Tamu Tengah Malam (1989)

... aka: Midnight Guest

Directed by:

Atok Suharto

If you think your love life is a mess, spending 80 minutes with these folks should make you feel a little better about that. Wealthy, middle-aged Ningsih (Ully Artha) falls passionately in love with younger skirt-chaser Kadir (Hengky Tornando), but their doomed romance is rife with issues, starting with the fact she's married to Sulaiman (Jack Maland) and has a young daughter, Mirna. To solve that issue, she promptly kicks both of them out of the house and moves her new man in instead. However, Kadir is a player and isn't content with just one woman. He's been going behind Ningsih's back with a youthful widow named Suryani (Yurike [Prastica]). With his sugar mama supposedly gone for the evening, Kadir sneaks Suryani over, but Ningish comes home early and catches the two of them in the act. 

The spurned adulteress then goes into a rage. She throws a vase at Suryani's head, bites a chunk of flesh off of Kadir's arm and spits it on the ground (!) and then runs around the room frantically trying to skewer both of them with a spear. That ends when Kadir flings a machete across the room into her back and then Suryani finishes her off with the spear. The two then hide the body in a secret room in the cellar. However, before dying, Ningish promised to return from the grave to get revenge... and that she does!

Years later, Kadir and Suryani have married. The bookish, shy and now-teenage Mirna (Dian Nitami) is friends with the wilder and more rebellious Lisa (Sally Marcellina), who just so happens to be Suryani's daughter from her previous marriage, though both girls are oblivious to everything their parents have been up to. Mirna and Lisa get together at Lisa's mansion with some friends to study for an exam, where a hidden passageway and a strange statue made of green crystals, rumored to be some kind of vessel to summon demons, are found in the basement. The teens hold a séance using the crystal, which ends up unleashing Ningsih's vengeful spirit. Lisa is possessed, throws everyone around the room, tries to strangle a guy, spits green gunk in someone's face and then passes out. A doctor is called in and claims the incident was caused by stress from studying too hard (!!)

Both Mirna and Suryani are plagued by nightmares, with the former seeing her late mother as a leyak / leák (flying severed head with entrails attached) and the latter envisioning herself trapped in a jail cell with a worm that transforms into a snake with Ningsih's laughing head attached. While that's going on, Kadir's long-ago-healed arm wound opens back up again and starts bleeding. But it's the innocent Lisa who seems to get the bad end of the deal for most of the film. After hearing the ghost calling to her over the radio, she finds herself possessed yet again. Her face turns green, she does 360 degree spins with her head, turns holy water into blood, pukes some more and then thrusts her hand into a shaman's stomach, rips out his guts and throws him out of the upstairs window. That's followed by many more attacks on others. Another shaman is eventually called in to try to exorcise the spirit.

This alternates between wanting to be taken seriously and being just plain (intentionally) silly; almost as if it's trying to send-up The Exorcist, which it knowingly recycles plot points from, at times. As is customary with older Indonesian genre films, there are some grating comedy elements interjected into the mix, mostly centering around maid Mina (Lina Budiarti) and a girl-crazy, ass-pinching, always-horny chauffeur (Mandra Bokir) who will probably die a virgin. I'm sure these are included as a means to break up the tension but, as is often the case, they turn out to be the low points of the film. That said, at least these goofy moments are kept sidelined and aren't allowed to completely take over the film like you'd probably see if this were made in Hong Kong or Thailand at around the same time.

Aside from that, much of the rest of this is pretty great. Well, maybe not great, but it sure is entertaining and a lot of fun to watch! Remember that leyak I mentioned from Mirna's nightmare? Thankfully it turns out to be Ningsih's usual ghostly form so we get lots of scenes of a head flying around in the basement attacking people. Better yet, it gets to do so with a gigantic stretchy tongue that's used to subdue or even kill people! In one scene, it strangles a guy and then rips his head off after both of his arms get pulled off! During another amazing scene, it sprouts a small spinning saw blade at the tip (!) that's used to bore through a victim's head.

There are lots of other bizarre moments to be found here, like a scene where possessed Lisa's top half detaches from her bottom while the chauffeur tries to feel up her legs. Kadir's arm wound eventually sprouts a green snake, footage from the original murder is replayed on a TV set and the ghost writes "Hari Pembalasam" ("Judgment Day") on the wall in blood and then goes to a funeral, where she lounges on top of a gravestone wearing a white miniskirt and giant white sunglasses, admiring her own work. The whole thing has this really bizarre blue / green tint to it, though I can't tell if that's the way it was filmed or if the print is in need of color correction. I'm assuming it's the latter.

This was written by Tindra Rengat (director of the Indo cult classic MIRACLE BABY), who also shows up in cameo. The director made quite a few other obscure genre films, including Perempuan Malam / "Night Virgin" (1987), Putri Kuntilanak / THE WITCH'S DAUGHTER (1988), Melacak dendam / "Tracking Revenge" (1989; an uncredited remake of NINJA III: THE DOMINATION that I really need to see!), Misteri di Malam Pengantin / "Wedding Night Mystery" (1993), Misteri Permainan Terlarang / "Mystery of the Forbidden Game" (1993) and Roh: The Evil Spirit (2006).

