In short: Pocong Kamar Sebelah (2009)

Little does college student Felisia (Rahma Azhari) expect the boarding house she's just moved into to be this troublesome. Trouble number one (though she doesn't know it), is one of her neighbours who also happens to be the son of the establishment's owner. Among this charming guy's hobbies can be found poking a camera through the hole he's made in Felisia's wall, and staring creepily while masturbating (as much as an Indonesian film can show such a thing). Then there's the disturbing fact that the house's interior is only ever filmed from weird and slightly disturbing angles, suggesting a certain atmosphere of dread.

Might the latter problem have something to do with the sounds of a crying woman coming from the room next door to Felisia every night, behind a door the owner is warning her not to open, a door that has not just been locked for two years but chained closed?

Our heroine will eventually find out, for she - not being particularly bright - decides to open the room anyway for no good reason. It will not exactly come as a surprise that Felisia's action sets free a ghost, a pocong (shrouded female ghost) to be precise. As is the habit of pocongs, the dead woman then proceeds to appear creepily to Felisia and the other inhabitants of the boarding house, tap people on the shoulders from behind and make a frightening nuisance out of herself, until she finally works herself up to a bit of killing.

Will our rock dumb heroine survive the ghost's attention?

Pocong Kamar Sebelah (which translates to "the pocong next door", the Internet tells me) is another cheap and dirty horror movie from Indonesia, featuring the Indonesian version of a Paris Hilton-like celebrity in the lead role.

Fortunately, this isn't the sort of film in need of a real actress, but only someone more or less attractive who is willing to squeeze into various tight outfits, act in the sort of sex scene the Indonesian censors allow, and poke her (clothed) breasts in the direction of the camera while staring panic-y. Azhari is surely able to perform these functions well enough, so there's no need for me to complain.

Director Ian Jacobs seems to generally know what he's doing. While he's probably putting a bit too much visual emphasis on Dutch angles and likes the usual jump scares a bit too much, he is at least visibly trying to deliver the goods expected from another one among the endless number of Indonesian horror movies of these last few years from the film's first minute on. Jacobs tries to make up for what the film's script lacks in complexity by a not original, yet well-timed series of mild shocks and simple spook effects that is only ever disrupted for what goes for sleaze in contemporary Indonesian cinema (and lacks the comedy stylings that make many of these movies pretty difficult to get through for me).

The resulting film surely isn't something anybody would ever rave about, but it fulfils its function as a mildly exploitative diversion well enough.

 

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In short: Kuntilanak Beranak (2009)

A group of cute college students looking for a location to shoot their own indie film in enter a large, dilapidated house in the country. There, they find a video camera containing a tape that shows the misadventures of another group of cute college students.

The latter group was trying to make some sort of sensational report to get some unseen producers to give them money for something (don't you just love the precision of detail that has gone into the plot?). The best thing they could come up with was to try and find out what really happened to a disappeared dancer.

At first, the country population was less than helpful and/or ghosts, but a helpful, insultingly acted mute guy ooga booga-ed them in the direction of an old dilapidated house. With a surprising amount of reason, our heroes postponed the search of the house until the next day. That night, they had rather disturbing encounters with a female ghost obviously out to warn them off from disturbing her home.

With a surprising lack of reason, the students/filmmakers/whatever entered the house anyway, only to have more ghostly encounters and run around screaming a lot.

So, the children of Blair Witch Project have obviously made it into Indonesia. Kuntilanak Beranak is no full-grown POV horror film, though. A lot of the shots are supposed to come from the cameras everyone is dragging around (and somehow all got onto the single camera the first group of students find, but oh well), but director Ian Jackson doesn't seem to care much about sub-genre conventions and also randomly uses shots that aren't. He also seems to have a thing for cameras hanging at about ceiling level looking down at the characters for no discernible reason - it's certainly not looking as spooky as it is probably supposed to.

For its first thirty minutes or so, the movie makes a relatively positive impression. While it is very obvious how low the budget must have been, neither the pacing nor the acting are too embarrassing. Some of the early ghost appearances are even quite effective, especially the (common in Indonesian ghost movies, as it seems) scene in which one character finds her strangely zoned out mother sitting alone in the dark in the living room, only to turn around and find that her real mother is just coming down the stairs and she just talked to a ghost in disguise.

As soon as the characters enter the cursed house, the film loses any interest at building and maintaining a mood and turns into all shaky cam and screaming all the time. There are still one or two neat ideas to be found, like the ghost of a dancer possessing someone to dance creepily, but Jacobs isn't able to milk them enough to fill another forty minutes. Screeching only gets a movie that far.

Even so, I won't come down to hard on the film. Being too long, but having four or five creepy scenes isn't too bad a record for a film this cheap, and while I wasn't exactly enraptured during the film's second half, I also wasn't too bored.

 

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