Raging Phoenix is another awesome martial arts sock to the jaw from the Ong Bak stable, starring skinny Jija Yanin, the autistic fighting sensation who first burst onto our screens in 2008’s Chocolate. Where Chocolate was just silly, Raging Phoenix is extravagantly ridiculous: Yanin takes on the role of Deu, a lonely, angrily unhappy rich girl who is nearly kidnapped by the evil Jaguar Gang before being saved by a boy called Sanim. After some free-running shenanigans during which they’re nearly recaptured by men on bouncy bladed stilts that are clearly useless for fighting in and make their wearers look like descendants of Return to Oz’s Wheelers, Sanim takes her to the seaside and with the help of sidekicks Pigshit, Dogshit and Bullshit (who all bear a marked resemblance to their respective animals) teaches her the art of Mayraiyuth, which involves getting really drunk then pulling crazy Muay Thai/hip hop moves. Deu falls in love with Sanim, but he’s still in love with his one-time bride; she’s now a prisoner of the Jaguar Gang, which targets girls with special pheromones that can be harvested from their tears and made into a sexually captivating and highly addictive perfume.

Raging Phoenix is utterly winning in its clownish comedy and entertaining characters with their penchant for messing around, drinking and fighting. There’s a shift into a darker gear towards the end, though, when Deu discovers that the power of Mayraiyuth comes not from drinking but from the pain and sorrow that pour into drinking, and the friends head off to save Sanim’s drugged-up girlfriend, dropping the dance moves for their final battle with the Jaguar Gang and its fearsome spider-like female boss. Again, as in Chocolate, Yanin makes the film, but here she proves that not only is she an amazing fighter and athlete but that she has oodles of charm. The fighting and choreography are spectacular, and the look of the film is fantastical, with the action set in the kind of brightly-coloured post-apocalypse you might pull out of a child’s toybox - the extraordinary plushness of Deu’s bedroom, the bottle-strewn, sun-bleached ruins by the sea, the dark fairytale burrows of the evil gang’s lair. In short, Raging Phoenix is a high-energy riot that spins off martial arts clichés into a mad concoction all of its own.