage from other asian films and 20% new ninja footage shot by ho with white actors in a bid to increase revenues from foreign territories. The recycled footage is somewhat of a mystery to me as well since I truly don't know what country Ho and Lai steal these movies from or if they're unreleased films or what. All I know is that through their dubious alchemy, beauty is born. In truth more often than not you end up being completely bored with the stolen movie, waiting in vain for the white overactors to show up and turn into ninjas.

In this case the A story revolves around a girl and her pet snake who grows to monstrous proportions after being exposed to the 'formula.' The B story involves crime lord Solomon sending his henchman off to steal said formula in a bid to take over the world. This is Solomon:When he's not shouting "HAAA!" he's detailing his plans for world domination which, frankly, I never quite understood. Solomon's idea seems to be that once he's stolen the formula to make things bigger he will be able to provide food to the world's poorer countries, thus engendering the type of goodwill that presumably allows one to take over the world. Uh... yeah, and why wouldn't someone just take the formula from him by force and use it to do something that could actually help one take over the world like, I don't know, make a 500 ton gold bar or a fleet of giant monsters or begin breeding a super race of paul bunyan's and 50 foot women. I mean, you can't use benevolence to take over the world. At any rate, Solomon is the villain of the story, the very rich and very powerful super villain in fact, something which is amply demonstrated by the deluxe firing range we see him using early in the film.


Early on we also get a primal nightmare of a sequence involving what looks like a big ball of poo melting while snakes pour out of it. This incident goes unremarked upon and unexplained but presumably this is the way in which the girl comes into possession of her snake. I'm just going to be calling the snake 'the snake' by the way. I kept notes as I watching the film of what the fucking thing was actually called but I could never figure it out since, in addition to being hideous, the little girl has a world-class marble mouth. The snake's name might be Mossler, Rossler, Mockler, Markur, Margaret, Aslan, Monster, Marsha, or Mozler. Anyway the snake and the girl are best friends as demonstrated by this picture which vaguely shows the snake wearing a bow the deformed girl made for it.So eventually through various shenanigans the girl ends up with the formula, which rather than being an actual formula, which would make sense, you know some little dribble of green scifi liquid in a test tube or something, no rather than that it turns out the formula is a large clear case that you can put stuff into. Like a frog for example.Ugh, okay this is my first real blog post and I am getting sick of it I have been doing this for hours uploading pictures and stuff so we are on the movie now, aight, we fucking going for it so try to hang on like these loser kids playing skeets with each other (that's ski skating fyi).

See? It's not all formula this, giant snake that; there's also time for not one but two skeequences (that's ski skate sequences) although luckily for you I've only chosen to show the one above. Unluckily for you the second one had a giant snake in it and it was better but that's too bad. Speaking of giant snakes: origin story time!

Goddamn! It should be pointed out that the snake frequently makes loud screechy squawking noises. Probably a habit he picked up from the girl since by the end of the movie I wanted to tear her throat to make her stop oh god make her stop. Oh hey it's been a while since we saw anybody from the other movie:
Our (white) hero. His name is TED! TED FAST! which seems to be the only way people say it in this film.
It kinda makes it look like maybe Ted was shooting at the snake when it popped up but of course he wasn't, that would be impossible, they're from two different movies. Likewise it may look like the snake is spying on the guy below,
...but no, he's from like a half an hour later in the movie! And he's just as confused as I was about how an empty box can be a 'formula.' But thanks to these jokers stealing the formula and just generally fucking shit up and kidnapping little girls and what not our snake is forced into action. It doesn't really go as planned though since he's immediately machine gunned, blown up, and electrocuted.
Of course it has the side effect of massively embiggening the snake and giving the creepy girl her first chance to accidentally rupture her hymen (she never took gymnastics or horse riding).On the surface this picture of the two dudes looks pretty boring, but what if I told you that their names are Loosetang and Goosechow? It's still boring. But now that our snake is really really big he becomes kind of a dick. He manages to lose the girl despite the fact that she is sitting right on top of his head, and then he just starts wilding out!
This is as good a time as any to point out that the special effects, while obviously crude, are highly impressive by Ho standards. To be honest I wasn't expecting anything like this. I mean they even built little bridges and cities and stuff. I kind of figured going in that we'd be treated to a real snake flopping around in a sock drawer, not spectacular explosions and little lasers flying around, I mean damn. And his lil tongue would even dart in and out sometimes! I mean shit at one point before he became super giant the snake even flew at one point. That's movie magic. Aight we're almost done.Dragon Wars eat your heart out! That's right bitch, Freyho beat you to it little dumb boy! During this sequence the little girl is rescued by a police officer and by this point the movie seems to have come around to how horrible she is since there is a gratuitous sequence showing the police officer trying in vain to carry her down the stairs of the building and having to stop every five seconds to put her down and try carrying her a different way. It goes on for almost 45 seconds, even once they get out of the building he's still trying and failing to hold her aloft for more than a moment or two.
Oh yeah I completely forgot to mention that the whole thing was subtitled in some kind of crazy moon language. And I would have had a picture of the white guy fight that happens after our snake falls to his death but it wasn't noteworthy at all, unfortunately. I knew not to expect any ninjas in the final duel since there hadn't been any up to that point, but when the two white guys decided to put their guns down and fight like men I admit I got my hopes up. But no. And they didn't even end up fighting like men, our (white) hero TED! TED FAST! shot Solomon anyway. However, there was one pretty great dialogue exchange:

Solomon: Who are you? Ted Fast!?
Ted Fast: The one and only. I hope I didn’t mess up your plans, dick!

This was the first time I've watched one of Godfrey's movies by myself and I have to say it's far from ideal. You pretty much need to have some buddies with you to offset the extreme boredom that inevitably sets in. Still, can't complain, it was one of the more interesting Ho efforts I've seen.