Alapaap (1984)

... aka: Clouds

... aka: High Clouds

Directed by:

Tata Esteban

Opening with a truly bizarre musical number featuring an apparently confused punk / New Wave-look band performing a harmonica-heavy blues rock number called "Society" in a smoky club, this doesn't get any less addled from there! The band is cut with a bunch of surreal and seemingly senseless scenes (sometimes shot with a kaleidoscope effect added or through a Vaseline-smeared lens) of a dazed audience member gazing at the band while lights flash in his face, scenes of the same man sitting at a typewriter in some foggy black void dressed in a hospital gown and surrounded by blood bags and three men attacking and raping a young woman in the woods and by a waterfall. The same man also envisions he's led to his own casket by nurses with teased 80s hair and large syringes and members of the press. A newspaper headline then announces that a decomposing body has been found near Baguio City. The victim has been identified as Baeg Longed, an 18-year old jungle "maiden". The girl's father, the tribal head, has warned police that if the crime isn't soon solved, he and the rest of the tribe will seek a bloody revenge.

The man having all of these strange hallucinations is a troubled young aspiring screenwriter named Jake (William Martinez) and there's a good reason for the disorienting opening ten minutes. It's all a drug-fueled delusion as Jake lies in his hospital recovering from his latest overdose. His mother (Rosemarie Gil) is fed up with him, yet too busy with work and her social life to offer any support. Jake and a bunch of his pals - director Dave (Mark Gil), his cameraman brother Donald (Michael De Mesa), their girlfriends, Christine (Eva Rose Palma) and Betsy (Isadora Alonzo), an aspiring Scream Queen who wants to "be the next Nastassja Kinski," and the German Shepherd Jabbar (playing himself) - decide to go to the country to shoot a movie. On the way there, Jake has multiple visions of a beautiful, mysterious woman who seems to be coming on to him but disappears just as soon as he sees her.

After some looking around, the friends are able to rent a large home from Mr. Longed (Ed Villapol), whose name may look familiar if you read the first paragraph. Mr. Longed puts them up in a nice old house with covered furniture, but only under one condition: One of the rooms, which belonged to his late daughter, is strictly off limits. Their first night there, the home is already trying to red flag them the f out. Shutters and windows open and close on their own, fireplaces light themselves, a rocking chair starts moving with nobody in it and Donald sees a wooden idol cry blood. The following morning all of the furniture in the home has been thrown around. When Donald, who witnessed some of the strange activity the night before, expresses his concerns, nobody takes him seriously.

As it transpires, Mr. Longed's daughter, Baeg (Tanya Gomez), was raped and murdered nearby just two months earlier and is now lurking the grounds in vengeful spirit form. And, for some reason that kind of defies the traumatic gang rape she'd already suffered, she's very, very horny! She possesses Betsy and has her sneak into Jake's bedroom to seduce him. And then she inhabits Christine and turns the demure girl sexually ravenous, which ends with her slapping her boyfriend in the face and then passing out. Baeg herself materializes topless near a waterfall to lure in Jake. When Dave and Donald stumble upon them having sex, they whip out their camera and secretly start filming, but no girl is in footage when they later view it, only Jake.

After enough strange / inexplicable / ghostly shit goes down that would drive any normal person away (just not these idiots), Baeg decides she's had enough fun and now wants revenge. No, she doesn't head out after the men who actually raped and murdered her, she instead decides to settle for Jake and his friends. Her justification? Well, basically she's impatient, sick of waiting and doesn't like city folk much anyway, so why not? Her father (who'd pulled her spirit out of her body and now keeps her blue decomposing corpse in the locked bedroom) pleads with her not to harm anyone but gets so worked up he keels over from a heart attack! Now with no one to stop her, she sets about possessing and slaughtering everyone in sight.

Story and performance-wise, this is pretty pedestrian stuff, with a thin plot, poor dialogue, unlikable characters and awful acting, though several of these issues could very well be chalked up to the terrible English dubbing on the print I viewed. Still, the exploitative and stylistic aspects are enough to somewhat redeem things. This offers up pretty much exactly what exploit fans want to see; blood, a bit of gore and a heaping helping of nudity and sex. Even the rape scene, which is shown merely in brief flashes at the beginning, is shown in its gratuitous entirety later on in the form of a flashback.

