Anita (1984)

... aka: Anita: Female Snake

... aka: Anita (Ular Betina)

Directed by:

"M. Syarifudin" (M. Sharieffudin A.)

Disapproving of plans for an arranged marriage, Juwita (Enny Beatrice) is chastised by her mother, Sofia (Ade Irawan), and then slapped in the face by her father, Thomas (Deddy Sutomo). As if that wasn't enough punishment already, she's then taken deep into the jungle on a remote island, tied to stakes in the ground and is left for dead (!) And then something even stranger happens. She's freed when lasers shoot the ropes holding her down and a huge python slithers between her legs. This particular snake has special powers and the ability to impregnate humans, which is exactly what happens when it gets busy (!) with a writhing Juwita. Afterward, Juwita goes a little crazy. Her guilt-stricken parents (the mother starts having nightmares about snakes attacking her in her garden) soon regret their decision and hire a posse of hunters, led by Hendra (Harry Capri), the man Juwita was to wed, to go find her and bring her back.

After Hendra locates a dirty and disheveled Juwita, a laser beam shoots out of the sun (?), speeds along her pregnancy, induces labor and she then gives birth to a huge egg. Once the egg cracks open, a bunch of slithering serpents emerge. A panicked Hendra starts frantically chopping them up with his machete (yes, real snakes are killed), is tripped up by one of them and accidentally stabs Juwita in the stomach. After Harry (Syarief Friant), one of Hendra's pissed off fellow hunters, engages him in a comically overlong fight, the men agree to keep what truly happened a secret. They bury Juwita in a shallow grave and then go on their way.

Unbeknownst to the hunters, one of the baby snakes managed to get away and it grows into a beautiful young woman named Anita (also played by Beatrice). Anita likes to swing from vines, bathe topless under waterfalls (which was blurred out on the version I viewed) and do hilarious erotic dances with snakes to generic elevator muzak. While performing one such dance, she passes out and wakes up in a cave surrounded by snake women decked out in snake-skin crop tops and miniskirts. All of the snake women can switch from human to snake form at will, as can Anita. The queen of the snake women (Poppy Soraya) is pleased with the new addition to their tribe, teaches her some snake fu moves and then shoots her with a laser and gives her a Medusa-head full of live snakes. I guess in snake woman world that's considered some kind of promotion.

A wildlife photographer (Advent Bangun) is canoeing around the island snapping photos when a pesky gator shows up, eats his guide and makes him wreck his boat. After stabbing it to death, he makes his way inland and is immediately ambushed by a half dozen snake warrior women, whom he defeats in a fight. One well-placed booby trap later and he's shirtless, sweaty and tied up in the cave, where snake ladies perform their patented seductive dance for him, which involves swaying their hips, slithering their arms, bowing before him and, uh, standing on his chest (?) Afterward, he has a fight with Anita and an errant laser shot hits the Queen and kills her. Now it's time for Anita to take charge and she wants the photographer to be her lover / assistant; a position he gladly accepts (might have something to do with him being shot with a green laser beam though).

Meanwhile, Juwita's father organizes an expedition to the island, which includes Hendra, Harry and five other dudes (including Dadang Iskandar and Yacob Essad from another Beatrice vehicle called ALLIGATOR QUEEN), who get picked off one by one. Several are killed by snakes, there's another alligator attack and, in an ironic death, Hendra gets impaled with a machete against the same tree Juwita died in front of. The survivors flee and make it back to their vehicle and to civilization. However, Anita (in snake form) has managed to hitch a ride on the bottom of their jeep. At around the same time, Lina (Linda Lolita Husein), who is either Juwita's kid sister or a niece, shows up at the house for a visit. Her first night there, she's welcomed by a cobra slithering into bed with her, which is "killed" with an umbrella but then transforms into a piece of rope.

