Wolf (1981)

Original title: Srigala

Ill-mannered Caroko (S. Parya) and his hired hand divers Tommy (an alas very underused Barry Prima) and Johan (Rudy Salam) have come to a lake somewhere in the jungles of Indonesia to dive for treasure.

The operation is all hush-hush – and one supposes not perfectly legal – so Caroko gets particularly cranky when a trio of, ahem, teenagers appear to have some fun by the lake. Good girl Nina (Lydia Kandou) and less good girl Hesty (Siska Widowati) are accompanied by their much-hated friend and odious comic relief Pono (Dorman Borisman) for some reason.

The girls do like a bit of a good flirt, and the two divers are “hunks”, so Caroko’s ever shorter patience is further tested by his employees’ ensuing extracurricular activities.

Someone else is sneaking around the lake – as well as the obligatory dilapidated lake cabins – as well, clearly planning evil and getting up to the occasional speed-boat duel. Things finally come to a head when the divers find a coffin containing a rotting corpse in the lake, and soon, slashing commences.

I do love quite a few of the films of Indonesian exploitation movie maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra, so getting my hands on a sexy newish restoration of what is generally called an Indonesian Friday the 13th rip-off did get me as excited as normal people are by a long lost reel of Citizen Kane.

As it goes with these things, the film turns out to be a minor disappointment, with the Friday rip-off relegated to the final third. Before Gautama Putra can prove he’s a much better director than Sean S. Cunningham – which indeed he was – there’s a lot of other stuff to get through, not much of it terribly well connected.

Rather, much of the film feels like an attempt to loosely stitch together scenes the filmmakers believe will entertain the audience, but filling the parts in between with simple feet-dragging instead of excitement. So the space between a wonderfully over-the-top speed boat duel (the Voorheeses never got up to that) and the obligatory exploitation movie catfight turning into a much more entertaining out of nowhere exploitation movie martial arts catfight is filled with annoying comic relief, some coy sexy times and lots of pointless bickering.

All of this does look pretty great, at least, and once the film turns into a full-on Friday imitations, it also becomes an undoubtedly fun time, so it’s not as if this were a total write-off. Sisworo Gautama Putra just did so much better in other films.