Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

Three Indonesian Horror Films Make A Post: The thing with the flying coffin happens all the time here

Trinil: Kembalikan Tubuhku (2024): After a three month long honeymoon, a couple returns to the Javanese plantation Rara (Carmela van der Kruk) inherited from her Dad. The place is plagued by a curious series of worker suicides and disappearances, and a flying witch’s head – a kuyang – makes frequent appearances. Rara acts increasingly aggressive, while her hubby mostly cringes and cowers. All of it has something to do with dark secrets of the near past. Fortunately the cowardly male half of the couple has a friend who is a psychiatrist and an exorcist at the same time, so whatever could go wrong?

The very broad, sometimes hilariously so, acting, the just as broad direction, and the melodramatically twisting plot can give the impression that Hanung Bramantyo’s Trinil is some kind of crazily mutated plantation soap opera. If one can imagine a soap opera with kuyang (the beloved witch with a flying head figure), quite a few lobbed off heads, virtual bodies buried basically everywhere and a properly insane climax too fun to describe. None of this is exactly good, or exactly well made, but it has a crazed energy and a complete disregard for good taste that makes it a lot of fun to watch.

Kuyang: Sekutu Iblis yang Selalu Mengintai (2024): Speaking of kuyang, this Borneo-set tale of the misadventures of a young teacher and his pregnant wife taking on a position in a completely normal (see title of this post) isolated village and stumbling into a choice bit of folk/black magic horror features not one, but two of the creatures, who will even duel for a (alas only very short) bit.

This is shot with a bit more style and moodiness, the acting is a little better, and the plot makes more sense than that of Trinil, though the too long series of scenes where something utterly outrageous happens but everyone just kind of shrugs it off can strain one’s patience a bit. On the other hand, this film, too, climaxes wonderfully, with some beautifully macabre images and a lot of kuyang action.

Do You See What I See (2024): Of these three, Awi Suryadi’s movie is the classiest and most subtextually resonant, as well as the film whose director has the most control over his material. But then, Suryadi is one of the core directors of the decade’s Indonesian horror cycle, and knows how to set up lingering mood pieces, as well as short, sharp jump scares and is one of the directors who created the filmic language with its mix of very Western contemporary mainstream horror influences and old-school Indonesian horror the country’s horror directors speak in at the moment.

Apart from the obligatory – and often increasingly wonderful – horrors, this is a film about female friendship and empowerment, where the only actual male character is a pretty, vapid, and untrustworthy idiot, and love for a man is mostly treated as a threat to sanity and a young woman’s mental well-being – particularly when the lover turns out to be dead.

Apart from Suryadi’s obvious strengths, I particularly admired his willingness for keeping things off-screen here. We never get to see the ghost lover as poor Mawar sees him – in fact, for much of the film we see him only reflected in the changes he inflicts on her. There’s also quite a particular kind of daring to making a girl power film that still goes for a 70s downer ending.

Three Films Make A Post: So, what does Jirocho do, exactly?

The Kingdom of Jirocho 4 (1965): In this final of four Jirocho movies starring the great Koji Tsuruta and directed by Masahiro Makino, things change: about half of the characters are recast – generally not for the better – and something like focus appears, one might even say this one’s got a plot. Tonally, there’s still quite a bit of the funny business, but much of the film is taken over by Jirocho’s wife slowly and very dramatically dying of what I can only assume is consumption.

The production as a whole feels cheaper, and rather like a project everyone involved was trying to get over with as quickly as possible. However, there are still enough aesthetically or emotionally pleasing moments here to make this a somewhat satisfying viewing, at least if you’re into ninkyo eiga.

Magnificent Trio (1966): This isn’t exactly one of the more spectacular offerings from Chang Cheh’s early wuxia phase. Its actual emotional and moral core lies surprisingly enough with the female characters – particularly those played by Margaret Tu Chuan and Chin Ping – but this being a Chang Cheh joint, he puts emphasis on the much less interesting business of his male trio, of whom only Lo Lieh’s doubtful hero is actually interesting. There are bits and pieces in the background of Jimmy Wang Yu’s and Cheng Lei’s characters that could be thematically interesting but the film never really gets into those.

