Santet (1988)

... aka: Black Magic

... aka: Black Magic: Bringer of Death

... aka: Black Magic: The Science of Destroying Lives

... aka: Santet (Ilmu Pelebur Nyawa)

... aka: Witchcraft

Directed by:

Sisworo Gautama Putra

Mondo Macabro can't do it all by themselves, so let's take a second to thank Vinegar Syndrome for now also stepping into the ring to help fill in another Indonesian horror gap. This is the very first time this previously seldom-viewed title has been available in English here in America, and their 2K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative looks fantastic. It looks especially fantastic if you're anything like me and have already sat through countless awful-looking, non-subtitled VHS and VCD versions of similar films. While there's still a long ways to go when it comes to rescuing and restoring older Southeast Asian horror films, let's hope there are more releases just like this one in somebody's pipeline.

Santet ("Black Magic") is another collaborations between prolific director Sisworo Gautama Putra and horror queen Suzzanna, whose working relationship proved extremely fruitful throughout the 80s. How fruitful? Well, they also paired up for SUNDELBOLONG (1981), THE SNAKE QUEEN (1982), Sangkuriang (1982), Nyi Ageng, the Decoy Queen (1983), The Snake Queen's Wedding (1983), LAKE EERIE (1984), Awakening of the South Seas Queen (1985), Calon Arang, the Powerful Queen (1985), The Hungry Snake Woman (1986), The Night of Kliwon Friday (1986), Satu Suro Night (1988), Death-Spreading Heirloom (1990), Incarnation of the Snake Goddess (1990), Pact with the Forces of Darkness (1991) and The Queen of the South Sea (1991). Count this one and its sequel (yes, there was a sequel the following year, also now available from Vinegar Syndrome for the first time), and that gives us an impressive 17 horror films in just ten years. And that's not even counting a few other non-genre films they did, like their take on the legend of Samson and Delilah (1985), which may even be partially horror from the sounds of it, and the coming of age drama The Age of Turmoil (1986).

There potentially may have been even more than that had Putra not passed away at a relatively young age (54) in 1993. His passing also seemed to coincide with Suzzanna's semi-retirement, as she'd only appear in one other film afterward (2008's Hantu Ambulance), but that probably has more to do with the Indonesian film industry self-destructing in the 90s than Putra's departure. Suzzanna apparently also did some TV work here and there, including a soap opera in the early 2000s.

The setting is an isolated village called Karang Setan ("Satan's Coral"), where a lack of proper law enforcement means corruption is the order of the day. Bisman (I. Gusti Jagat Karana) is a fat, bumpy-and-cracked faced criminal who runs a gambling den / brothel / bar where all of the local hooligans like to hang out. His wife Parmi is always sick and thus cramping his style, so he decides to speed along her demise by tricking her into drinking pesticide, claiming it's medicine. Soon after, she has seizures, pukes up blood and falls over dead. To cover his tracks, Bisman falsely claims that local cleric Sarma (Novie Chandra), whose wife he covets, has cast a black magic spell on her. He gathers a posse of torch-carrying villagers and decides to go pay him a visit.

In actuality, Sarma is a kindly, moralistic and devout sort who runs a school with his wife, Katemi (Suzzanna), and condemns the use of black magic. Nevertheless, the men beat him up, drag him into the woods, cover him with gasoline and set him ablaze. Forced to watch her innocent husband being murdered, Katemi is then pulled into a hut and almost raped by Bisman. She manages to fight him off by squeezing his crotch from behind (!) and then flees into the jungle, where she spends the night. The following morning she follows a blackbird into some caves filled with giant mushrooms and runs across a crocodile with a human head, who announces herself as Nyi Angker (Joice Erna - BLACK MAGIC ANNIHILATION). She's the self-professed "Queen of Black Magic" and wants to recruit her visitor as an apprentice / heir.

