If there’s one thing the Thai film industry knows how to do, it’s weird the fuck out of foreigners.
True, the Kingdom’s most famous director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) isn’t known for the amount of flatulence in his films, but his sublime Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives revolves around something that’s on every Thai’s mind, namely ghosts and spirits. The same goes for this, Bihn Banloerit’s prime slice of explosively bizarro, WTF, full-bore goofy.
Any similarity between the two directors ends there, however, and The Dwarves Must Be Crazy is more on a par with homegrown comedies that are traditionally aimed at a Thai audience, presumably in the provinces well away from cosmopolitan Bangkok. Thailand has always been mad for the movies, but the gulf between imported Hollywood blockbusters and native-born projects such as this is wide indeed. For one thing, precious few American films rely so heavily on Chuck Jones-style foley effects such as the slide-whistle, rubbery boinging, and of course the always-good-for-a-laugh cowbell. That’s fine in small doses, but director Banloerit ups, and then re-ups the bemused chuckle factor by orders of magnitude. And that’s not even counting the movie’s all-little people cast.
The plot, or story, or possibly just “seemed like a good idea at the time” kind of thing, takes us to a remote jungle village populated by a clan of dwarves. (Thailand being as tropical and therefore wet as all get out, the village brings to mind a bamboo Venice a few kilometers off the Mekong and equidistant to bizarro world, which, of course, is what you seek in a Thai comedy.) One day, the village foragers discover some glowing slugs writhing around an anthill and decide, what the hell, why not eat them? Turns out the bugs are poisonous, and before you can say “I Love King Bhumibol Adulyadej,” six villagers die and then return as one of the most recognizable of ghosts, the krasue. Consisting of a floating severed head trailed by all the organs of the decedent’s corpus, the hungry evil spirit is indeed a ghastly sight, but lowbrow comedy of the sort that borders on the Three Stooge-ism is the main order of business here. It’s up to a gaggle of not-very-brave-at-all villagers to hunt down and kill the krasue before the whole community is wiped out.
To be sure, The Dwarves Must Be Crazy is 92 minutes of short-guy jokes, riceball pratfalls, wacky shenanigans, and every hoary bit of foley work in the book. The extremely broad comedy translates into any language, though, so it’s all good if that’s what you’re looking for. What’s not so hot are the extremely low-rent CGI effects and the batshit crazy addition, three-quarters of the way through the film, of a pair of tattooed, Muay Thai demons that fly with plastic snaggle teeth and wings. “What the hell?” you ask. Absolutely, yes, the hell of movies so ingeniously cattywampus to anything else you’ll likely see this year that you actually adore them. Did I mention the levitating ghosts ’n’ guts are out to lick and/or naw on everybody’s backside? My bad, but what a deliciously weird film this is, so much better than Under the Rainbow or Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small.
The Dwarves Must Be Crazy screens again Tuesday, Sept. 27, 11:30pm.
Fantastic Fest 2016 runs Sept. 22-29 at the Alamo South Lamar. Tickets and info at www.fantasticfest.com, and follow our ongoing coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
This article appears in September 23 • 2016.