Batas Impian Ranjang Setan (1986)

... aka: Cauchemar (Nightmare)

... aka: Ranjang Setan

... aka: Satan's Bed

Directed by:

(H.) Tjut Djalil

"We feel ghosts are responsible and religion does teach us that, as well as us human beings, God created spirits annnnd it's my confirmed belief that, ummmm, that's what we got here."

Due to the overwhelming popularity of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), there were loads of similar films made to cash in during the second half of the 80s. Most of these just utilized the general concept of killer dreams, others were very blatant in their approach, especially low budget foreign films that probably didn't have to worry about copyright laws. Batas Impian Ranjang Setan from Indonesia, given the English title Satan's Bed, is the most blatant copy I've seen thus far. The borrowings from Craven's film are almost too numerous to mention. There are the four teens dealing with typical teen stuff often seen riding around in a jeep. There are the self-absorbed parents who are too busy dealing with their own drama to pay proper attention to their children. And, most notably, there's the clawed, disfigured killer who haunts the dreams of the teenagers and kills them in their sleep. This just barely tries to camouflage what it's doing by giving the haunted home a different sordid backstory. 

A Dutch family consisting of a dad (Didier A. Hamel, now a popular artist), mom (Marianne Wolf) and their three young children, frequently seen in soft focus shots dressed in white doing jump rope in slow motion (sound familiar?), were all senselessly murdered there on Christmas day while doing a Dutch rendition of "Silent Night" (!!) at the piano.

Siska Baskoro (Linda Lolita Husein - ANITA: FEMALE SNAKES) moves into the same home years later. She's recently divorced from her lawyer husband (Mansyur Syahdan) and now dating an asshole named Marcus (Doddy Sukma), who pays all of her bills and claims he's going to soon divorce his wife to be with her. Siska's teenage daughter, Maria (Chintami Atmanegara), and teenage niece, Nina (Eva Eliza), move in with her, along with rotund maid Wanda (Sofia) and goofball gardener Bokir (H. Bokir), who are both involved in some ill-fitting comedy scenes. The two girls immediately start having terrible nightmares about a clawed ghostly figure (the Dutch husband / dad killed from the prologue) trying to kill them. Their idiot boyfriends, Irawan (Richie Ricardo, apparently a popular singer and teen idol in Indonesia at the time) and Rudy (Gusti Randa), mock their concerns until people actually start dying.

This goes right down the Elm Street 1 checklist, with little deviation. Remember when Freddy's face pushed through a wall? Remember when Freddy laughed with glee after cutting off his own finger? Remember when Freddy's claw emerged Jaws-style from the bathtub to yank Nancy underwater? Remember the sticky stairs? Remember the dead friend showing up in a body bag nightmare? Yep, that's all here, though this shuffles the order in which these moments occur in the narrative and also sometimes mixes up who they occur to. After the Nina character is killed (while wearing a "This is my SEXY t-shirt" oversized tee), Rudy is blamed for the crime. He's hauled off to prison, escapes and is later seduced by the ghost of the Dutch woman and then hung from a tree in the haunted home's front yard. Since two people have now been killed in her home and she's unable to run off to see her sugar daddy, Siska becomes depressed and lounges around all day in her robe sucking down booze.

An exorcist (Simon P.S.) is eventually called in and goes to battle with the ghosts in a foggy dream world, but it ends prematurely when the spirits detach their heads, throw them at him and then the woman's head bites down on his crotch. Siska learns from real estate agent Mr. Hendra (Anton Indracaya) that the home was built on an ancient burial ground and then this suddenly starts ripping off Poltergeist left and right, with coffins emerging out of the ground, skeletons popping out, etc. A second shaman (Belkiez Rachman) shows up, only to get killed when Dutch Freddy sticks his claw through his back and out his chest. Can a third holy man - a dwarf Catholic priest armed with a giant wooden cross (!) - save the day?

Amusingly, even with a preexisting template to steal directly from, this can't seem to do anything right. All of the NOES copycat scenes are ineptly staged, the acting is poor, the pacing is off, characters behave brain damaged and as if they could care less when people get killed (often times not even mentioning it), the editing is abysmal, the continuity is nonexistent and the make-up job on the duck-lipped Freddy substitute looks like it was applied by a toddler using finger paint.

While Satan's Bed obviously wouldn't be any good even in its original Indonesian language due to its weak attempts at emulating a vastly superior film, this is a case where the horrific English dubbing (featuring terrible voice actors and ridiculously dumb dialogue) actually help by turning what is a cheap, unscary and poorly made rip-off into a comedy goldmine. Fans of the Elm Street series should definitely get a few laughs out of it.

Unlike many other Indonesian genre films from this same time, this actually made it outside of its home country during the video era. There were at least three non-Indonesian VHS releases; one in Germany dubbed into German (under the title Satan's Bed), one in France dubbed into French (under the title Cauchemar / "Nightmare") and one in South Korea (again using the Satan's Bed title). Though I could find no evidence this was ever officially released in the U.S., UK or any other English-speaking country, at some point an English audio track was recorded. The German DVD and Blu-ray releases from Schröder Media and WMM come with both English and German audio tracks. Though a heavily-damaged print is used, the fact it's widescreen AND available in English makes it a real anomaly as far as 80s Indonesian genre films are concerned.

This actually wasn't the only Elm Street rip-off to emerge from Indonesia. There's also Sisworo Gautama Putra's Perjanjian di Malam Keramat / "Pact With the Forces of Darkness" (1991), which stars the legendary Suzzanna as the clawed killer! There were also several Indian / Hindi copies, like Khooni Murdaa / "Bloody Corpse" (1989) from Mohan Bhakri and, a little late to the party, Mahakaal / "The Monster" (1994) from the Ramsay Brothers.