Katemi is resistant at first. After all, she's Muslim and black magic is frowned upon, but Nyi Angker (who sheds her crocodile skin and takes on a normal human look at certain times of the month) can be quite persuasive. There are three steps Katemi must complete to become a powerful black magic practitioner. First, she has to find and then eat a placenta from a newborn baby. Second, she has to spend all night bathing and meditating in a pond with crocodiles and avoid getting eaten. Finally, she has to strip naked and walk through her village during a full moon. As she's working on step #2, two of Bisman's goons end up getting eaten by crocodiles while trying to capture her, which only further puts her on Bisman's bad side.

As Katemi is doing her training, Bisman keeps busy sex trafficking kidnapping virgins and conspiring to overthrow the current leader, Chief Markum (K. Arief Raduma), who he already pays off under the table. Potentially throwing a wrench into their plan is the arrival of Markum's pious son, Achmad Pramuja (Jeffry "Daniel" [Waworuntu]), from his studies in the city. However, a couple of Bisman's henchmen (Karsiman Gada, Belkiez Rachman) are able to get to him first and trick Markum into drinking poisoned coffee. Bisman again blames the death on black magic, frames both Katemi and Nyi Angker as the responsible parties and uses it as an excuse to appoint himself as the new village chief; promising to make it a priority to hunt down and execute the two witches.

While this black magic romp isn't all smooth sailing, it mostly makes up for that by featuring all kinds of insane things you're not likely to see anywhere else. A large frog causes a man's crotch to burst, a snake enters a mouth, gives birth and causes a stomach to explode with spurting blood and baby snakes, eels break their way out of legs and are pulled out of ears and a breast is ripped off and squirts milk in someone's face! There's also a werewolf, numerous people getting burned alive, a super-stretchy long tongue, fireballs and perhaps the strangest and least erotic "erotic" scene in recent memory; a Vaseline smeared Adam and Eve garden fantasy with cardboard flowers, a papier-mâché volcano, fog, bubbles and neck stroking that ends with a nipple getting bitten off (!!) After plenty of violence and gore, plus some some sleaze / nudity (courtesy of a single body double used for both female stars), this then tries to justify itself with a religious / moral message about the power of prayer and Allah at the very end!

Not surprisingly, there's also plenty of humor along the way, or should I say attempts at humor. Skinny, giraffe-necked H.I.M. Damsyik is featured in a single scene as a con artist trying to sell evil-repelling trinkets to naïve, superstitious villagers. Getting more screen time are a pair of bumbling, inept security guards named Bokir (played by Bokir) and Dorman (Dorman Borisman), who are the closest thing this village has to police, which certainly explains a lot. Bokir has a couple of cute / silly scenes with his basket weaver wife Siti (Bu Siti) and performs an entire song wearing an over-sized pair of underwear during a 5-minute-long random musical interlude that erupts into a village dance party where someone carries around a sign that says "Bokir: Rambo IV (Rambutan Bogor)" and then Bokir transforms into Rambo (!?) There appears to be some kind of inside joke here that went right over my head. 

What harms this film most is the under-utilization of the Nyi Angker character. She's off-screen a lot, and for long periods of time, while this focuses mostly on the scummy misdeeds of Bisman and his men. They're shown in such a bad light that Nyi Angker, who's mostly around to facilitate Katemi's revenge, actually comes off as not so bad in the process. That results in an unsatisfying finale when she's brought back in the last few minutes and treated like the final boss. Even worse, Suzzanna doesn't even really factor into the finale of her own film and has to be white knighted by the boring, unlikable and self-righteous Pramuja (who's played about as blandly and woodenly as possible by Waworuntu). I ended up rooting for Nyi Angker.

The director also made the non-Suzzanna PRIMITIVES (1980), SATAN'S SLAVE (1980), THE WARRIOR (1981) and WOLF (1981). Prior to the new Blu-ray, I found only an Indonesian VCD and a Malaysian VHS release for this title but nothing else, so I doubt even most folks in Asia had access to this one.