I'm not aware of any official home video releases outside of Asian VCDs, and this has also never been available in an English-friendly version. The widescreen print I watched was snatched from the Flix channel.

★★1/2

Roh (1989)

... aka: Spirit

Directed by:

Susilo SWD

It's been awhile since I've seen HELLRAISER (1987), but this movie really brought back fond memories of it... It's a nearly scene-for-scene remake / rip-off, sans credit to the original filmmakers, naturally! All of the primary characters (Julia, Larry, Kirsty, Frank, etc.) have been duplicated, only renamed, and most of the same things that occur in the original film occur here in roughly the same order. Of course, being an Indonesian film, they didn't have near the budget or talent of the famous 80s hit, which is evident just a few minutes in. Most of this takes place inside one home and the sets are ridiculously simple and sparse. It's almost surreal how blank everything is here, as if this all takes place in some kind of rainbow void instead of planet Earth, though that strangely also gives this its own unique vibe.

Instead of the famous puzzle box, Satanist "Lucky" Lukito (Hengky Tornando - BLACK MAGIC ANNIHILATION) has acquired a special little Halloween-bargain-rack-lookin' metal sphere with a smiley face on it (!) to make contact with the underworld. However, the device ends up sucking him straight to hell, where he's tortured with hooks that shoot out of a rotating column and rip all of his flesh off. Lukito had been practicing the black arts in the rat-infested attic of his wealthy, oblivious brother Bramasto's (Pong Hardjatmo) mansion and, while staying there, also carrying on a passionate affair with Bram's dissatisfied wife, Astria (Enny Beatrice - VIRGINS FROM HELL).

After Bram slices his hand while cutting up chicken, he dribbles blood on the attic floor. The floor sucks it up, starts smoking and then we get a copy of the gory regeneration scene from Hellraiser, only this time using some very poorly executed stop motion animation to achieve the effect. Though Lukito can now speak and technically has a functioning body, he's weak, skinless and in a partial skeletal state. Only fresh blood can both sustain his life and help fully restore his body, and that's where Astria comes in. She loves Lukito, not her husband, and is willing to do whatever it takes to help her lover.

While her husband's at work, Astria starts dressing up sexy, hitting local bars and aquariums and picking up men. She brings them home, lures them into the attic and then hits them over the head with a hammer. Lukito then feasts on the blood and, with each new victim, starts becoming more and more human-like. Eventually he just needs a new skin suit to complete the look. Bram's college-aged daughter, Nadia (Sally Marcellina - THE WITCH'S DAUGHTER), is distrustful of Astria to the point where she refuses to even live in the same home as her, despite her father's wishes. She's also plagued by nightmares on her stepmother trying to kill them.

After stumbling upon Astria and Lukito murdering another of the their victims, Nadia gets her hands on the sphere and runs off. She's involved in a car accident and ends up in the hospital, where the sphere is accidentally activated. The wall cracks open, she steps inside and encounters most of the same, though slightly altered, demons / "cenobites" as seen in the original. There's a fat one, there's the one with the huge ring through its face that shoots fire out of its mouth and there's a female one, who always wear sunglasses because she has no eyes and appears to be the leader of the demons. Conspicuously absent though is the most famous of them all, Pinhead, though that would have perhaps made things a bit too obvious for comfort, or it may have been a make-up job beyond the talents of the fx crew. Also no Chatterer.

Clearly this is no match for the original film, and it's not even good as far as remakes are concerned (there are zero improvements to the first and it adds nothing new or novel to the original concept), but it's made somewhat palatable by the speedy pacing, large amount of make-up effects and, as you can probably tell from the screen caps, the extremely colorful visual presentation.

While Suzzanna is by far the most famous horror movie star from Indonesia, she wasn't the only actress in the game at the time and there were a number of others who rivaled her credit-wise. Beatrice and Marcellina were just two of them, but for some reason these actresses (Yurike Prastika, Farida Pasha, Rina Hasyim and Joice Erna were some others) are all but ignored nowadays. Drawing a comparison, we could say Suzzanna was a Jamie Lee Curtis type in that she got all of the fame and leads in the higher budgeted productions of the day, while the others were more comparable to the American B-movie "Scream Queens" that flourished around this same time. Tornando (sometimes spelled "Tarnando") also has quite a few genre credits under his belt.

The cast includes Agyl Syahriar in a useless role as Nadia's supportive boyfriend Djoni (to be fair this same role was equally useless in the original Hellraiser), Simon P.S. as one of the victims and Belkiez Rachman as Lukito's teacher (who may be Satan himself).

Though this was never officially released outside of its home country, it's now available online with several different sets of fan made English subtitles. The first set is a Google translate of the original audio, which skips over large portions of the dialogue, and the second was whipped up by a Clive Barker fan who didn't seem to follow the original audio much at all and decided to swap the original character names out for those from Hellraiser! The available print is also poorly formatted in what appears to be a faux widescreen attempt which frequently leaves the tops, bottoms and sides of people's heads cut off. Still, considering many 70s and 80s Indonesian genre films are in such terrible shape they're damn near impossible to watch, this at least looks OK-ish.

★★