What’s left is a decent mid-60s Shaw Brothers wuxia – that’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis: Part 2 aka The Female Followers of the Devil: Part 2 (2024): Rako Prijanto doubles down on the insanity of the first part of the story, and tries to squeeze even more melodramatic acting, trashy yet awesome gore, and general disreputable mayhem in, while also adding a bit of religion, fights between the now three Female Followers, a bit of a demonic zombie apocalypse and martial arts of doubtful quality.

If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, dear imaginary reader, I don’t know what to say.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis (2023)

aka The Female Followers of the Devil

There’s something going on in a small Indonesian village - I mean apart from all of the patriarchal repression you’d expect. A woman is murdered, her corpse is stolen and – spoiler – becomes the secret ingredient of a tasty curry. Secrets of the past loom, and quite a bit of female revenge is on the horizon.

That revenge is instigated by the Devil (Adipati Dolken) himself. When he’s not giggling like a loon or mewling like a sick kitten, he’s independently feeding information to two different girls – Sumi  (Mawar Eva de Jongh) and Sari (Hanggini) – that makes them very angry indeed, and thus perfectly willing to join into perhaps rather ill-advised pacts. Though said ill-advised pacts do lead to some tasty comeuppance for the kind of evildoer that hides away behind the mask of male respectability, so the Devil is doing something right, at least.

If this does make Rako Prijanto’s Female Followers sound like a tasty example of somewhat deconstructivist feminist horror, perish the thought any of that happened on purpose. Clearly, the filmmakers have not spent a single thought on questions like what it actually means that the only recourse that might allow its female protagonists a way to justice and perhaps freedom is a pact with the actual devil; nor that they only exchange one version of patriarchal servitude with another. They just wanted to show us a dude preening and giggling in one of the funnier devil performances outside of comedies – the noises Dolken makes are absolutely brilliant/hilariously stupid. Female Followers combines that with soap operatics so big, our lead actresses can’t stop eye-rolling, shouting, and contorting for even a single scenes some choice, and also features delightfully tasteless gore.

Obviously, since all horror movies have horrible secrets in the past, Female Followers has those as well, they’re just treated with an impressive degree of stupidity and carelessness and are completely divorced from the way actual people – hell, even fictional people – think or behave.

The script by Prijanto and Anggoro Saronto seems utterly uncaring of the way you’d traditionally construct a narrative. There’s no attempt to reconcile the double protagonists who basically only meet to set up a sequel with the necessities of structures, there’s barely a recognizable act structure – in a way it’s rather an impressive feat in an environment as professional as contemporary Indonesian horror filmmaking is.

So, technically, this isn’t what I’d call a “good” movie, but it is a terribly fun one, full of invention, ill-advised and badly aimed energy, ideas that make little sense, characters that simply aren’t and acting so intensely, badly melodramatic I find it impossible to imagine not being entertained by the whole shebang.

Dangerous Seductress (1992)

After her shit-heel boyfriend tries to rape her, Model Susan (Tonya Offer) flees from Los Angeles to the home of her sister Linda (Kristin Ann) in Indonesia. While Linda’s off on a modelling job in Bali, Susan discovers an old book of spells and rituals some guy who will later turn out to be a shaman apparently randomly gifted Linda for her birthday.

Before you can say “Klaatu barada nikto”, Susan has conjured up The Evil Queen (Amy Weber). Said Queen, who had already been somewhat revived by the blood of some car-crashing robbers, promises Susan eternal life, beauty, and sexual dominance over men if she agrees to puke or otherwise spatter the blood of men she murders at the mirror the Queen appears in.

Susan is more than game, and begins to seduce and murder her way through the Indonesian nightclub scene. In a satisfying development, her evil ex-boyfriend comes to Indonesia to murder and/or fuck her – I don’t believe he sees much of a difference there – and gets a deadly example of Susan’s new, assertive manners.

At this point in his career, H. Tjut Djalil, the director/writer who brought us the glorious Mystics in Bali as well as the not quite as glorious Lady Terminator, was clearly making his movies for the international market. Thus, the Indonesian actors are mostly relegated to minor roles, and the leads are taken by a bunch of spectacularly bad American actors who look like Baywatch rejects.