Anita keeps tormenting the family, mostly in her cobra form, and bites a face, slithers inside a pants leg, traps Lina inside a car with constrictor snakes and knocks her off a dock into the water and causes people to shoot one another. Whenever it's time for hand-to-hand combat, Anita transforms back into her human form. The finale takes place in the woods and at a huge rock quarry and features an arm hacked off with a machete, laser snakes, numerous people knocked over a rocky embankment to their deaths, a neck snapped with a thigh, a snake fight, lots more human fighting and a female spiritualist (Connie Sutedja) who has a laser battle with Anita and then transforms into a giant frog (!?) before dying.

While this starts getting a little sloppy toward the end and I can definitely do without seeing real animal slaughter (there's also a completely pointless bit where a constrictor is put inside a cage with a rabbit), this hits all of the other right notes one would want out of such a film. It's filled with action and martial arts (the fight scenes are actually pretty good), magic, cheap special effects, animal attacks, flash editing, fun costumes, nice shooting locations and has a fast-paced, bizarre, sometimes incoherent and highly entertaining plot that combines jungle adventure, fantasy, snake horror and even a little haunted house flick in the last 30 minutes.

Anita is a very good vehicle for Beatrice, who must have been pretty popular in Indonesia in the 80s because this was one of 14 (!) films she did in 1984 alone. Here, she's nice to look at, enthusiastic, acquits herself pretty well with the martial arts demands and is obviously brave to spend half the movie with snakes crawling all over her, not to mention wearing that live snake headdress for most of her scenes. Beatrice abruptly disappeared from films for good in the late 80s after marrying (and having six children with) wealthy Malaysian businessman Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor, who was dabbling in film production at the time. He would go on to become a politician, serving on the Malaysian Parliament and as the countries Minister of Tourism, and has been embroiled in bribery, corruption and tax evasion scandals in the past few years.

This has never been released in America nor is it available in an English language version. I could only track down one home video release; an Indonesian one on the VCD format.

★★★

Golok Setan (1984)

... aka: Der herr der krokodile (Lord of the Crocodile)
... aka: Devil's Machete
... aka: Devil's Sword, The
... aka: Koral le justicier (Koral the Vigilante)
... aka: Le justicier contre la reine des crocodiles (The Vigilante Against the Queen of the Crocodiles)
... aka: Lord of the Crocodiles
... aka: Svaerdets dronning (Queen of the Sword)

Directed by:
Ratno Timoer

A small village worships or, more specifically, has no other choice but to worship, a cruel, insatiable and all-powerful nympho white crocodile demon queen (Gudhi Sintara) who lives in a palace underneath a nearby lake along with a slew of crocodile handmaidens, faithful male warriors and a wizard sidekick. The queen's sexual appetite is so huge that she's been ordering the village to sacrifice all of their strong, brave and handsome young men to her. After all, it sometimes takes at least seven at once to please her on her croc-themed silver chaise lounge. You could say that she's high maintenance. She also hates being disappointed. If she grows tired of her sex slaves, feel they're misbehaving or they fail to live up to her expectations, she simply does away with them by tossing them into a bamboo cage filled with hungry, crazed cannibals!

Since the village has recently been unable to keep up with the queen's demands, she resurrects the great warrior Banyujaga (Advent Bangun) from beyond. He goes to the village (riding in on a levitating boulder!) and demands a young man named Sanjaya (Yos Santo), who's right in the middle of wedding village leader Barata's (H.I.M. Damsyik) daughter, Pitaloka (Enny Christina), accompany him back to the queen's palace. When the villagers refuse to cooperate, Banyujaga punches, kicks, cracks bones and uses his twin swords to slash, slice, impale, chop, disembowel, dismember and decapitate. Interestingly, Pitaloka (who has a parasol weapon and knows martial arts) mostly fights him while her hopefully-husband-to-be is left to stand by and watch. During the fight, Pitaloka is injured and her father is killed after having his hand chopped off. But not all hope is lost...

