In case anyone ever wonders what the world's greatest Buddhist Film Trilogy is

One can never forget Thailand is a Buddhist country even when you go to the movies. Maybe that is particularly when you go to the movies. Movies are popular culture, of course, and what better way to express the feelings of the populace than through film.

Recently I saw three movies in Thailand, that varied in topic, but all featured Buddhist themes. First of all, I saw a pretty disturbing film called "Colic." The poster shows one of the more disgusting images from the film, that of a little baby with his hand cut off. The movie is the tell of a baby who keeps crying. His parents cannot figure out why, but in the end, they discover the baby is just the reincarnation of an army general, who committed a lot of horrible crimes against the Thai people. In the end, the soul is released and the baby stops crying.

The second film I saw was another horror movie, but of a more comedic variety. It was call "See How They Run." It is about a ghost who is haunting a small Thai village. He appears to everyone in town and they run to the head monk to get rid of it. In the end, we find out that the baby was the aborted fetus we had to so horribly see performed in the opening scene. The mother is the crazy woman seen walking around town and the ghost's father turns out to be the head monk. The movie could have taken an anti-Buddhist slant at this point, anywhere but in Thailand; but the boy is reunited with his mother and father (who gives him a hug). Then the boy's soul is released to be reincarnated. The ending is very shocking, particularly in this day and age. The villagers are going to leave when dozens of children's ghosts show up, and warn them not to abort their unborn children. So in the end we have a very pro-choice horror story.

The last film we have is a superhero flick called "Mercury Man." This has to be the first superhero film in history where the protagonist has a transvestite for a "sister" ("she" designs his costume). But hey, this is Thailand. The story revolves around a firefighter who becomes a superhero after being stabbed in the chest by a Islamic terrorist group. Seems al-Qaeda has discovered a pair of secret amulets that when combined will create "one fourth of the power of the bomb that dropped on Nagasaki." This movie also gives us the chance to see British actors playing Americans (complete with their accents intact) and Thai actors playing Arabs! There are great scenes, where Mercury Man's powers are released while he is looking at an issue of Penthouse (his powers catch his clothes on fire, and then his mother walks in and finds him in the nude); where a soldier that the children think is inept saves the day; a mysterious Cambodian boy with the power to control clocks; a Tibetan woman who kicks ass and speaks perfect Thai; and a very touching scene where American soldiers fire indescrimaely at a bus and kill Usama Ali's wife and child at a roadside check in "The Middle East." Usama Ali is the villain by the way. In the end it is a strange mix of Buddhist mysticism, Islamic fanaticism, plain old good time anti-Americanism, and a repeated homage to Spiderman. In the final battle between Mercury Man and Usama Ali, Mercury Man gives Usama a lecture on what is good about Islam and wonders how he could have forgotten it. Usama Ali doesn't care and he just wants to kill.

So there you have my foreys into the weird and wacky world of films with a Buddhist twist. I could understand them all because of the beauty of subtitling. Thais put subtitles on their films so foreigners like me can understand their films. The only problem is when an actor tries to use English. Then there are no subtitles, and then I cannot understand what they are saying.