Which isn’t a problem for a film quite as maniacally insane as this one is, starting with a car chase that produces quite a few flying body parts and going through so many set pieces of tasteless, sleazy beauty, it’s difficult to find words for all the glories included. So, I’ll do as the Marquis de Sade would do, and just list some of it: there’s a woman with skeletal parts who draws the flesh of dead bodies to her to finish her look, who is then held down by grabbing arms underground that won’t let her go on her evil ways this easily; she also has blue glowing nipples I always hoped would fire lightning bolts sometime during the course of the film yet never do; sexy sax and synth music that suddenly turns abstract; a sexy murder chase in a meat packing plant; blood play with fishhooks; a woman cutting her own throat to feed a mirror with blood; a sparkly glowing magic duel; an evil queen played with all the enthusiasm of a kid’s theatre performance; flame thrower candles; so much sleazy teasing with no climaxes but the big bloody death; and so much more.

All of this – and truly much more - is presented with great energy and joy, never stops to think – lest it die of stupidity – and often looks surprisingly good for what it is. I don’t exactly want to cart the old “psychotronic” out to describe this wondrous piece of cinema, but it is, and so I do.

Needless to say, this giant hunk of lingerie, blood and glowy magic made me inordinately happy while watching.

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: It's never too late to start.

Living (2022): There’s so much that could have gone wrong with shifting Oliver Hermanus’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to 1950s London, but the resulting movie carves out its own, individual identity instead of being the original movie, but worse and set in the West. Kazuo Ishiguro’s script for the tale of a man confronted with the diagnosis of his looming death and what this does to him is delicate, intelligent and easily portrays the difficult bits of the human heart, so that a story that in the wrong hands could be just a piece of kitsch becomes deeply felt, thought and moving. Hermanus directs with quiet intelligence, a presence that’s never showy, and the ability to support his actors.

The cast, led by a typically wonderful Bill Nighy doesn’t exactly need the support, great as the ensemble does, but the film isn’t exactly getting worse by them and their director being on the same page.

Sri Asih (2022): Only the second film of the Indonesian Bumilangit Cinematic (superhero) Universe, and we’re already getting not only a female led (Pevita Pearce as the titular heroine) entry, but one directed by a woman – Upi Avianto – to boot. For my tastes, this is a better paced movie than Gundala is, a little slicker in presentation and choreography, and a lot of fun like this sort of big budget superhero thing is supposed to be, particularly – as with its predecessor - in the way it allows itself to be local as well as universal.

Hergé: In the Shadow of Tintin aka Hergé à l’ombre de Tintin (2016): Apparently, there are different cuts of Hugues Nancy’s documentary about the great pioneer of the Bande dessinée, Hergé. I have only been able to see the shorter, fifty-two minute cut. I suspect most of my problems with the film would be resolved by the thirty minutes longer version, for this version’s main problem seems to be its neck-breaking pace, racing through its subject’s life and work with so little breathing room, it can only touch on anything – his unpleasant early politics, the war years, his emotional struggle with being the Tintin drawing machine, the development of his style and so on – without ever finding the time to actually say anything deep about it, despite featuring an impressive number of experts as well as rare and valuable archive material from Hergé’s estate.

I’m not quite so sure the film’s tendency to hyperbole – there’s a lot of talk about “genius”, whatever that means, little talk about any comics work influencing Hergé and things like that – is going to be better in the longer version, but it running around like the White Rabbit really is its main problem in the short cut.

In short: Gundala (2019)

An orphan learns that he has divinely inspired superpowers. Combined with the martial arts skills taught him by an older orphan during his worst times, this makes him prime superhero material. Eventually, reluctantly, the grown-up version of our orphan turns into the masked hero Gundala (Abimana Aryasata) to fight off a demonically (well, the Indonesian equivalent of demons, really) inspired rich man (Bront Palarae) with a very complicated mad rich villain plan, and his small army of orphan assassins. There’s also a subplot about ancient evil that only makes partial sense to the uninitiated like me, but is most probably in here to prepare the future of this superhero universe, as is the short appearance of Sri Asih (Pevita Pearce), who has her own prequel film following this.

Directed by the great Joko Anwar, this is the first entry into a proposed big Indonesian comic book based superhero universe, the Bumilangit Cinematic Universe. Because very little of this stuff has made it into languages I can understand, I really can’t say how this connects/compares to the comics. I always find it fascinating how standard super hero tropes are treated through a slightly different cultural lens (see also the riches of Filipino superhero movies of decades past, or Japanese tokusatsu cinema), and it certainly makes a very nice change from the Marvel and DC styles, even if you don’t understand every cultural nuance. And you’ll hardly get this movie’s class war aspect from Hollywood.

