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.

Special Silencers (1982)

Original title: Serbuan Halilintar

This is based on the original Indonesian cut of the movie.

Criminal mastermind – the subtitles say so, so it must be true – Gundar (Dicky Zulkarnaen) and his evil nephew are attempting to take control of a village in the Indonesian countryside. To achieve this goal, the village mayor as well as the mayor’s brother, a cop en route from the city, need to die. Because nobody here is into regular assassinations, the villains poison their victims with a red pill that makes a mass of roots burst from their bodies.

Mayor and brother are easily despatched thusly, but the cop’s daughter Julia (Eva Arnaz) escapes this fate by chance and through some pretty nifty martial arts skills. Directly before her father dies, Julia also meet-cutes strapping young Hendra (Barry Prima), who quickly puts his considerable fighting prowess into the service of punching villains with and for her.

In most regards, Special Silencers, directed by Arizal, is pretty typical for an Indonesian martial arts movie starring Barry Prima: the fights are vigorous, well choreographed – if typically not on the level of comparable Hongkong films – and decidedly on the bloody side; there’s a romance element that feels somewhat more serious than in many another martial arts film; the villains are truly hissable.

Also there and accounted for is a pretty incredible synth soundtrack (I believe only partially needle-dropped) that helps make even the most normal fight feel a bit weird, and a certain sense of strangeness.

Despite that inspired and inspiring roots-based murder method – so good the film repeats the effect again and again – the strangeness level is a bit low for an Indonesian movie, for while there are some nods to black magic, and a bit of dubious but fun poison animal action, most of the fighting here lacks the bigger gimmicks you’d find in something like a Jaka Sembung film. That’s a complaint in so far as this lack of the more extreme bits of exploitation movie value robs Special Silencers of the chance of becoming  mind-blowing instead of just being a well-made and highly entertaining example of Indonesian martial arts cinema of its era.

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 2 (1983)

aka The Warrior and the Blind Swordsman

Original title: Si Buta lawa Jaka Sembung

When last we saw the heroic Indonesian freedom fighter Jaka Sembung (Barry Prima), he had just ended the Dutch colonial reign over Indonesia by gorily despatching of a lot of evil people. It doesn't seem to have stuck, though, and so this sequel finds Jaka fighting his old enemies again. In fact, he and his merry band of rebels are so effective at their jobs that the Dutch colonel governing the land is already at the end of his rope.

The best weapon against Jaka's magical martial arts prowess seems to be to hire local talent, so the Colonel holds a fighting tournament whose winner will have the dubious honour of killing Jaka for him. The winner is a blind magical stick fighter known as Si Buta (Advent Bangun).

Si Buta merrily proceeds to search out Jaka, rips his head off and cashes in a chest of gold for the body part. The Dutch, being evil and all, decide to not let Si Buta get away with the payment due to him and attack the warrior on his way home. Si Buta fights his enemies off by throwing parts of a forest at them, but is mortally wounded during the fight. Fortunately, a woman named Maki has observed the last half hour of the movie from various trees and does a little sex healing magic on Si Buta. He isn't pleased with that, though, and declines the woman's friendly offer of more sex, marriage, immortality and a soul forever damned to hellfire, because he is a rather nice guy at heart. Or so he says. This pisses Maki off so much that she tries to kill the still wounded Si Buta by jumping up and down on his chest.

And the evil magician would have gotten away with it too, if not for the timely appearance of a very lively Jaka Sembung, who drives Maki away and takes care of Si Buta's wounds. You see, Si Buta's attack on Jaka was just an illusion the talented guy used to cheat the Dutch out of their gold.

Now, together, Jake and Si Buta only have to fight off Maki and her cult of giggling magic fu amazons and the Dutch to secure a happy end for themselves and Indonesia.

Worod Suma's The Warrior 2 isn't quite as transcendentally awesome as Sisworo Gautama Putra's first adventure of Jaka Sembung, but it's still a highly entertaining entry into the Indonesian Magic Fu exploitation genre.

Sure, it's not as insane an experience as the first movie, but we're still talking about a film in which an elderly evil guy's possession of what I hope is a prehensile tail and not a tentacle growing out of his behind seems like a perfectly ordinary thing nobody even deigns to mention as something special or bizarre, a film in which knowledge of magic like invisibility or teleportation is utterly common and a film that can't go five minutes without something completely outrageous happening. That not everything that does happen makes much sense is of course a given, but I don't think anybody would go into a film like this expects anything different.

Worryingly, I have to admit that the plot as a whole probably makes a bit too much sense. It's the old story of freedom fighters wasting their time and energy on infighting when they should try to concentrate on their true enemy while said true enemy comes to gloatingly mop up the survivors when they have mostly eradicated themselves. Don't fret, though, this instructive lesson is taught to the audience in the gory, and highly distractible comic book style of Indonesian cinema of that era, by a director who just can't help himself but has to pile subplot on subplot on silly aside until the film becomes a lumbering mountain of one damn thing after another.

That's of course exactly what I came to The Warrior 2 for, so every minute spent on Maki's problems in finding a willing partner to produce a child that will rule the world (and why is that always such a problem for evil queens in Indonesian films? Even Margaret Thatcher was married, after all, and none of them is that evil) is a minute well-spent, as is each and every other minute of the film, now that I think of it.

 

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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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