Past Misdeeds: Hantu Jeruk Purut (2006)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Three friends are visiting an old cemetery by night. It is said that if an odd number of people circles the cemetery seven times, they will see the beheaded ghost of a priest who is supposed to haunt this place.

The legend turns out to be true. For some reason, it has missed the part about the ghost then slaughtering the odd number of people in a Final Destination-like semi-accident.

Romance writer Anna is trying to branch out by writing a non-fiction book about the supernatural. Unfortunately, she has decided on the same cursed cemetery as base for her book. After a short visit there of her own, the ghost starts to follow her around threateningly, or rather, the ghosts do - apart from the beheaded guy picturesquely carrying his head in his hand, there is also a rotting and pale female ghost and a ghostly dog. Most active of them is the woman. She warns Anna that she'd better stop writing lies about them, but doesn't give her much time to reconsider her writing or bothers to explain what exactly she is talking about.

Instead, the headless kills Anna in another strange semi-accident. While she's bleeding to death (or is already dead - the film is never making this clear), Anna calls the student Rin (Angie Virgin), an acquaintance and aspiring writer herself, to beg her to finish the book for her.

Even after discovering the corpse of her idol, Rin decides to respect the dead woman's wish. It's not as if she hadn't enough problems of her own, living with a mother who has become clinically depressed after divorce and Valen, the assholish boyfriend of her best friend Nadine trying to creep himself into her heart. The new writing project however grabs the girl at her ambition.

Together with Nadine and Valen, Rin visits the cemetery, does her seven rounds and is from then on haunted by the ghosts herself. The girl isn't dissuaded from her course by spooky visions, though, and soon the ghosts put their energy into harassing her friends and her mother whose fragile state of mind seems to make her quite attractive to unfriendly spooks.

Koya Pagayo's Hantu Jeruk Purut is an extremely competent effort in the seemingly never-ending struggle of a handful of Indonesian production houses to mix the more international version of the still popular Japanese ghost horror genre no reasonable person will call "J-horror" with typical teen horror and Indonesian ghosts and spooks. Describing it as "Final Destination meets Ju-On" wouldn't be too wrong, but is also meaner than the film deserves.

My first impression on watching the film was one of craftsmanship and competence. I don't know if this is typical of the films of Koya Pagayo, or if this one is an island of competence in the cheap mire that seems to make up about half of contemporary Indonesian horror (which is of course still a much better quota than we get from US horror), or if he is always this confident a director, but I am bound to find out sooner rather than later.

As is typical for films I praise with the less than enthusiastic word "competent", Hantu Jeruk Purut impresses mostly through the avoidance of certain mistakes which too many other films seem to be seeking out with a true enthusiasm for wrong artistic choices.

Here, you won't see supposedly ultra-hip young characters, nor experience the special kind of annoyance that comes with supposedly scary sequences only based on jump scares, nor will you have trouble parsing what happens on screen because the camera shakes as if held by an epileptic in the throes of a fit.

The young protagonists may be prettier than is realistic (not that I'm complaining, mind you) and have to deal with some soap operatic problems, but the film does not seem interested in glamour - something which usually is a bad fit for horror - and times its moments of melodrama quite well, never falling in the "too much boyfriend and not enough ghosts" trap. It does of course help that the actors playing them aren't half bad.

When it comes to the scares, Pagayo prefers the long shot of a ghost behind or floating over one of his protagonists to shouting "boo!" into his viewers' faces, at first trying to build a mood before escalating the horror. This isn't to say that there are no jump scares at all here, but rather that Pagayo uses other techniques in the horror book as well, which makes the few jump scares a bit more unexpected again. It's also nice to have a relatively good look at the rather neat looking ghosts.

I really liked the way the film at first jumps into the horror action, but then decelerates for a slow build up and slow escalation to its plot until the loud and fast finale in a hospital. It's an old-fashioned yet satisfying sort of structure.

Also worth mentioning, especially for people who know and dread the often clunky and ill-fitting way Indonesian horror uses comic relief, is that the film eschews humour completely apart from a moment in the introduction and one in the outro, which aren't even all that painful.

The film's big weakness and the point that could very well make you enjoy the film a lot less than I did is that it is not original at all in the elements it contains. We all have seen these kind of ghosts, these sorts of deaths and these characters a hundred times before in other films, screaming, running, dying and making creepy noises while crawling around on the floor. However, I can't say that I mind much, or rather, I like many of the elements that make up the genre called "horror" and am watching horror films not necessarily for completely new experiences (although I'm fine with those), but for the way any given film mixes and matches the familiar elements, sometimes giving them unexpected twists, sometimes just repeating them in hopefully satisfying ways.

"Satisfying" is a good word for the way Hantu Jerak Purut turned out for me, and while it isn't as brilliant as Rizal Mantovani's Kuntilanak trilogy, it is a more than worthy part of the Indonesian horror boom.

In short: Hantu Jamu Gedong (2009)

Indonesia, the country with the highest ghost density in the known world. Two probably not very bright students decide that it would be a laugh to wander into the territory of the ghost of a raped and murdered jamu seller (a woman selling a traditional herbal medicine made of egg out of a bag carried around on her back, and, if I believe the movie, also one of the favourite victims of Indonesia's rapist community) and call her up with the help of a broken chicken egg.

The ghost doesn't approve, kills the male part of the student couple and drives the female part insane. Insane gal writes her story down in her journal before she commits suicide. The journal finds its way into the hands of a friend of theirs named Kafka (alas neither Josef nor Franz). Kafka thinks that the jamu seller ghost is exactly what he needs to write his thesis (I suppose he studies ghost science), so he grabs his girlfriend Sa and her best friend Dien and goes ghost hunting. Of course the ghost still disapproves and starts to follow the trio around, doing all the required ghost stunts, even killing an arsehole acquaintance of Kafka's who reminds her a bit too much of one of her killers.

It looks as if Kafka will need to do a bit of research to save himself and his friends. But what does the ghost really want?

The last time we saw Hantu Jamu Gedong's director Koya Pagayo in these parts, he was directing the not exactly original but highly entertaining Hantu Jeruk Purut. Three years (and at least four films) later - and as it seems working with an even lower budget - Pagayo still manages to produce a watchable entry into the book of the great Indonesian horror boom.

Originality still isn't Pagayo's strong suit. The ghost attacks are all happening strictly by the book of Asian horror and he doesn't do anything unexpected with his material, but the director seems to work from the principle that people go into a ghost movie to see ghosts frightening reasonably pretty young people and not to witness soap operatics or painful comedy and therefore shows us the (reasonably creepy looking) ghost menacing said young people early and often. It doesn't sound like much, yet the film's straightforwardness and fillerless pacing in combination with reasonably good acting performances are virtues you don't want to ignore if you have been punished by films containing not even these.

While there's not a single scene in it that truly sticks in my mind (and the film wastes some golden opportunities to speak about the horrors of class), I feel quite friendly disposed towards Hantu Jamu Gendong. It's just another Indonesian horror film about a local ghost legend meeting pretty students, but it is well made enough to entertain for seventy minutes.

 

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On WTF: Hantu Jeruk Purut (2006)

The Indonesian part of the Asian horror boom is often ignored by Western horror fandom, undeservedly so, as not original but fun films like Hantu Jeruk Purut prove. There's long-haired ghost women and headless priests, oh my!

 

Technorati-Tags: indonesian movies,koya pagayo,horror,reviews,angie virgin