Santet (1988)

A rather isolated village somewhere in Indonesia. Local crime lord and all-around bad guy Bisman (I. Gusti Jagat Karana) poisons his wife because she’s been annoying him with being ill for too long. Because he’s just that kind of a guy, he then proceeds to blame a local cleric for the killing as a work of black magic, burns the man alive (in a stunt that makes one fear for the stuntman involved), and then start in on an attempt to rape the cleric’s wife Katemi (Suzzanna). Katemi does know where rapist shits hurt, and manages to escape unscathed, at least bodily.

Out in the wilderness, she meets actual black magic sorceress Nyi Angker (Joice Erna), a woman whose human head sits on the body of a crocodile for half of the month. Nyi Angker sees in Katemi her chosen disciple, and convinces the woman to learn and use black magic to take vengeance on Bisman and his allies.

While Katemi does things like eat fresh baby placentas and bathe in crocodile-filed waters to prove her willingness to become a black magician, Bisman starts off a black magic scare in the village with the goal to become the local mayor, with his and his allies’ talk of magic also a useful distraction for the murders he commits himself. Things become interesting indeed when Katemi starts closing in with actual black magic.

Santet isn’t my favourite cooperation between great Indonesian horror and exploitation director Sisworo Gautama Putra and Indonesian Queen of Horror Suzzanna. There’s just a bit too much incidental comedy – even devolving into a musical number at one point – in it for me to fully embrace the film, particularly in the middle act when the jokes sometimes threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill. To be fair, the humour is only annoying when Suzzanna doesn’t join in – whenever she does some black magical joking while looking about impishly, I’m perfectly happy with it, perhaps because it is always fun to see this very dramatic and dignified actress cut loose in a different way from time to time.

The romance – between Suzzanna and the old mayor’s very pious son – is a bit undercooked as well, but then, it seems mostly to be in here to provide the opportunity for a fully clothed dream sequence that’s all hands rubbing “erotically” on cloth and to point towards an easy happy end Suzzanna’s characters don’t get too often (so I won’t complain).

Whenever the film focusses on the actual business at hand, we get the expected Indonesian madness, with many a body part exploding and snakes and what looks like eels crawling and/or slithering out of various natural and unnatural bodily orifices, bodies swelling and popping, and some choice human-animal hybridisation that would give the mad scientist around the corner ideas. Sometimes, these scenes have a truly phantasmagorical quality; at other times, they’re just gloriously weird and strange.

As a bonus, we also get a neat magical duel, Indonesian style, to wrap things up, though, alas, dear Suzzanna isn’t involved in it as anything but a bystander.

But hey, we will always have the indelible picture of Nyi Angker’s human/crocodile form rising out of a pool to say hello.

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.

Ghost With Hole (1981)

Original title: Sundelbolong/Sundel Bolong

Indonesia in the early 80s. Former prostitute Alisa (Suzzanna) has found love with ship’s captain Hendarto (Barry Prima) – apparently his only name. But just after they have gotten married, Alisa’s luck changes for the worst. On the day of their marriage, Hendarto is commanded to go on a voyage that’ll keep him away from home for nine months without any possibility of seeing or hearing from Alisa in that time apart from the occasional letter. I’d suspect Hendarto is Indonesian for Kirk, but we get to see his perfectly normal looking ship, so I have no idea what’s going on there.

Alisa is a bit bored and sad alone at home, but her job search meant to alleviate that only leads to an even nastier development. Her former madam Mami (Ruth Pelupessi) teams up with a sleazy fashion shop owner (Rudy Salam) to get Alisa back into the prostitution biz. When that doesn’t work, Rudy and some henchmen rape Alisa. Even though this is an even more difficult thing in Indonesia at this time and place than it would be today, Alisa goes through the horrors of a rape trial. Before that can end as badly for her as you would suspect, she realizes she is pregnant; attempts to get an abortion end with a judgmental preachy physician (who also informs us that miscarriages are the main cause of disability in children) and visions of disfigured children floating in the air around Alisa.

