I have hard to describe my feeling about this movie, but i would like you give it a pretty high score for its originality, visuals and charm, but its not one of my favorite movies..

Hmmmmm? Nope, no subtitled legitimate DVD’s for any of the sequels to “Buppha Rahtree” at all. Been expecting the “grey market” Malay versions to pop up but sadly none so far.

Ahhh… Fansubs. You can usually find those at most forum sites for Asian cinema…. unfortunately usually connected with DL info for the films too….. which is bad, bad, bad……but the subs themselves, well…. subs are good, good, good. There are however one or two subtitle only sites like Kloofy’s that archive just the subs written by fans or translated from the original language ones, to go with various versions of the film. If subs are something you need, I’d start there first.

Do you ever use that Asian horror films website I mentioned? You can watch films in about 2 or 3 parts and the quality is pretty decent. I prefer to collect DVDs but if the subtitles make no sense then the site comes in handy! You can watch Rahtree Reborn there..

Speaking of Rahtree, my next article in on the fourth film in the series, and I just so happen to work occasionally with the Thai distributor of the film and managed to get a subtitled screener from them. I’ve gotta say.. having watch Rahtree 3.2, I may be done with the series now! It’s pretty much identical to the third one. And whereas I found the comedy in the first one worked quite well, the slapstick stuff in 3 and 4 kind of ruin it for me.
Incidentally, do you know if there is an English subtitled DVD of part 2 out there?

I have to admit… I don’t know anything about fan subs.. how do they work?

There’s nothing wrong with hating torture porn, when it was something new like the first Saw movie it had a point in surprising audiences. Now that it’s a genre in its own right there’s no reason for it to exist.

“Death Wish” with Charles Bronson springs to mind. Combine that with “Last House on the Left” for the horror component and make your hero a woman and you get one of these sorts of films.

Carolyn can’t figure out why I like these kind of films when the “Torture Porn” stuff turns me off. I figure it’s something to do with my always having felt very vulnerable and powerless in the face of a world of people all usually much physically bigger and stronger than me. But who knows…..

Maybe Oldboy where everything ends up in a big messed up heap. Of course that might be the better film but it’s no where near as fun as a good revenge fantasy

Simply put, almost any amount of really nasty stuff can happen to people in a movie as long as the storytellers remember that it’s done not for the gratuitous sense of just showing such stuff, but to give a good narrative reason behind the story itself. I’m timid and squeamish as all heck about such stuff, but I never mind it as long as there’s a reason for it to be there in the story…..

In short…. never forget to let the victims turn the tables on their abusers and get their just revenge. Without that, there is no payoff for sitting through the nasty stuff…….