 

As for the death scenes, there aren't a whole lot but we do at least get a little variety. One of the ladies gets attacked and eaten by the (possessed) dog after it rips off all her clothes, a guy has his brains blown out, another dies by shards of glass after having his head pushed through three different windows and, in the most memorably silly bit, a girl blow dries herself to death (!) until her face is bloody and smoking and her eyeball falls out.

The film's best attribute is actually Esteban, who directs things with plenty of style. There's lots of smooth camerawork, POV shots, tracking shots and weird camera placements, like way up high in the tree tops looking down and underneath a typewriter. There's also some colorful lighting, lots of fog (I guess the "clouds" of the title) and shadow play going on. Regardless of its debits, the film manages to successfully conjure up a dark, dreary atmosphere in a similar fashion to Raimi's original Evil Dead, which seems to have been a strong influence.

Esteban, who took home a FAMAS (Filipino Oscar equivalent) award for his art direction here, also made MAGIC OF THE UNIVERSE (1986), which again starred De Mesa and Gomez, plus Liza Lorena (who has a brief appearance here as a doctor), and was the production designer on SNAKE SISTERS (1984). The only home video release I'm aware of was a 1987 Japanese VHS from Sony Exc!t!ng / Mount Light Home Video. The Japanese video has the English dub, though apparently there's a version in the original Tagalog with fan-made English subtitles that's out there somewhere, which may be the better option if you can find it.

★★1/2

Perawan di Sarang Sindikat (1986)

... aka: 地獄のバージン／女囚の地下帝国

... aka: Maiden's Revenge

... aka: Pertarungan Perawan di Sarang Sindikat (Battle of the Virgins in the Syndicate's Nest)

... aka: Virgin in the Syndicate Web, A

... aka: Virgins from Hell

... aka: Virgins of Hell

... aka: Virgins of Hell - Furien der Apocalypse (Furies of the Apocalypse)

... aka: Virgins of Hell - Sie wollen überleben (They Want to Survive)

Directed by:

Ackyl Anwari

Don't you just love it when a film's opening scene is so in tune with you and your tastes that you know right from the opening few frames you're just gonna love it? Shady gangster Maurice (Hendra Cipta) is gambling away in a smoky casino when his good luck charm / arm candy Sheila (Enny Beatrice) reminds him that they have a date. After retreating to an upstairs bedroom, the girl soon reveals that she's tricked him (Sheila has been posing as - in her own words - "a filthy whore" to gain access) and he's now in for the ass kicking of his life. Sure, she takes a few punches herself and even has a chair broken over her, but she's otherwise easily able to slap, hit and karate kick him into submission, hangs from a plastic ceiling lamp and gets him in a thigh hold, kicks his gun from his hand and then shoots him to death. Oh, and did I mention she's wearing a red headband, red vinyl crop top, frayed red vinyl hot pants and knee-high red vinyl boots during all this? Well, now you know, and now you also know why this was speaking my language. After dispatching the creep ("You son of a bitch! See ya later sucker!"), Sheila then opens the window and signals for her girls to raid the place. Her girls? Yes, Sheila is not only a bad ass chick but she also happens to front a bad ass all-female motorcycle gang who share their leader's affinity for hot pants, headbands, metal trinkets, copious amount of hair spray and horribly staged fight scenes. Hooray!

The biker chicks invade the gambling den, first by driving their red jeep with a skull painted on the hood through the wall, and proceed to clear out the place by punching, stabbing, machine gunning and sending guys through windows. They take all the cash they can grab and make a hasty retreat. A spy informs the super-sadistic owner, Mr. Tiger (Dicky Zulkarnaen), of what's occurred, so he orders his men to find and execute all of the biker chicks and dump their bodies into the river. "You know the spot!"

As for the reason the girls have it out for Mr. Tiger and his men to begin with, well, it basically stems from a property dispute. When Sheila's parents refused to sell their land to him, he had them killed and simply took their home (actually a CASTLE) and land. Now Sheila and her sister Karen (Yenny Farida), who both witnessed the crime, are out for revenge. The girls they've recruited to help out have been promised that they'll get their cut after they help to take out Mr. Tiger, who is using the property for his drug smuggling operation. In his underground lair, kidnapped doctors are being forced to work on drugs. If they fail, they're executed. Young medical student Larry (Harry Capri) is next in line, but does he have the skills to help Tiger "take over the worldwide aphrodisiac market?" Why yes. Yes he does.

