Asih 2 (2020)

A couple of days – at best months – after the first Asih movie, our indefatigable kuntilanak (as always, Shareefa Daanish) returns, murders the protagonists of said movie, leaving the old lady (Marini) behind to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution, and kidnaps the couple’s baby Amelia. So much for surviving a horror movie.

About six years later (so about 1991), a little girl (Anantya Rezky) is hit by a car on a jungle road and brought to hospital by the driver. Apparently, the kid lives alone in the jungle, without family or home. Hospital doctor Sylvia (Marsha Timothy) decides the little girl she soon will dub Ana needs adopting rather badly. It is clear that Ana, as well as the situation in which she was found, reminds Sylvia painfully of her own daughter and the way she died some years ago, a tragedy neither she nor her cartoonist husband Razan (Ario Bayu) have emotionally recovered from. Razan is pretty sceptical about the adoption idea, but is letting himself be convinced.

As the couple quickly realizes, Ana isn’t in the best of mental health, and isn’t exactly socially adapted to life outside of the jungle. This is of course not going to be the major problem our protagonists have to cope with, for Ana is of course little Amelia after some years as Asih’s “daughter”. Thus, the very jealous and rather dead would be mother starts on her usual diet of terror.

Which, of course is the main problem Rizal Mantovani’s Asih 2 has. This is now the third movie in the Danurverse in which Asih is the main villain, and her bag of tricks really hasn’t changed much from the early days of the franchise, so our characters are spooked and creeped out by things the film’s audience will have experienced often enough for a degree of tedium to set in. There are still decent scare scenes in here, thanks to Mantovani’s considerable talent at going through the motions with a degree of style, but hardly one of them is going to surprise or shock anyone. They do deserve an appreciative nod for competent filmmaking by the director, though.

Another obvious flaw is the amount of time the film needs to show its protagonists catching up to all the things about Asih the audience has learned during the course of her other appearances. There’s little excitement in seeing them figuring out the kuntilanak’s not exactly complex backstory, and there’s really little reason for an audience to go through it yet another time, particularly since the film adds little that changes anything of much relevance. Asih’s creepiness – and really the creepiness of most supernatural threats in the movies – is not at all enhanced by us knowing every part of her in fact sad and tragic backstory in excruciating detail, and there’s certainly no need for the film to go through the material yet again when it has no plans to use it in any interesting or new ways.

Thanks to this, Asih 2 also manages to bury its more interesting elements, namely the emotional parallel Sylvia draws between Ana/Amelia and her dead daughter, the well-drawn fog of grief that has descended on hers and Razan’s relationship and what their new little girl does to that. There’s a really interesting horror film about two grief-stricken women – one living, one dead – fighting each other for an adoptive daughter buried in here, but it is buried under the dross accrued through the very real horrors of bad franchising.

The Queen of Black Magic (2019)

Original title: Ratu Ilmu Hitam

A group of people who grew up together in a country orphanage, and grew as close as birth family there, mostly coupling up with their foster siblings, too, gathers back there to say a last goodbye to the apparently beloved orphanage boss Bandi (Yayu Unru). The new batch of kids is away on a bus tour over the weekend, so it seems like a good time for a reunion.

And a reunion it certainly is: the dark secrets haunting the lives of the grown-up orphans come back in a more literally form of haunting, and soon, ghosts and ghoulies appear, and half of the cast loses their minds in various very unpleasant ways. A nested series of dark secrets is revealed, and sins of the past have to be paid off in gory and very unappetizing ways.

Kimo Stamboel’s Queen of Black Magic (written by the redoubtable Joko Anwar) is only nominally a remake of the classic Suzzanna vehicle, using some elements of the older film but really being its own thing, the nostalgia relegated to the end credits. Hilariously enough, part of that nostalgia is a still shot of a bowl of maggots and worms, but then, once you’ve gotten through the scenes of centipede horror the film at hand features (enough of it you might also sell it as a remake of Centipede Horror), you might feel nostalgic towards that bowl too.

But really, centipedes, (self-)mutilation and all kinds of increasingly insane gory fun (and “fun) until the climax goes for a veritable hell on Earth of the grotesque are quite a ways away when the movie starts. Stamboel spends the first half of the running time carefully establishing character relations and those parts of their shared past the characters admit to, even among each other, effectively suggesting the holes in their stories and the peculiarities in their behaviours without outright explaining them or pointing them out.