★★1/2

King Dinosaur (1955)

... aka: El planeta infernal (The Hellish Planet)

... aka: Monstruos de otro planeta (Monsters from Another Planet)

Directed by:

Bert I. Gordon

Gordon just passed away a few days ago (March 8, 2023) at the ripe old age of 100, so what better way to celebrate his legacy than to take a look at his directorial debut? At least that's what I was thinking going into this, but my initial plan pretty much backfired on me! It wasn't until afterward that I discovered, of the 20+ films Gordon made over his 60-year career, this is generally considered his very worst film. Doh! While it's still of interest in that it helped to establish a template for many of the director's size-obsessed later offerings, this not being Gordon at his best means I probably picked the absolute worst film possible for some kind of appreciative retrospective review. With that said, I'll stop right here before I get into all the negatives and point out that Gordon did make a number of enjoyable movies. I particularly liked his ghost film TORMENTED (1960) and his sleaze-filled crime drama The Mad Bomber (1975). Also, some of the giant monster films that he's mostly famous for, while not exactly "good," are at least fairly amusing. Unfortunately that's not the case for King Dinosaur. 

Shot over the course of a week in the fall of 1954 (partially at the ever-popular Bronson Canyon) on a budget of just 15,000 dollars and featuring a cast of just four people, this shows all of the tell-tale signs (stock footage, stolen footage, endless filler to stretch the running time to barely over an hour, patchwork narration courtesy of Marvin Miller...) of a film cheaply spat out with the express purpose of making a quick buck from unsuspecting moviegoers. And that it apparently did as Gordon would start churning out very similar films at a steady quip just a few years later.

In a preposterous, reality-defying plot that's certain to give science geeks everywhere a good laugh, astronomers are startled to discover that a large rogue planet has drifted into our solar system and latched right on to the Earth's orbit. It's now not only close enough to be of moderate climate but scientists also suspect it also could have an identical atmosphere capable of supporting life. A powerful telescope is used to take a closer look at the planet's surface, which uncovers that vegetation is indeed there. That prompts a space race between nations around the globe to see who can be the first to explore our new neighbor. There's only one thing that's missing: A "space rocket" capable of transporting astronauts there. Hey, this is 1955 we're talking about here! The narrator goes into painstaking detail about various tests, developing a brand new metal, etc. over boring stock footage until the craft is finally completed. Naturally, the first country to make it there is the U.S. of 'Murica.

A curiously tiny team (considering the importance of such a mission) is put together to go to the new planet, which has since been dubbed Nova. Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson), an "expert of zoogeography" and the man who discovered the famous tar pits of Salt Lake City is the first signed to the mission. He's followed by mineralogist Dr. Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher), physician Dr. Ralph Martin (William Bryant) and chemist Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis). No trained pilot? No problem! The rocket launch is successful and the quartet speed through their months-long journey to Nova. Since apparently there was little of interest to do during the trip, and space can be a lonely place, the two men and two women have paired off and are now romantic couples.

Upon landing, Ralph and Patricia slip on their suits and become the very first humans to touch ground on Nova, which they're delighted to discover is filled with trees and lush vegetation and has a pleasant temperature of 78 degrees Celsius. They first run some tests to see if the atmosphere is suitable for them. Though 40% of the microscopic bacteria detected is unknown to man they do what all highly intelligent and educated scientists would do in a similar situation: Say screw it, throw caution to the wind and remove their cumbersome suits. Early discoveries made include breathable air, potable water and identical animal species (deer, vultures, owls, bears, sloths...) that are found on the Earth. Analyzing some rock samples, Nora determines that the planet is comparable to Earth during its Prehistoric era. And you know what that means: Dinosaurs! Eh, kinda, well, not really...