Of course, there’s so much here that’s universal to the subgenre – heroes being heroic and all - the film is still easily understood and related to even for an audience outside of Indonesia.

Anwar is of course a fine director, and I appreciate the film’s complicated sort of leftist touches, but I do think Gundala does spend a little too much time on our hero’s horrible misadventures as an orphan. Some of it has a pay-off later on, but I do prefer my origin stories generally a bit shorter unless the length is absolutely necessary. The pace is in general a bit more leisurely than it needs to be.

That our main villain’s plan only makes very little logical sense is no problem whatsoever in the context of this kind of project, of course, and Anwar (who also scripted with Harya Suraminata) uses the dubious logic to set up some fine and fun set pieces for Gundala to fight his way through. The fight and action choreography is generally fine, not quite as inspired as in some modern Indonesian action movies, but individual enough to be fun and have heft when the plot actually needs it.

Which certainly makes for a promising start for this particular universe.

Satan’s Slaves: Communion (2022)

Original title: Pengabdi Setan 2: Communion

1984. Having soured of country life and fallen on financial hard times, the surviving members of the Suwono family are now living in a large, ugly and dreary apartment building. Daughter Rini (Tara Basro) has taken on the role of the family’s replacement mom, putting her own future on the backburner to take care of her brothers Toni (Endy Arfian) and Bondi (Nasar Annuz), who seem to have grown into very typical teenage boys. So Toni is infatuated with an older, hot pants-affine neighbour Tari (Ratu Felisha) and Bondi does love some youthful farting around. Only father Bahri (Bront Palarae) seems to visibly suffer from the trauma of the first film. At least, he’s acting very strangely indeed: he doesn’t tell his kids what and where he is working, locks up his briefcase as if it were full of secrets, and has an in turns shifty and absent manner. He clearly loves his family, though.

Given what happened in the first movie, it’s really no surprise Bahri has grown strange, and living in mid-80s Indonesia, with its dictatorship and the daily disappearances that were part of it can’t have helped. There are also police reports about a sniper shooting tattooed men, adding even more tension.

Said tension increases around the time when a heavy storm hits the apartment building – it’s literally built too close to the water in the middle of nowhere – and locks in the place’s inhabitants. Obviously, quite a few strange and horrible things begin happening in that night (and shortly before), and it is all connected to the pasts of Rini’s family.

If you ask me, Communion’s director Joko Anwar is one of the best directors working in horror today. After the incredible Impetigore und his rethinking of the Indonesian classic Satan’s Slaves, this sequel to the latter shows someone working at the height of his power.

Ironically, given how tight those other two films are, Anwar’s script this time around is the weakest element of the affair. On paper, there are just too many moving parts, too many characters moving around independently, and there are rather a lot of scenes where they act exclusively after the kind of horror movie logic following which it makes total sense to fart around with a body of electrified water, to crawl through holes in walls, or look for the hidden upper floor of a building that’s haunted as hell. The set-up for a sequel isn’t terribly well integrated into the film either; one might also ask if having half of the film consist of various characters walking through the same dark apartment complex really is that great of an idea.

In practice, I found that none of these nominal problems mattered at all, because Anwar is utterly on top of his game in creating an atmosphere of dread, in pacing shocks and set pieces small and large, and in evoking the atmosphere of a very specific time and place with small, well chosen details where lesser directors would go all out and thus overshoot the mark. I’d argue that the time Communion takes place in is incredibly important for it. As much as the film actually seems to underplay it, its underbelly is all about a time in Indonesia’s history when paranoia and a hidden yet daily threat of violence must have done terrible things to the psyches of the people living through it. The barely parsable Satanic (perhaps Jinn) conspiracy running through the film feels like the logical embodiment of such feelings. Consequently, much of the film takes on the quality of a nightmare where neither home, nor family, nor the world itself seem as safe and consistent as they should be, where all social structures and their products are on the verge of complete breakdown, and logic applies to very little in life.