So when the supernatural violence begins to explode, it’s really a very traditional, as well as as very effective way to confront the characters with the lies and secrets of their pasts while drenching them in blood and bodily fluids. It’s not one of those highly moralizing films where nasty people get what they deserve, though. Rather, there are degrees to everyone’s guilt, Stamboel making pretty clear that, as terrible as some of the things some of the characters did were, there were quite a few extenuating circumstances, and the traumas inflicted on them in their childhoods were price enough for anyone to pay for any sin. Behind the gore, there’s some clear knowledge of the way abuse can twist its victims into accomplices of their abusers, leaving behind minefields of guilt, and silent quotidian horrors.

And it’s not as if the supernatural vengeance were in any way, shape or form interested in punishing anyone in appropriate ways. Indeed, the film makes a point of the perpetrator of the vengeance being so warped by their own pain and trauma, she simply doesn’t care if she hurt or kills innocents not even born when the initial incidents took place; it’s not so much about vengeance anymore, but a wish to perpetuate the pain inflicted on oneself. Again, Stamboel works quite a few truths about the true horrors of abuse into his little fest of nasty visuals. In fact, one might argue that all the blood, mutilation, child death and centipedes are Stamboel’s way to ease the bitter pills about abuse he has to offer down our throats a bit more easily, the icky bits actually making it possible to watch what amounts to a tragedy about cycles of abuse.

Darah (2009)

aka Macabre

Adjie (Ario Bayu), his very pregnant wife Astrid (Sigi Wimala), his estranged sister Ladya (Indonesian horror mainstay Julie Estelle), and a handful of their friends are on their way to Jakarta. On a country road, they find a girl named Maya (Imelda Therinne) just standing around alone in the dark. Maya explains she has been robbed and asks for a ride home. After some hesitation, the group decides to help the girl out, for Astrid is a rather kind-hearted woman and Eko (Dendy Subangil), one of the friends, rather fancies Maya.

Once the party has arrived at Maya's place, a rather large house right in the middle of nowhere, the girl suggests everyone come in and meet her mother, who will surely be thankful to the strangers.

The group agrees. After all, they've already gone that far, and hearing a "thank you" is always appreciated. Little do they know that Maya's mother Dara (Shareefa Daanish) is the head of a little family of slowly aging (human meat has powers, as you'll remember from various other movies like Ravenous) cannibal butchers. Dara, her other two sons - Adam (Arifin Putra) and an overweight guy specialized in the arts of the butcher whose name I didn't get - and Maya don't just slaughter humans for themselves, but are also the meat providers for other cannibals (rich and evil, obviously) around Indonesia, so a carload of young people is excellent news to them, and rather bad news for said young people, who will soon have to fight for their lives and bacon.

Darah, a Indonesian/Singaporean co-production, was made by a pair of Indonesian directors (and writers and producers) calling themselves The Mo Brothers and features an Indonesian cast. It is based on motives and a character from the directors' short film "Dara" that was part of another international co-production, the US-co-produced omnibus film Takut, so I think I can safely assume that 1) The Mo Brothers really liked the character of Dara(h) and Shareefa Daanish's performance in the role and 2) unlike many other Indonesian directors and studios, these guys are interested in selling their films overseas, too.

Another indication for the truth of the second theory (I don't think the first one can be in any doubt at all) is how different Darah is to the endless masses of films brought up by the Indonesian horror boom of the 2000s. Mainly, this is not much of a supernatural horror film, but is rather oriented on the more Western horror sub-genre of backwoods horror/torture porn (two once distinct sub-genres that seem to have become one thanks to Hostel and its followers), so there are - unfortunately - no traditional Indonesian ghosts going around, nor - fortunately - is there much of the extremely low-brow humour on display that has ruined more than one Indonesian horror film.

The Mo Brothers don't go too far with their film's internationalisation, though. The pair is insightful enough to realize that local colour can only distinguish their film from the mass of other films populating their chosen sub-genre, so they have made a film that is a visibly Indonesian interpretation of torture porn, containing the local colour that evokes the kind of sense of place that can (and does) produce a more effective mood of threat and desolation than more generic surroundings ever could.

As should be obvious, Darah is still not a very original movie. I've seen its content (a bit of creepiness fastly turning into grotesque, slightly humorous violence) and plot a hundred times before, yet the Mo Brothers' film is executed so well I don't mind its lack of originality much. After all, the violence is creative, the pacing tight, the Brothers' direction technically pretty great without being distractingly flashy, the acting - from the more traditionally realist style of the victims to the non-blinking scenery-chewing staring of the cannibals - is good, and there's even a bit of characterisation for the victims that does not make them look like the douchebags and idiots that are traditionally the victims in this sort of film.

So Darah might be generic, but it sure is fun.

 

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