After a change of wardrobe (don't fret, the tattered, multi-colored new streetwalker outfits are still outstanding), the ladies raid the castle compound, which results in a hilarious machine gun battle filled with staged motorcycle stunts (including a levitating bike on a wire getting blown up) and all kinds of explosions. The guards retreat, the girls get by the entrance, a trap door opens and half of them fall into an underground cavern. The others who haven't already been killed are then rounded up and everyone is stuck in a large prison cell in a cave... and then this thing suddenly becomes the equivalent of a women-in-prison torture flick with all of the expected (and plenty of not so expected!) trappings.

When they aren't being tortured, sexually assaulted and killed, the women are forced to do manual labor, like wheeling around huge carts like donkeys and climbing trees to harvest coconuts (!) A captive named Janet is given the drug and then raped by Tiger's "business partner" Sam (August Melasz). Another poor girl (a virgin no less) stabs one of her attackers (S. Parya) in the crotch with a knife, but still gets gang raped and hangs herself as a result. There's also plenty of torture of the non-sexual nature, including lots of beatings, whippings and getting sliced up by a barbed wire "swing," strapped to a spit and roasted over an open fire, tied up in a sack with a rabid rodent and much more. On the plus side, the cave prison comes with a large, luxurious swimming hole for the women to lounge around in, so it's not all bad.

There's also plenty of girl drama, which leads to countless bicker sessions and cat fights. Sheila, Karen and Vicky (Leily Sagita) attempt to escape into the jungle, but Karen and Vicky (who makes the mistake of trying to hide in a leech-filled swamp) are apprehended. Sheila ends up getting washed downstream and is injured during a wrestling match with an alligator, which ends with her ripping out its eyeball with her bare hands! Thankfully, Sheila stumbles upon an old mystic who heals her with traditional medicine.

Meanwhile, Lisa (Ratna Debby Ardi) and her pal Julie (Yetty Loren) sell out the other girls and are promoted as guards for their efforts. They're forced to throw Mr. Tiger an 80s synth private dance party wearing sheer nighties, which ends with him handcuffing them together, pulling their hair, slapping them around, whipping them and basically terrifying the shit out of both of them with his extremely bizarre behavior! For an encore, he force feeds them wine and tries to drown them in a bathtub! While he's busy with them, Tiger's tattooed female guard, Dutch, takes advantage of Karen while she's asleep and licks her cleavage and a bloody wound on her leg (!!) before Karen wakes up screaming "Get off me, you lezbo!"

Two others also escape the compound. Larry kills a bunch of guards (including blowing one up and causing the other to have a full body meltdown complete with blood-bursting boils!), before being seriously wounded himself. With Sheila now gone, Dina (Nina Anwar) is forced to temporarily take the reigns. Feigning injury using rat blood, she defeats several guards and eventually locates an unconscious Larry. After she's caught molesting (!!) the nearly-dead student by Sheila, her new mystic buddy heals Larry's wound by sticking a snake in his bloody wound to retrieve the bullet (!!!) Sheila, Dina and Larry then team up to raid the camp and rescue the remaining captive girls.

This is one of those films that's basically impossible to rate as it straddles the line between SBIG and being an intentional trash film that has no real aspirations aside from being action-packed brainless entertainment. (I'm so confused right now I'm just going with the former rating). Say what you will about how some shots are clearly out of focus, how some of the action scenes are "enhanced" by speeding up the film and the ridiculousness of the entire plot, there's nary a dull moment here. It's loaded with violence, fighting, action, stunts and gore (including some serious blood-spurting) and also boasts some very decent pyro fx and explosions. There's also a memorable, lip-licking (literally!) camp performance from a heavily-made-up Zulkarnaen as the main bad guy, who also has some fantastic wardrobe selections. Perhaps the most peculiar thing of all is that despite being filled to the rafters with various sleazy goings-on, this somehow does the impossible by having no nudity whatsoever. Not that this film really needs it!

You never know just where some of these things might pop up on home video. I found only two early releases: a 1987 Japanese VHS that roughly translates to "Virgin of Hell: Underground Empire of Female Visitors" by Mount Light Home Video / Sony Exc!t!ng and a 1988 German release (dubbed into German) on the IVE label. Aside from some ancient Asian VCD releases, this title sat pretty much dormant until 2006 when it made its official U.S. debut thanks to Mondo Macabro. In Germany, they also received a DVD release in 2006 on the Retrofilm label, which comes with Indonesian, English and German audio tracks.

SBIG