Wanita Harimau: Santet II (1989)

... aka: Black Magic II

... aka: Black Magic 2: The Female Tiger

... aka: Tiger Woman: Black Magic II, The

... aka: Santet 2

... aka: Witchcraft II

Directed by:

Sisworo Gautama Putra

Poor Katemi (Suzzanna) just can't catch a break. In the previous film, her squeaky-clean life as a devout religious teacher's wife was shattered when the couple were framed for using black magic, leading to his death and her being reduced to becoming the unwilling pupil of an actual black magic crocodile queen. Though Katemi ended up killing quite a few people, she was able to repent, save her soul and return a life of normalcy. Praise Allah! Unfortunately, the previous queen - Nyi Angker - wasn't actually the top black magic bitch in the neighborhood. She herself was a student of an even more powerful witch named Nyi Loreng (Rina Hasyim - MIRACLE BABY), who just randomly pops up in Katemi's wardrobe late one evening wearing an amazing wig. The witch has her own list of demands, starting with her insistence that Katemi start practicing black magic again, When she refuses, Nyi Loreng simply takes over her body so she no longer has a choice in the matter. Now, on nights with a crescent moon, she'll transform into a killer tiger. The ultimate goal is to get revenge on handsome young cleric Achmad Pramuji (Jeffry "Daniel" / Waworuntu), who was able to pray away Nyi Angker until she exploded in the previous film.

Meanwhile, the cursed village of Karang Seta has tried to reinvent itself with some major changes for the good. They've removed the "n" from their name (it used to be "Setan"), non-corrupt Saleh (Doddy Sukma - SATAN'S BED) has recently been elected as leader and they even appear to have hired a proper policeman named Nasir (H. Nasir T.) to try to keep crime in check. However, he's been saddled with buffoonish Bokir as his assistant and apparently that buffoonery is contagious because Nasir is yukking it up himself in no time.

To celebrate, they throw an outdoor concert featuring a hijab-sporting all-female rock band (!) called Nasida Ria. I had to stop and immediately look these ladies up to make sure they were for real. Yes, they are indeed for real, and they're pretty unique and actually kind of great. These ladies perform numerous stringed instruments (including electric guitar and violin), but also several different styles of drums (including traditional and bongo), tambourine, flute and keyboard, plus the lead vocals and harmonizing are on point AND the song they perform here (which seems to be titled "The World Is in the News") has political and social messages. Nasida Ria, who have apparently been around for almost half a century, released 35 studio albums and are in a constant state of updating talent, have a stated purpose of making catchy, upbeat music to spread positive messages and social commentary. As for what the heck they're doing in this silly black magic horror-comedy is anyone's guess, but I was happy to be introduced to them. They even throw some colorful lights, smoke and fireworks into their show.

Unlike in the previous film where Katemi kept her black magic influence hidden, here she's completely upfront about it as soon as it begins. She informs Pramuji and the police that Nyi Loreng is possessing her, transforming her into a tiger and wants to force her to kill Pramuji. She's instructed to pray harder to banish the witch and is able to keep her away, though only temporarily, using that tactic, but the witch still keeps coming back to haunt her. Katemi's recent troubles have also played hell on her social standing in the community. She has to live on the outskirts all by herself, is constantly the subject of gossip, is refused service at a market and is taunted by adult and children alike. Most believe she should be forced to leave the area. At the end of her rope, Katemi decides to kill herself. However, before she can even get her head in a noose, some villagers show up with torches and set her hut on fire.

A defeated and disheveled Katemi manages to survive and makes her way through the jungle until she ends up in a blue-lit cave, which is the home (and burial site) of Nyi Loreng. The undead witch now finds Katemi weaker and much more pliable than she was earlier, and thus easier to manipulate. Soon, the "tiger woman" is prowling around the village causing a near panic among the locals and prompting a tiger hunt, though it's more of a tiger capture since - as it is pointed out here - the animals are a protected species in Indonesia.