Virtuous warrior Mandala (Barry Prima) rides in on his horse to help but Banyujaga is able to resurrect some alligator men from underground to distract him long enough to run off with Sanjaya, who's taken to the queen's kingdom. There, she hypnotizes him with her mesmeric eyes and has her way with him on a spinning bed surrounded by fire. Meanwhile, Mandala finds his teacher Abirama (Kandar Sinyo), whom he communicates with telepathically, seriously injured. Snake venom from a previous fight is making his legs turn black and rot. Mandala is able to stabilize him with a concoction made from exploding mushrooms (!) and then chops off both of his legs to keep the poison from spreading. Abirama reveals that he was attacked for refusing to give up the secrets of the Devil's Sword, which was made from a fallen meteor and possesses supernatural powers. Whoever has it in their possession could use it to end life as we know it. Mandala is given a map and sent on quest to locate it. He teams up with the persistent Pitaloka, who is determined to rescue her husband.

Banyujaga is not only beholden to the evil crocodile queen (whom she's taken as a lover), but he's also teamed up with three other evil, power-hungry warriors. There's the Red Snake King, who has a poison staff that can turn into a snake (or vice versa), an old, rotten-tooth witch (Rita Zahara) with a deadly whip and a bald-domed man (Kusno Sudjarwadi) who has a nifty hat that can explode or rip off heads. As they'd all like to possess the sword, the four soon turn on each other and battle it out. The snake and hat men aren't difficult for Banyujaga to defeat but the witch, who's called a "polluted bitch hound" and "dirty daughter of a whore," regenerates after being cut in two and keeps on going even after losing her head. Though she's forced to retreat, she promises to return to get revenge. That never happens.

Getting to the sword proves to be no easy task and starts with a (marvelously done!) raft ride across a foggy lake from a skeleton. Some floppy-headed alligator men attack and the sword itself is located inside a pink-lit cave filled with bats and a bunch of booby traps, including an acid lake, spikes that pop out of the floor and a room that shoots out spears. A one-eyed stone monster is the final challenge and considering it appears to be made out of paper it's easily defeated. Mandala and Pitaloka must then do battle with Banyujaga before descending into the queen's underground lair to do battle with her, her minions and a gold, blue-eyed flamethrower / laser crocodile icon.

Many viewers make mention of the low budget special effects, cheap-looking sets and wonky fight choreography and editing on display here. However, once you start descending down the Indonesian fantasy / horror rabbit hole a bit further you'll realize that all of the above get much, much worse than this. For an Indo production from this same time frame, Devil's Sword is more elaborate, better-made and appears to have a larger-than-usual budget. That's all relatively speaking, of course! Still, I have seen far cheaper and far more incompetent.

The action is extremely fast-paced and gruesome as this juggles all kinds of odd fantasy-adventure / horror / mystical ideas and leaps from one fx-fueled set piece to another... coherence be damned! Nearly every scene ends up turning into some kind of big fight. While some of these are almost passably choreographed, at other times they resort to speeding up the action, which of course looks ridiculous and comical. The plot is jam packed with assorted nonsense, some of which doesn't feel like it belongs at all. You never really know what you're going to get from one scene to the next, but the nonsensical nature of the plot eventually takes its toll. The final act suffers because of this, in part because you've grown accustomed to slapdash nature of the movie and in part because most of the better weird stuff has already occurred or is simply being repeated.

This was based on a comic by Man (pen name for Mansyur Daman) and is part of his Mandala serial. The ending seems to be a set-up for a sequel, though one was never made. Very prolific actor / director / writer / producer Timoer (real name: Ahmad Suratno) also directed the genre films Kuntilanak / "Female Ghost" (1974), Gondoruwo / "The Haunted House" (1981), Jin Galunggung / "Galunggung Genie" (1982), Rimba Panas / "Jungle Heat" (1988) and Pembalasan Setan Karang Bolong / "Revenge of the Karang Bolong Demon" (1989), plus acted in a handful, most notably some of the Sisworo Gautama Putra / Suzzanna collaborations. He'd won some major acting awards (including Best Actor at the Indonesian Film Festival) in the 70s and amassed over 150 credits during his 30 year career.

This is one of the best distributed Indonesian genre titles from this era. There were home video releases in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, the Netherlands and elsewhere and this was English-dubbed for release in the US and UK. A 2006 DVD from Mondo Macabro gave it even more exposure, boosting it to near the top of all Asian cult films.

★★1/2