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

Wewe Gombel (1988)

... aka: Wewek Gombel

Directed by:

B.Z. Kadaryono

Many people find it tasteless to show graphic depictions of violence directed at young children and babies, which I've always found strange considering no one bats an eye at teenagers getting butchered in every other film! Not that young'un's don't ever die in movies and haven't been dying in movies ever since cinema began. Back in the day, they just usually died off-screen. Or subtly. Or bloodlessly. Or the death was implied. Actually showing their death with accompanying blood and gore used to be extremely taboo in much of world cinema. There have always been a few exceptions to this rule, though, starting with the obvious cases of children being evil, monstrous, inhuman or possessed. Remember, audiences as far back as the 1950s were certainly able to put their values aside to demand the death of Rhoda Penmark in the original version of The Bad Seed, so that film's ending was changed to suit their tastes. However, in audience eyes there's a big difference between an irredeemably evil child dying (would anyone have had a problem seeing Gregory Peck sink a dagger into Damien at the end of The Omen?) and an innocent child shown being graphically killed.

And then there's low budget outsider cinema that revels in bad taste and over-the-top attempts to shock and outrage. Andy Warhol's Bad, for instance, features a scene where a woman hires an assassin to kill her toddler, gets tired of waiting for her to show up and then simply chucks her infant out the window of her apartment building. It hits the pavement down below, splatters blood all over passing bystanders and then the mother angrily shouts at her boyfriend over the phone to get his ass over there or else she's gonna throw the rest of his crap out, too. A scene like that is, of course, going to ruffle some feathers, which is basically the entire point OF the film; a fact that even the most uptight and moralistic critics have to recognize. Not that they necessarily enjoy seeing such things or still won't sometimes complain, but they're usually backed into a corner of having to accept the scene in context to the rest of the film. Besides, is there really this big chasm of morality between simulated adult or teenager death and a simulated child or baby death? It's all fake!

Just like many European directors and audiences in the 60s, 70s and 80s didn't have the sexual hang-ups of, say, American or British filmmakers and audiences at the same time, many Asian countries apparently didn't let the kid killing hang-ups of much of the rest of the world get in their way of showing infanticide in all its gory glory. Everyone's apparently fair game there! I've seen little kids getting hacked and slashed, stew pots filled with baby parts, newborns tossed directly into crocodile mouths and a lot more kiddie carnage than what would typically be shown in films from other countries. Wewe Gombel (which the title card calls "Wewek Gombel" for some reason) is about a ghost that specifically targets babies and children and it too doesn't dilly dally around or try to be subtle about it. Unfortunately, that's probably the most positive thing I can say about this mess!

As the film opens, numerous babies disappear from a small village. A woman's sick baby is zapped right out of her hands as she goes to get help, and then the titular ghost / witch enters another woman's bedroom and snatches her infant right out of her hands. So, Wewe Gombel is a known figure in Indonesian folklore, but this film deviates from the legend considerably. For starters, the ghost's most distinctive physical attribute is her long, floppy, low-hanging breasts (see artwork above). And then there's the fact that the standard mythology states that, while Wewe may kidnap and hoard children, she does not typically harm them. In fact, the children she takes away tend to like her, especially seeing how she specifically sets out to save abused and neglected children from their awful parents. That's decidedly not how this film plays out.

Here, Wewe is more of an Elisabeth Bathory-type, whose beauty and youth are restored by feeding on the blood of babies and children. Otherwise, she's hideously ugly and deformed. Instead of running around topless with her mudflaps blowing in the breeze, she wears a red flowing gown and has a necklace made out of baby skulls. We get to see the unique way in which the ghost feeds (which I also don't think is in the original folk tale) in the very first scene. After retreating to her hideout (decorated with bloody infant parts, including baby heads) with her latest stolen newborn, Wewe pierces the baby's skull with her razor sharp claw and sucks the blood out through her syringe-like finger. The baby smolders and smokes as it's held and Wewe's ugly old face peels off like a snake shedding its skin to reveal an attractive woman underneath.

New to the haunted village because her insensitive and kind of asshole-ish hubby Budi (Jamal Jentak) has been requested there to help the locals improve their farming, pregnant Asih (Susana Aryani) has been spending most of her free time listening to the locals at an all-purpose watering hole where all of the haus frau gather to gossip, bathe, swim AND wash clothing... and all in front of a busy highway just a few feet away! Now Asih is scared and paranoid about Wewe Gombel, who all of the villagers fear. However, because they're from the big city and don't believe in such nonsense, Budi just brushes off her concerns and suggest she read the Koran and trust in Allah. Budi also claims to be out late at night working at the local mosque, but he may be having an affair with one of the women. Either that or I've just mistaken him for one of the other twenty men in here with the same haircut and thin mustache.

Wewe Gombel (mostly played by Sherly Sarita though the character does take many different forms) impersonates an old midwife to gain access to another pregnant woman. After kicking the men out of the room, she snatches the baby and kills the woman. That's enough to have Asih demanding to return to the city. Her husband actually agrees for a change and the two leave. Meanwhile, the villagers run amok (sometimes with torches) screaming "Wewe Gombel!" every few seconds. Some loony woman in a white dress who may or may not be one of the many forms of Wewe hitches a ride in the back of someone's car, climbs up in tree cackling like a maniac and peels a coconut with her bare hands and hits a guy over the head with it. Due to the sudden change to goofy music, I suppose these scenes are supposed to be funny.

And I'm not sure what to make of a scene where tattooed peeping tom / sleazebag Parman (Kamsul Chandrajaya) attacks a young mother named Mina (Joice Erna) after spying on her showering. She kicks him in the crotch and hits him with her purse, but he wrestles her to the ground and attempts to rape her until a passerby beats him off with a stick. Nothing is ever said about the attack afterward. Other random scenes seem thrown in just cuz. There's a succession of major WTF moments that start out with a thuggish man (Arthur Tobing) jumping another guy who seems to be the village leader and engaging in a horribly staged fist fight. That's followed by a brief scene where Parman strips down to yellow bikini briefs and has PG-rated under the covers sex with Wewe Gombel (who decides to use him to help her in her schemes). And that's followed by a scene of kids playing soccer in an overgrown field and an old woman coming over and yelling at a kid for watching them. Huh?

Because he couldn't get into Mina's pants the first time around, Parman uses a bloody magical cloth given to him by Wewe Gombel to transforms into her husband, Mas (Jamal Mirdad). He then pays frequent visits to her home to have his way with her, which causes some major confusion in the couple's marriage. However, his attempts to sneak the baby out of the home to offer up to Wewe are unsuccessful because Mina, for obvious reasons, is watching her first born like a hawk. Eventually the impostor husband is discovered when "both" husbands are in the same room at the same time. Every once in awhile, Wewe is kind enough to swoop back into her own hijacked story. Her head starts smoking when someone reads from the Koran, she's shown feeding live worms to her child captives in flashbacks and she detaches her head and arms, and starts breathing fire, during her confrontation with a priest at the very end.

This is an absolutely awful film, and not in a good way. It's cheap, slow, extremely talky, ineptly edited, poorly acted and directed, devoid of any interesting special effects, almost completely incoherent and has so many characters, so many characters impersonating other characters (and even played by different actors) and so many dead end plot lines stuffed into the mix that you can't tell anyone from Adam, nor what they're doing at any given time, nor what anyone's motivations are, nor why most of the cast behaves like complete idiots the entire time. It certainly doesn't help matters that the print quality (taken from a VCD as that's the only release) is terrible, but this would be nearly as difficult to sit through even in visually pristine form.

★