Even though Anwar uses a lot of classic horror tropes, and plots very loosely indeed, he on the other hand also seems to trust in his audience’s ability to put together a surprisingly large number of hints about what is actually going on strewn throughout the film. There’s certainly nobody going to explain anything in long, expository scenes here; we are apparently expected to correlate quite a few hints shown only for a moment or two, and to understand what they mean. There’s a total commitment to showing things and providing enough information to understand them but not explaining them that’s utterly admirable, and works very well indeed for me. This adds a dimension of mystery and thoughtfulness to a film that at first looks like a very tropey series of set pieces, and certainly keeps it in the mind longer.

Of course, those set pieces are absolutely incredible, realized by Anwar with an off-handed sense of stylishness, and created with a sense of the absurd as well as of the creepy, edited to perfection, and utterly engaging. The relatively early elevator sequence is an obvious example for the director’s abilities, but things stay suspenseful, tight and creepy, with actual pay-offs throughout the film, until the peculiar and inspired finale accompanies us out.

KKN di Desa Penari (2022)

A group of Indonesian university students on the KKN-part of their academic life come to a village out in the middle of nowhere to develop a new water source for the place. While somewhat eccentric and certainly beholden to some beliefs rather confusing to our city folk protagonists, the villagers are for once in a film like this friendly enough and seem to genuinely care for the young people’s safety and health. Since the village is rather spirit-haunted, this does result in helpful rules like “don’t enter that part of the forest, it doesn’t belong to us”, but what are young people to do when they hear gamelan music from there? Or when a female jinn (Aulia Sarah) makes offers they simply can’t refuse?

Awi Suryadi’s KKN di Desa Penari was apparently a huge blockbuster hit in Indonesia, even bigger than the director’s Danur movies. The story is based on a “true Internet story”, which I read as “serial creepypasta” by somebody going by the handle of simpleman. Lacking completely in Indonesian, I couldn’t say how close it sticks to its source, though the film’s somewhat episodic structure seems typical for the kind of thing it adapts. Eventually, most of the curious experiences our students have are tied together with the big threat and/or the spirit protecting our Muslim final girl Nur (Tissa Biani), but two thirds of the film are a bit too loose for my tastes, more held together by Suryadi’s experienced and capable hand for creepy – but not too creepy – set pieces than by any kind of narrative drive.

Part of the problem there is how long Desa Penari is, with more than two hours runtime that include two epilogues and a triple dose of crying; a bit of judicious cutting down of repetition and the lesser of the spooky set pieces would probably have been a considerable improvement. Which is not to say this isn’t a good, sometimes even great, bit of contemporary Indonesian horror, but a tighter focus and this would have been an actual masterpiece.

Even so, there is a lot to like here, beginning with Suryadi’s eschewing of jump scares for longer, lingering suspense scenes that often end in some wonderfully creepy imagery. The first Gamelan dancer possession, for example, feels particularly eerie because the director gives it room to breathe, visually exploring it instead of throwing it away as a quick shock. Which also opens up room for a handful of very cool possession sequences the young actresses can throw themselves into, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my horror watching life, it is that young actresses really seem to love doing this sort of stuff.

As an admirer of folk horror, I’m also very happy with the decision to not make the villagers evil cultist, but rather a group of people who have learned to live with the supernatural forces surrounding them, having found a way to live and let live with malevolent things that are still an inescapable part of their world. Of course, they are not terribly competent at protecting their guests. As the film portrays it, that’s in part thanks to the divide between town and country beliefs which makes it impossible to actually explain what’s going on before it is too late. In part, because our young people do tend to “sin” – like all of Suryadi’s films, this is a bit more on the socially conservative side than the more brutal style of Indonesian horror – and in part because supernatural forces of this kind which are also natural forces can’t truly be contained by us mere humans. Even the god(s) of your choice can have problems there.

Speaking of folk horror, the mix of jinn and spirit beliefs, including the beliefs of the local pagan (is that the right word for the Muslim part of the world?) past, and the way they intersect with Muslim folkloric (more than religious) ideas is particularly fascinating here, suggesting a comparable dialectic as existed between Christian and pagan belief structures but playing out with less of a drive to violently suppress the old ways. So there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff going on in this particular crowd pleaser, despite my issues with its pacing.

Makmum 2 (2021)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Ten years or thereabouts have gone by since the first Makmum. Our heroine Rini (Titi Kamal) has used that time to marry a supporting character from the first movie, have a child named Hafiz (Jason Doulez Beunaya Bangun), and become a widow.

