Perhaps it's a trend. Last week SBS showed a Kazakhstani ripoff of The Seven Samurai, reset in a post-apocalyptic world. And, incidentally, not such a bad ripoff. This week it's a Thai ripoff of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos.
Most of the film follows the classic plot, with some semi-random changes. A very large spacecraft interrupts a holiday festival (complete with ferris wheel) to send everyone to sleep. The spacecraft camouflages its approach by pretending to be the moon (I guess you had to be there). Multicoloured rays irradiate all the women, proving that you can get pregnant by going to a disco. All the women, of course, wake up pregnant, including (nice touch) an octogenarian, who tells her husband she thinks it's the milkman's.
Much like triffids, cuckoos seem to thrive in tropical climes. The babies are born (with a little assistance from the light show) several months early and grow up several times faster than normal children. In addition to the normal set of Midwich talents they are telekinetics, and have pointy ears.
Eventually one of the cuckoos decides the human race's ears are just too ugly for words (or for telepathic projection) and informs some viewpoint characters of the reason for his presence. The cuckoos are the advance party from an advanced culture. Whence they came, no one gets sick and everything is perfect. Well, almost perfect: the planet's battery is going dead and the chemist doesn't stock the right kind. So it's time to emigrate, and the round-ears have got to go. But apart from that, perfect.
The evil chief cuckoo then vents his spleen by hunting the viewpoint characters around their specially constructed school. His technique is, as befits a doubly advanced and superior form of life, fiendishly clever: trap your prey in a room from which there is only one exit, guard that exit, then bombard with energy blasts until your prey is destroyed. The human response has a low animal cunning worthy of a John W. Campbell story: they duck. When the energy blast blows a hole through the wall, they escape through it. This works several times.
Once his demonstration of the superiority of open plan architecture is complete, one expects Dilbert's pointy-haired boss to appear and install cubicles. Instead, exhausted by his battle on Frank Lloyd Wright's behalf, he collapses while several walls are still standing. He is taken back to the hospital, where it is discovered that he's not just tired but ill.
Others come down with the disease, and the leader dies. A post-mortem reveals he has become sickly so easily because he doesn't have a spleen. ("I think I vented it.") The aliens have a decent public health system and so don't need it, but with Jeff Kennett running Thailand, getting ill is a bit more of a problem.
There's nothing to be done but abandon the project, hang up the heat ray, and go water the red weed garden one more time before leaving. The ship returns to pick up the survivors: the hale walk on, while the souls of the dear departed are embarked by multicoloured ray, the alien equivalent of public transport and the Swiss Army Knife. Once home, presumably, they spread the disease to their quarantine-ignorant brethren and make the entire species extinct, but nobody warns them about that.
Come to think of it, this omission may be the most sensible decision anyone makes in the film.
This review would not be complete without a mention of the Buddhist priest. But I couldn't work him in anywhere, possibly because he doesn't do anything. Which is impressive considering how much script he gets: must be Zen, I guess.
In summary, an interesting work, but mostly from a spot-the-ripped-off-Wyndham-element point of view. The original elements make the story less plausible as science fiction (why will I sooner accept psychic coercion than telekinesis?). On its own merits, a reasonable Star Trek episode.