The same guy cast as the main baddie in the previous film is back again. But he was burnt to a crisp after being transformed into a werewolf and hit by fireballs, you say? Well, this time he plays Brahma, the son of the dead guy. Lest you mix them up, the son likes to wear a silly black wig with either a gigantic cowboy hat or glittery headband, and the apple didn't fall far from the tree as far as nefarious criminal activity is concerned. I. Gusti Jagat Karana is the actor playing him and in case you were wondering about this man's unique face, no, it's not make-up and, yes, he's disfigured. I'm not sure if he suffered a burn or had some kind of disease but his face, and only his face, is covered in bumps, lumps, cracks and wrinkles and he has a fat, swollen nose. Brahma is not only involved in smuggling marijuana into the village (hidden inside fish) but he's also out for revenge against Katemi for killing his father and the one responsible for burning down her hut.

In between the horror, we're treated (if that's the word for it) to the comic shenanigans and musical talents of Bokir. In a major subplot, he finds himself bored with his chubby, frumpy wife, Oji (Neny Ribut Rawit), who he compares to a cement truck, and is secretly pursuing a flirty young widow named Rina (Rina Lidya Rawit). Surprising even him, Rina appears to be receptive to his propositions for sex behind the wife's back, but all is not what it seems. Bokir and Nasir are also involved in a recurring series of bad gags detailing how inept they are, including trying to arrest the wrong guys (one with a skin condition and the other a man who can't pronounce his own name properly due to a cleft palate). They also play charades with a stuttering dwarf who can only grunt. Gotta love when disabilities are played for cheap laughs!

As for Bokir's fantasy dream musical number, it's pretty amazing if you like strange, goofy stuff. It starts out in a flower garden gazebo at night with sitar, pungi and bongo players, a bubble machine, confetti, a fireworks show, Suzzanna seductively fluttering her eyelids and licking her lips and Bokir singing about unrequited love. Then it transitions to a helicopter before going down to the jungle for a Tarzan and Jane fantasy where Suzzanna is harassed by an amorous man-in-a-suit primate until Bokir fights it off with a rubber knife and then the two lovebirds ride off into the sunset on an elephant!

After a zillion and one detours, we return to supernatural horror in the last 25 minutes. A possessed woman pukes up green slime and sea critters, a hand bursts through the back of someone's head and out the mouth (did Peter Jackson see this?) and a disembodied living hand with an eyeball on the palm tries to strangle somebody and then turns into a catfish (?!) Katemi, back to using black magic, sneaks into the drug den and kills two of the men with raw fish. Nyi Loreng, a sporadic-at-best presence in the film, finally shows up again for the finale, where she briefly transforms into a younger seductress (played by Lela Anggraini) and has a kung fu battle with the pious male lead armed with fire-shooting tiger mittens.

This sequel basically does the exact same things the first one did, and follows the original's plot and structure nearly beat for beat, only really boosting the music and comedy elements. How defiant of genre and consistent tone the whole thing is will either be a plus or a minus depending on what you like, but being beaten over the head a thousand times about how Islam is the one and only true religion ("There is no God except Allah!") grows tiresome after awhile.

That said, you never know what direction this is going in from one scene to the next. Gruesome death scene, or lighthearted comedy? Serial adulterers trying to hide from their wives by wearing foliage or one of Suzzanna's many awe-inspiring wardrobe / wig changes (including appearing in male drag a few times)? A pro-drug poster referring to weed as "heaven's leaf" or a goofy-looking plush tiger rocketing through the air? Seductive chicken thigh eating or catch of the day impalement? Hey, you get it all! The cast, right down to all the extras playing villagers, seem like they're having a great time regardless of what's going on, which makes this charming and pleasant most of the time. Not the stuff of nightmares, mind you, but it's pretty fun.

 

Like the original, this was given a new lease on life after languishing in VCD hell for decades courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome's 2024 Blu-ray release. Though there are better and worse films out there, both Santet films are a nice introduction to the crazy pleasures of 80s Indonesian genre cinema.

★★1/2

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