Three years after her husband’s demise, she has yet to really work through her grief, so it’s not great for her mental state when she learns that her beloved auntie has now also died. Together with Hafiz, Rini travels to the tiny mountain village where she was raised (probably by the aunt) to take part in the funeral rites.

The village has not changed much since her childhood: the villagers, following the will of the local Big Head (Pritt Timothy), are renouncing modern nonsense like electricity and cell phone towers, even when there’s good reason to use electricity to power a water pump that should help everyone through the droughts gripping most of the other villages around. On the positive side, the village is just building a rather fetching new mosque.

Rini feels early on that something’s not quite right in the village, besides Luddism. For one, her ghostly prayer follower is acting up again, which is never a good sign. But there’s also an increasing number of strange and possibly supernatural occurrences that have nothing to do with Rini’s ghost, but seem to come from the spirits haunting a part of the local forest that has traditionally been forbidden to enter or develop; the spirits’ realm starts right next to the new Mosque, incidentally. Inexplicable problems with that new building’s substance are really only the beginning, as are a creepy little boy with a limp nobody in the two-kid village knows, and everybody shrugs off as a product of childish imagination. Soon enough, threatened children, possession, and spirits that love to puke black goo into their victims’ faces will make their appearance. Rini and Hafiz are of course right in the middle of it all.

Where the first Makmum was generally entertaining enough, but also much too generic for my tastes, new director Guntur Soeharjanto pushes this sequel into much more interesting directions, pairing the more religious side of contemporary Indonesian horror with folk horror. It’s folk horror with a bit of a twist, too, for where the terror in many of the films of this genre is caused by people following or reviving the old ways, here the problem is the direct opposite: the villagers not respecting their old pacts made to help them coexist with a very real spirit world as they should is what causes all of the film’s problems.

Interestingly enough, Soeharjanto does not use this to argue against modernity, but really for a fusion of traditional, Muslim, and worldly beliefs, in which a happy end is achieved by finding a balance between these things: the forbidden forest is reinstituted and respected again, the mosque is built, and there are solar cells on its roof. Which is the kind of ideal of mutual respect and attempts at understanding this old atheist socialist can agree with rather well. This approach also results in a film where conservatism and modernity often stand in a pretty ironic dialogue with what’s going on in the plot, and leads to some very interesting changes in the way the old horror concepts of the Believer and the Unbeliever are treated. I’ve not seen this exact way to treat these well-worn yet always interesting themes before. It appears much less rigid (perhaps more humanistic) than these specific genre tropes are typically treated and used.

I’m not quite sure why this needed to be a sequel, exactly, for apart from a prayer disturbing ghost and Rini, there’s very little truly connecting the two films. And Rini really doesn’t have much to do with the woman she was in the first film (which makes sense given the not terribly happy life she has had in between the movies).

On the other hand, it does enable Titi Kamal – who was solid but not more in the first movie – to return. She is really rather great in this one, throwing herself bodily into the script’s more melodramatic elements but also bringing enough nuance to the quieter ones. Her performance makes it easy to believe that Rini has had an actual life between when we last saw her and this film, which helps make everything around her as well her reactions to it much more believable and grounded in recognizable human feelings and behaviour. The actress also does a bang-up job when it comes to her mandatory possession scenes, screeching and crinkling her neck with the best of them.

I like the film’s approach to its spooky sequences as well. It does find a very effective middle between scenes and sequences that feel folkloric, particularly whenever the spirits trick people via shapeshifting, and those that are more your standard horror fare. Part of Makmum 2’s success in this regard is founded on Soeharjanto’s easy ability to create the village as a believable place, suggesting the actual village politics and hierarchies, and making the place feel real, with the supernatural always lurking at the borders of experience of the population.

If there’s more one could ask of the kind of sequel that could easily have been a simple cash-in, I don’t know what it is.

In short: Makmum (2019)

After being evicted from her home, chance points mortuary beautician and speaker to the dead Rini (Titi Kamal) towards the boarding school where she was raised. She hires on as a summer tutor. Her help is desperately needed, though not in educational matters. During summer vacations, three girls have been left behind at the school because of their bad grades (I’m sure that’s going to help), in the not so tender care of nasty new boarding school boss Rosa (Reni Yuliana). Rosa’s a bit of a sadist at the best of times, but these certainly aren’t. The kids are attacked, possessed and generally terrorized by a ghost that seems fixated on disturbing them during their prayer times, usually starting its business by imitating a prayer follower (the titular “Makmum”, as far as I understand) and proceeds from there.

