Sidewalks of Bangkok

There’s quite a lot been said and written about Jean Rollin’s The Sidewalks of Bangkok and there are just as many opinions about it. Some favour it because it, for Rollin standards, holds a pretty fast and furious beat to it. Others feel that it’s a bastard child which sticks out to much compared to his more reserved and sombre poetic works.

Supposedly Rollin wrote the script to The Sidewalks of Bangkok in three days with the intention of making a movie that paid homage to good old cliffhanger serials and MGM’s 1932 classic The Mask of Fu Manchu with Boris Karloff in the lead role. And if the three-day script writing session is true, then it has to be said that he made a pretty damned good job of it. Much like the later film Perdues dans New York (Lost in New York) 1989, The Sidewalks of Bangkok was crafted around footage that was shot at a different occasion. This time by producer Lionel Wallman on his honeymoon in Bangkok - Wallman had previously produced Rollin’s Lèvres de sang (Lips of Blood) 1975 and Les démoniaques (Demoniacs) 1974. The footage was given to Rollin with the suggestion that it could be worked into a movie, and damned right too, as the handful of inserts work like a charm in selling the illusion that part of the action in the movie takes place in Thailand.

Although fans of Rollin’s regular sensuous female vampires and the chilly breeze of the beach of Dieppe are in for something completely different as this is a movie set completely outside of Rollin’s EuroGoth world of erotic horror. The Sidewalks of Bangkok is a fast paced, full throttle action movie that slows down for nothing – unless it’s excruciating sexploitation scene time. And I never thought that I’d say it, but these scenes act as sluggish speed bumps in The Sidewalks of Bangkok.

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