After a day out in the field, our fearless foursome get lost on their trip back to the shuttle and are forced to camp out for the night. What follows would basically become Gordon's speh-see-ality later on: one animal attack scene after another. Patricia is menaced by a boa constrictor, Ralph has a wrestling match with an alligator, some kind of giant bug shows up at camp, makes some weird noise and is shot dead and the snake makes a return visit after dark. They also "adopt" a kinkajou (played by Little Joe - The Honey Bear) and spend much of the rest of the movie jerking the poor thing around by its tail.

Nora becomes infatuated with a nearby volcanic island ("What a desolate, forsaken place!") and eventually talks Richard into taking an inflatable boat over to it to check it out. There, they discover it's filled with giant reptiles, which I suppose are the "dinosaurs" of the title even though they're played by an iguana ("It resembles the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Earth's prehistoric age" - Not!), an alligator, an armadillo and a salamander. The iguana and alligator engage in a duel to the death and the victor of that match-up then gets to battle the salamander. Nora and Richard become trapped in a cave as the "monsters" rampage outside, but manage to shoot off a flare to alert their colleagues. Can they get there in time to save them?

I'm used to the stock footage (though perhaps not the first ten minutes of a film being almost exclusively stock footage!) and the bad acting and the junk science and the laughable dialogue in Grade Z sci-fi films from this era, so none of that particularly bothered me with this one either. That said, there are few schlock movie transgressions worse than luring your audience in with the promise of one thing but giving them something else entirely. No matter how one films them, lizards (even ones with plastic horns glued to their head) and gators are not dinosaurs. And neither are armadillos. Not that this would have sucked any less had it been called King Lizard instead, but the deceptive title and marketing is certainly annoying. Had Gordon put someone in a rubber dinosaur suit or even just shot a plastic head that somewhat resembled an actual dino I'd probably have been more satisfied than what he did here. Even then, there are worse aspects to this production to bitch about...

Firstly, how these scientists decide to get themselves out of their predicament is one of the most astonishingly stupid things I've ever seen. As they're fleeing the island, one of the men has his light bulb moment. "I brought the atom bomb," he says as if he'd just remembered where he left his car keys, "I think it's a good time to use it!" They then make it back across the lake, detonate the briefcase bomb (set up to a timer!) and blow the entire island and all of its unique creatures to smithereens as if it's nothing! The crew then beam in the light of the atomic cloud, proud that they have "brought civilization to Planet Nova." There are so many logical and ethical issues with this that I don't even know where to begin!

Even worse is the treatment of the real animals. As bad as Gordon's special effects could be at times, they're certainly preferable to he and his crew mates throwing a couple of lizards together on a set and having them fight and kill one another. This is a topic that's frequently discussed in horror circles and viewers usually fall into two separate camps. There are those who argue that animals do this anyway and nature documentaries feature animals killing one another all the time so it's OK. And there are those (including myself) who believe that no animal should ever be harmed or killed for the sake of a movie and that documenting wild animals doing their thing is not the same as trapping them together to provoke conflict / fighting / death and then turning your camera on them. I mean, is that really much different than dogfighting, which is illegal in most of the world for a reason? To me, these scenes act as a dark cloud hanging over what is already a dull, stupid, poorly-made movie.

While no one is credited with doing the film's special effects (one can assume it was Gordon with assist from his then-wife, Flora M. Gordon, as per usual), the most impressive one is the brief appearance of a woolly mammoth, which was actually swiped from One Million B.C. (1940). The credits says it's based on a short story called "Beast from Outer Space" written by Gordon and Al Zimbalist (also one of the producers). Tom Gries, who'd later go on to make the excellent Manson TV movie Helter Skelter (1976), adapted the story. Many of these same people were behind another film called Serpent Island (1954), which Gries directed and Gordon produced.

There have been several DVD double feature releases for this 63 minute film. The first was from Retromedia, who paired it with the gorilla reincarnation (?) film The Bride and the Beast (1958). The second is from Kit Parker / VCI, who've paired it up with The Jungle (1952), which involves woolly mammoths in India. This was also ridiculed in a 1990 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which itself was released on DVD by Shout! Factory.

R.I.P. B.I.G.

★