Of course, Rosa doesn’t believe the possession tales, but she also doesn’t see the problem as one of mental or physical illness, even when Putri (Adilla Fitri), the ghost’s favourite possession body, shows clear signs of physical breakdown. As Rosa sees it, it’s all just a lack of basic discipline. So Rini arrives just in time.

Makmum, directed by Hadrah Daeng Ratu, shows various of the favourite concepts and set pieces of the milder side of contemporary Indonesian horror: there’s the haunted school, the woman with a tragic past (most of which she’ll only remember during the course of the movie) who can see and speak to ghosts, the nasty female authority figure making things worse by her insistence on knowing every damn thing about everything even though she knows very little indeed, the ghost who disturbs prayers (which I as a heathen atheist always find particularly fascinating a trope). Also appearing are the attack on an ill old woman, as well as a lot of generic set pieces you probably see in front of your inner eye right now.

So a well of originality or depth, this film is certainly not, yet there’s a certain sense of conviction in the presentation of the spooky set pieces that makes them always fun to watch. Ratu’s storytelling has a nice, light-handed flow to it that makes the clichés decidedly more convincing, and enough of a sense for mildly creepy mood to make the whole thing perfectly entertaining despite its lack of any personality of its own.

Ruqyah: The Exorcism (2017)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Although, given that this is based on “a true story”, there can be no actual spoilers, right?

Anyway. Jakarta, 2012. Popular actress Asha (Celine Evangelista) has been having some strange and frightening experiences with doppelgangers, poltergeist phenomena and the usual demonic (well, djinn) business. Either she is haunted, or she is losing her mind. Eventually, she is confessing her troubles to reporter Mahisa (Evan Sanders), who is clearly so smitten with her he’s perfectly okay to not report a pretty great story and instead help her out. At first, he’s rather sceptical when it comes to the supernatural aspects of Asha’s troubles, but seeing turns out to be believing.

Mahisa’s research quickly suggests that Asha is possessed by various djinn who are responsible for her success and beauty but also need her to pay a proper price for their help. We further learn that quite a few people in showbusiness are helping their careers along with black magic, whereas Asha genuinely has no clue about her evil supernatural helpers, or where they come from. Eventually, it turns out to be something of a tradition in the village where she comes from to ensorcel the young and the pretty without their knowledge so they are supernaturally endowed to make money for their elders. Beats work, I guess.

Mahisa decides he really needs professional help now, but the imam he goes to recommends a homemade exorcism by an unsupervised (except for Allah, one supposes) amateur like our hero. Apparently, the guy doesn’t believe in actually putting any effort into helping people coming to him for help. which even an atheist like me understands to be not the way holy texts and prophets want their priest casts to act.

As you can imagine, things don’t go terribly smoothly with Mahisa’s attempt at exorcizing Asha while also fighting her black magic wielding mum (Mega Carefansa).

Ruqyah is yet another piece of Indonesian horror by the prolific Jose Poernomo (this time around also his own DP as well as co-writer). It’s not the director’s best effort, for unlike most of his films, this one seems have greater ambitions than it can actually afford, so the plot of a two hour movie is squeezed into ninety minutes, and particularly the big climax feels undercooked and underbudgeted, with the film’s worst effects and worst looking set not exactly making for a winning combination there, even with as much effort as Poernomo puts into dramatic handheld camera waving and pretty tight editing.

This doesn’t mean the whole of Ruqyah is a wash: there are some fun and clever (if less than original) sequences throughout, with some especially fine examples of the doppelganger motive Indonesian horror cinema uses so often, and the nearly mandatory scene of someone’s mirror image acting independently of themselves. The latter comes with the – thematically clever with this particular type of possession – variation of the mirror image looking more afraid than the original person.

Interestingly, Poernomo sets most of the big set pieces and moments of horror in brightly lit, modern apartments, clearly suggesting that contemporary evil is to be found with the rich, the powerful, and the very modern indeed. Which does have a whiff of preachiness and conservatism, too, of course, as is nearly inevitable in religious horror like this. Fortunately, Poernomo doesn’t overplay this aspect of the tale as much as he could. Plus, it’s not as if the religious authorities are terribly efficient before the mandatory final exorcism; and even that one is undermined by the good old horror movie bullshit ending.

