The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.
I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.
1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.
It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.
The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.
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