On her very last rope, Alisa tries to abort the foetus herself, and dies in the process. Because this woman clearly can’t catch even the tiniest break, and she died very angry and bitter indeed, she very quickly returns as a ghost, a so-called sundel bolong, a woman with no feet (unless she wishes to be seen otherwise) and a rotting hole in her back. In a somewhat more socially acceptable looking form, she spends half of her nights romancing the now finally returned Hendarto while, in an early Daredevil move Stan Lee would be proud of, pretending to be her own, actually dead, twin sister Shinta.

Looking rather more frightening, the other half of the night is time for taking vengeance on the rapists and human monsters responsible for her sad fate. Well, and for some comic relief when she terrorizes some night workers for reasons.

The villains are not going to take this lying down, so there are attacks on Hendarto that provide Prima with the opportunity to show off some of his screen fighting skills, and even an evil exorcist shooting a laser finger.

Ghost with Hole is one of the many cooperations between Indonesian horror maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra and the country’s great horror star Suzzanna. The film does a fine job when it comes to shifting the folk tales it uses as a basis into contemporary Indonesia. As in most of the director’s films I have seen, Indonesia becomes a kind of liminal place, where the very modern and the very traditional, as well as very Western and very – to my very Western eyes – traditionally Muslim ways of looking at the world and being in her collide. This liminality is not po-faced and intellectualised, thank the gods, but rather a side effect of what at its core is very traditional exploitation filmmaking of the kind where certain universal tropes – the rape revenge, the opportunity to show off as much female nudity as the censor allows, the love for crude and imaginative violence and so on – are seen through a more individual and local lens. This is a movie made mostly for the local Indonesian market but of course influenced by everything from the rest of the world that made its way there, leading to that joyful mix of the very universal and the very specific I love so dearly in a movie. As it should be.

The film’s early stages are somewhat heavy going. The melodrama is absolutely necessary for the ghost story to work, but tastes of the time and place do lead for this part of the film to drag on a little long, with ever more troubles and horrors ladled onto Alisa’s plate until it becomes a bit exhausting to watch; it’s also not exactly pleasant, but then, it’s not supposed to be.

I find it rather interesting how easy it is to read the whole movie, like many melodramas, as a feminist film. Sure, there’s the obligatory scene of Alisa getting prayed away at the end, but you couldn’t have sold this to the censors any other way. Otherwise, the film is completely on Alisa’s side – even the ranting doctor and the deformed baby visions don’t feel like an attempt at attacking Alisa by the movie, but rather like another moment when the melodrama hones in on the enormous pressure society puts on this woman, until she desperately breaks.

This does of course also cause the film’s horror half to be rather a lot of fun. Alisa dispatching the nasty bastards responsible for her death in increasingly surrealistic and imaginative ways (personal favourite: the flying four arms technique, though I’m also a fan of the googly-eyed half-rotten corpse look she sometimes shifts into) like a prettier and a lot less morally icky Freddy Krueger is a sight to behold, as are the scenes of her romancing Hendarto again; the latter as something of a bittersweet counter-argument against the basic meanness of the world its melodrama struggled against.

That Suzzanna is great in whatever form the film needs her to be in is a given, once you’ve seen her in a few movies, but let me again emphasise how wonderful she shifts between the serious and dignified sufferer, the angry ghost and the light-hearted lover, and how important she is for holding Ghost with Hole’s disparate elements together.

Three Films Make A Post: A Terrifying Case of SKULL-DUGGERY!

Don't Look Up (2009): Fruit Chan remakes Hideo Nakata's fine early ghost story for the English language market, but replaces subtlety with loud noises and annoying dumbness and Nakata's interesting characters with a director who is seeing dead people in badly acted epileptic fits and the usual clichés that come with that sort of role. Instead of not explaining a lot, Chan churns out some crap about a "gypsy curse" that is supposed to give the film a whiff of the Gothic, but only achieves to bring it further down the road of films nobody needs to see.

It's an embarrassing film from a director who really should know and can do better. A fantastic demonstration how not to make a film about ghosts.

 

Rat Sakti Calon Arang (1985): Despite being blessed with Suzzanna (in an improbable double role as evil black magic queen and her kind-hearted daughter) and Barry Prima in the leads, this Indonesian film isn't really the insane mix of horror, martial arts and fantasy I had expected, but rather a more earnest-minded adaptation of an actual legend, which puts it right outside my area of expertise (and my areas of vaguely knowledgeable dilettantism, too). It's a fine time, though, and - earnest-minded or not - does have moments like the utterly bizarre scene in which Suzzanna fights one of her enemies by power-urinating on him that bridge all cultural barriers for your low-brow needs.