Three Films Make A Post: You are the experiment

Kain Kafam Hitam (2019): Somehow, it took two directors in form of Yudhistira Bayuadji and Maxime Bouttier to make the most generic, blandest example of the contemporary Indonesian horror wave I have yet seen. As a long-time genre movie fan, I’m perfectly okay with movies that aren’t works of genius and which consist nearly completely of well-worn tropes, but this one really has not a single moment that’s genuinely creepy, instead dragging its audience from one non-set piece, filmed indifferently, to the next. Apparently, the true horror is getting painfully bored by a film not even making the pretence of putting any effort in.

Arctic Void (2022): In comparison, this “stranded on Stavanger after some Fortean stuff happened” film by Darren Mann is a masterpiece. At least, it does start out pretty strong, with an inciting incident that’s cleverly staged and genuinely intriguing.

After the first act, alas, it becomes clear all too quickly that the film doesn’t really have any material for a second or a third one and will mostly drag its feet while nothing happens. At first, the very beautiful shots of an empty arctic township are somewhat interesting, but that attraction does stop eventually too, for one can only watch three mediocre actors doing very little for some time before one expects a theme, a plot, or just a mood to arrive.

The French Dispatch (2021): If you’re Wes Anderson (and the comparison is obviously very unfair to Arctic Void), you can get by with a very personal aesthetic, as this movie of connected shorts set in a France built out of weird ideas dreamt up after a marathon viewing session of pre-80s French cinema demonstrates. The film’s omnibus structure enables Anderson to completely give up on any pretence of interest in a standard narrative. Instead, a bunch of great actors go through a series of Anderson obsessions, tics and concepts, movie and literature quotes as filtered through the director’s by now well-known predilections, until the viewer is either hypnotized by the power of watching the contents of someone’s subconscious turned movie, or annoyed. I’m one of the viewers still very much with Anderson; visiting his mind space as a world put on screen still feels rather singular.

In short: Silam (2018)

Little Baskara (Zidane Khalid) is having a very hard time. His father has died, and his mother is coping badly, treating the kid with little empathy or understanding. Things feel so bad to him, Baskara decides to run away on the day of a school outing, for some reason pinning his goodbye note to an intensely creepy looking doll he has made himself.

Because it is apparently that sort of week for the boy, a bullying incident on the outing apparently opens his sixth sense, and now he’s seeing ghosts all around him. Eventually, he makes his way to the home of his father’s twin Anton (Surya Saputra), his wife Ami (Wulan Guritno) and their weird twin girls, all of whom he hasn’t seen for years. He is welcomed very warmly indeed, but something’s clearly not right about the situation: there are no questions why he is here, or anything about his mother. The family simply takes the boy in, no questions asked, smiling very broad smiles while going through their peculiarly repetitive days. Obviously, Baskara’s ghost encounters don’t stop, either.

Repeat horror offender Jose Poernomo’s Silam isn’t one of the director’s better ones; it also isn’t exactly a highlight of Indonesia’s contemporary horror boom. The film’s structure is just too ramshackle for it to work well, its plot twist feels telegraphed (unless you are Baskara’s age), and a potentially potent emotional core is buried under quite a few clichés used inelegantly.

There are also very painfully obvious attempts at borrowing from Blumhouse style horror, with a finale scene that so clearly prays at the altar of Annabelle (but admittedly with a creepier looking doll), it becomes faintly embarrassing. The film’s borrowings from Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense work rather better, partially because Poernomo here actually does some rejiggering of tropes and give what he takes a bit of a turn of his own. Because so many Indonesian horror films use elements of that film, it has basically become a founding film of the less gory side of Indonesian horror.

There are, as is typical of Poernomo, a few rather potent horror set pieces buried under the commonplace material. The repeated family dinner may be overacted but is wonderfully weird and creepy, and who doesn’t like a ghost who apparently infects its surroundings with slow motion? Plus, it’s nice to see the twins from The Shining getting regular work.

That’s not really enough to recommend Silam as a whole, but if a viewer is in a bit of a gold digging mood and can find a way to watch the film, there is indeed something of interest to find here.

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.