In short: Alas Pati: Hutan Mati (2018)

A group of students spend much of their free time making YouTube videos of the sporty type. They have copped to the fact that doing that while visiting creepy and supposedly haunted places brings quite a few more views, so they decide to visit Alas Pati, the wood of the dead. It’s not a place anyone’s supposed to visit, particularly not its open air cemetery where corpses aren’t buried but put onto scaffoldings. Our protagonists don’t just visit, they start playing around with the corpses, until one of them gets staked in a pretty improbable accident. Because these kids are obviously idiots, they don’t try to help their friend or contact the authorities, but just run and pretend nothing ever happened.

Not surprisingly in a horror movie, they quickly find they are now haunted by poltergeist activity, horrible dreams and other assorted supernatural manifestations.

The main problem of this Indonesian teen horror movie directed by Jose Poernomo should be obvious from this short synopsis alone: our hot protagonists are so stupid and callous, it is very difficult to sympathize with them. These are, after all, people who think that nobody will ask them questions when a close associate disappears after a shared trip they weren’t exactly mum about beforehand; they are also people who’re just going to leave the corpse of someone who was supposed to be their friend rotting away in some godforsaken wood (or to even bother checking if she’s actually dead). Making them even less likeable is their near complete lack of character traits. These kids are so nondescript, they don’t even fall into standard horror movie types, and so add boringness to their other sins of character.

The only reason why Alas Pati is at least a watchable movie is Poernomo’s ability to threaten these unpleasant idiots in perfectly decent horror set pieces that often show a pretty good idea of basic human anxieties. Of course, these set pieces would probably be rather better than just decent if there was any reason to care about these characters. As it stands, Poernomo at least turns a film that should by all rights be completely uninvolving decently watchable.