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A plump comedian turns into a dedicated man of love. A pop star becomes a man of disaster always breaking out a fight. A normal heathy-drinks sales girl is a hitman who traces down them to death. A girl who is taken as a hostage turns into a lover of her own kidnapper. Whatever you want to guess from other typical genre movies, you will never get it from Yuthlert Sippapak’s fourth movie, Pattaya Maniac.
The story is involved with two best friends who have nothing in common. One is a naive amulet gurn Tun – all in common good guy; the other is a pirated-VCD vendor-plus a football gambler – are also in a common bad boy. All of the chaos start when Tun is crushed on a sexy girl Nok, a mafia’s mistress, and tries every way to free her. At the same time, Tao loses his game in a football gambling and runs almost to hell in order to return the loan to the mafia.
Pattaya Maniac is a movie of twists. You will waste your time to get the formulas you find in a genre formula. First is the role-swapping between the two main actors. Tun is taken the role by a famous comedian Choosak Iamsuk who had never gone beyond the role of a protagonist’s best friend. His best friend Tao on the other hand is played by a country’s famous pop singer-cum-actor Somchai Kemglad. Seemingly, he had never taken the role less than being a hero. In fact, it is even more difficult to define what genres movie should fit into. Initially, it looks like a romantic comedy. But the friendship between the two protagonists is of high merit. At the same time, the movie songs are so fantastic that viewers can not avoid stepping their feets along the rhythms.
If someone wants to call it as an ‘experimental,’ it is not exaggerated. But it is experimental in Yuthlert’s way. Instead of augmenting with styles and techniques, Yuthlert breaks out the legend by his use of plots. In fact, the movie combines all of the genres, and challenged all of the movies that he had made. At the same time, Yuthlert still does not forget to leave one of his trademarks in his fourth work – the verbal bites to famous Thai people. Film people laughed and clasped their hands when he called a famous but scandalized film critic as ‘the crocodile,’ whom has recently been sued by another journalist for his direct attack in a newspaper.
Pattaya Maniac proved Yuthlert’s master in the road of cult movies, and, for me, a new polite critic of contemporary Thai society.
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