SBIG

Ye zhi ji (1980)

... aka: 鬼圖

... aka: 夜之祭

... aka: Devil Design

... aka: Ghost Map

... aka: Gui tu

... aka: Ritual of the Night

Directed by:

Pan Yung Min

1276 China in the setting for the lengthy (nearly 40 minutes long!) prologue. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, is in the middle of expanding his Yuan dynasty deep into China and ruthlessly massacring any detractor along the way. Though the Mongols have been generally successful, pockets of resisters from the Sung dynasty have sprung up all over. General Ku-Shah (Ying Bai) is tasked with finding these people and killing them before they can pose a threat to Yuan. Upon completion, he's been promised a special reward: Royal marriage to a princess. A battle between Mongol and Chinese armies finds the former easily winning after slaughtering the Chinese troops and decapitating their leader (Chun Ku). The Mongol forces then ride on until they locate an abandoned village and settle there for the night.

There, Ku-Shah and his deputy, Ha-Tou (Han Hsieh), have an interesting conversation about how their spiritual beliefs seem at odds with their constant killing. To Ku-Shah, war is an "inevitable necessity to achieve one's ends" and the creator has made all men to fill predestined roles. God's chess game has but one king and his loyal men. Everyone else is meant to be "dispensable" and thus were created solely to die, which makes it perfectly fine to go around slaughtering them. They're not dead people. They're "destroyed objects."

The arrogant warriors in the midst of celebrating their victory are about to face their comeuppance as the destroyed village they end up in happens to be haunted by the evil spirits of those they'd previously slain. A lumpy-faced, cackling female ghost shows up and men are slashed, impaled with bamboo poles and forced to commit harakiri. Another has his own hand possessed a la Evil Dead 2 (only seven years earlier), which then attacks him and forces him to sever it, yet continues to live on. The Mongol warriors killed return as clawed, hopping vampires in wonderfully atmospheric scenes filled with lots of wind, backlighting and fog. Eventually, all of the Mongolian troopers are either killed or flee, but the narrator informs us that some of them will live on as evil spirits themselves.

We jump ahead 300 years to the Ming dynasty. The country has been led into turmoil due to a corrupt king, a drifting away from Buddhism toward amorality and the rampant use of black magic. The site of the Mongol warrior murders is now the village of Yen-Poi-Yi, which has been haunted by the ghost of Mongol warrior Ku-Shah for the past three centuries. As a result, the village has dwindled down in population considerably and there are only a handful of people still living there. With the arrival of an exorcist comes renewed hope and people start moving back there by the droves. Elder Uncle Lee (Hsiang-Ting Ko) suspects these new arrivals are phonies, especially after they ban mute orphan Lien-Hua (Doris Lung Chun-Erh), whose parents have been killed by the demon, from their festivities due to her presumably being bad luck. Uncle Lee is correct.

While the white-haired exorcist puts on quite a show for the villagers with a lavish parade, chicken blood, fire, smoke, acrobatics and giant spell papers, he's easily blown up / killed by the ghost of Ku-Shah. Everyone flees the village once again, leaving even fewer people than before. Just when things don't seem like they could get any worse, Yen-Poi-Yi is stricken with the plague, killing many of the stragglers. However, traveling monk Ou Ming (Chun Shih) arrives just in time to help. Ou Ming has made it his life's mission to re-introduce Buddhism to the people of China and thus save their souls. He orders all corpses and contaminated materials burned, even if that does upset some of the locals, then concocts an effective vaccine that saves everyone else. After he helps them repair their damaged homes. the sound of playing children laughing is heard around the village; a sign of hope that a new era is about to begin.

Ou Ming has decided that his direct path to Buddha and his final task will be to take on the Ku-Shah demon, thus freeing the tortured, murderous spirit from limbo and setting Yen-Poi-Yi on a path to recovery. In preparation, he shaves his head and then meditates while Lien-Hua gives him a full body tattoo, which will act like a suit of armor during battle. However, he's fully aware going in that this battle is most likely to cost him his life regardless. Sigh. The things we must do for Buddha.

Imperfect, poorly paced and heavy-handed at times, this is still a pretty neat little film which fuses history, religion, war, horror and drama. One thing it is decidedly not is a martial arts or action film as it's categorized on many websites, so don't go in expecting such. Despite the low budget, it's fairly well-made, has its heart in the right place, is often extremely atmospheric (particularly the first half hour) and also boasts some surprisingly creepy distorted sound design and synth music, which may have been stolen from other sources. There are issues with the editing throughout. Some scenes appear to have been clipped short, which may be due to only a heavily-damaged print being available to view. We'll perhaps never know for sure. The chances a 40+ year old Taiwanese genre movie is going to be fully restored at this stage of the game is slim.

Long-forgotten and seldom viewed these days (as of this writing, it doesn't even have the 5 votes necessary to clock a score on IMDb and has just two ratings [including the one I just sent in] on Letterboxd), this was released theatrically in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand and distributed on VHS in a number of countries. There was a U.S. mail order release from World Video & Supply Inc. in 1990, but it didn't come with English subtitles and was falsely promoted as Hong Kong action when it's Taiwanese horror-drama. I also found a Korean video and this was probably also released on VHS in Hong Kong and / or Taiwan. I'm not exactly sure where the English subtitled print came from.

★★1/2