 

BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007): Leave it to Uwe Boll to make a movie with a vampire lord Billy the Kid as its big bad that is utterly tedious and boring. I would admire Boll's gift for inciting even the better of his actors to dreadful performances, or his utter inability to learn how to point a camera into the right direction without having it make the wavering motions of a sick donkey, or his talent for finding scriptwriters whose lack of craftsmanship is equal to his own, but then I have seen too many of his movies to feel anything but disgust for him.

There aren't many directors able to make their crap films feel like deliberate insults to anyone stupid enough to lay his or her money down for them. Boll is their master.

 

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The Warrior (1981)

aka Jaka Sembung

Indonesia is plagued by the colonial reign of terror of the Dutch. The Dutch governor (played by an actor who looks decidedly Indonesian) is your typical mad sadist, whom even his own daughter Maria fears.

The only ones working against the oppressors are the heroic and pious magical martial arts hero Jaka Sembung (Barry Prima) and his merry band of rebels, who we'll never witness doing much rebelling.

At the beginning of the film, Jaka is already in Dutch hands, but escapes on his way to a penal colony. He hides away in a village somewhere in the jungle, and the colonial oppressors have a hard time finding him. The Dutch think it best to hire local talent to catch their enemy, and proceed to grab the first evil magical martial arts guy they can find for the job. He's big, he's strong, he's impervious to bullets and he spits fire, yet he still is no match for the rebel's superior jumping technique.

The Dutch's next plan is a little better. They hire a black magician with really bad teeth to reunite the head and body of another black magician. The newly revived bad guy - himself an old enemy of Jaka's, it seems - then proceeds to beat our hero thoroughly.

Afterwards, Jaka is jailed, nailed to a wall and his eyes are poked out as if this were a Lucio Fulci film.

But all is not lost for the oppressed people of Indonesia. No, they're not going to, you know, actually rebel.

Instead, Sirta, one single heroic woman from the rebel team with a crush on Jaka, sneaks into the Dutch prison to free her crushee. The blind hero uses the opportunity to bend some steel bars and do Hercules impressions, but is shortly thereafter turned into a pig.

Fortunately, even that is only a minor set-back for him.

The Warrior is a very typical Barry Prima vehicle directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra who made quite a few films in this style (and some black magic movies with Suzzanna). The film is structured in a classic "one damn thing after another" shape, with levitating bad guys followed by heavy-handed melodrama made even more painful by the film's bad dubbing, followed by magical eye transplantation (the eyes, they fly!), followed by rousing patriotic/religious speeches that don't make any sense as the dubbing translates them, followed by more bizarre (and slightly gory) stuff, then even more bizarre stuff, and then a totally tragic ending nobody should be able to take seriously after all the silly crap the film has already thrown at the audience.

I'm of course perfectly alright with a film mostly consisting of silly crap if and when said crap is as fantastically entertaining as it is here. You wanna see a Dutch guy levitating and rotated around his own axis? You got it. You just need to see Barry Prima with a pig's snout? No problem. You have always dreamed of watching a fight against a guy who truly can't be stopped by being hacked to pieces, like a more effective version of Monty Python's Black Knight? The Warrior's got your back. The only thing lacking is the presence of a coterie of midgets, but those guys were probably all over in the Philippines playing not-Jawas in a Cirio Santiago film about post-apocalyptic race car drivers.

Sure, some might say the film is lacking in characterisation, and that its plot line seems rather jumpy and a wee bit illogical, with a decided lack of connection between its scenes or basic human sanity. They'd be right with that, like people without a heart sometimes are. To these soulless people I'd reply with "this movie has flying eyes in it", which is the sort of thing that must end any discussion about characterisation and other useless stuff forever, much like bringing up Hitler in an Internet discussion. Let's just face it, it is an irrefutable fact that The Warrior is the best film ever made.

If you don't believe me, let me just add this: The Warrior kills off its odious comic relief in an odiously unfunny fight scene, as every other film containing such a character should do, yet none ever does. Oh, and there are at least two sequels to look forward to.

 

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