Medium (1985)

... aka: Ling yu an jian (Supernatural Cases)

... aka: Mediet

... aka: Медиум

... aka: Mysteria replica di un omicidio (Mystery - Replica of a Crime)

... aka: Un misterio llamado Aleksander Orwicz (A Mystery Called Aleksander Orwicz)

Directed by:

Jacek Koprowicz

Setting: 1933, Nazi-occupied Poland. Greta Wagner (Ewa Dałkowska), the powerful psychic sister of veteran parapsychologist / occultist Ernst (Jerzy Nowak), tunes into strange visions that are actually the current activities of another unknown medium. The medium is using his or her powers to control four different people, entrancing them and leading them all somewhere to do different tasks. Andrzej Gaszewski (Jerzy Zelnik) travels from Warsaw to the autonomous city-state Sopot / Gdańsk via train and has no idea how he even got there, but vows not to leave until he finds out. Schoolteacher Luiza Skubiejska (Grażyna Szapołowska) walks right out on her students mid-class, goes to a museum, steals a turn-of-the-century dress and then ends up in a park with no clue how she got there or why she has the dress. She then immediately returns the garment to the museum. Since this hasn't been the first time this has ever happened, she's on the radar of the police and could potentially lose her job. Likewise, out-of-town banker Georg Netz (Jerzy Stuhr) keeps waking up in a strange house, despite the fact he's simultaneously paying for a hotel room in town. He has no idea how he got there, why he's there or why he's been writing gloomy lovelorn poetry while entranced.

Superintendent Selin (Władysław Kowalski) is not only in charge of investigating the above weirdness but also happens to be directly involved. Every night after work, he mysteriously ends up on a beach, where he gets drunk and goes to sleep. When morning comes he doesn't remember the evening before and then turns up at the office every day unbathed, unshaven and reeking of alcohol. His young assistant Krank (Michał Bajor) is something of a sadist who worships Hitler ("it's logical to side with the stronger," he claims) and is conspiring against Selin behind his back. He secretly goes to their higher-ups to report the superintendent's bizarre behavior but they refuse to fire him for it. At least for now.

The strange home that appears to be the centerpiece of the action belongs to a Polish man named Aleksander Orwicz, who suffers from diabetes and is later found in a diabetic coma. While in his hypnotized state, Georg had been showing up there to give him shots of insulin and claims there was another guy present at the time... a guy who looks suspiciously like Selin.

Everything links back to a love triangle (square?) gone wrong that occurred in the same house 36 years earlier. In the late 1890s, extremely rich forty-something banker Stefan Orwicz married beautiful 22-year-old Zofia. He built her a luxurious Italian-style home and the two soon welcomed a son named Aleksander. Things then took a turn for the worst when Stefan went blind due to his diabetes. A live-in doctor named Malicki moved into the home to care for him full time. Soon after, he and Zofia began an affair. That arrangement would soon came to a bloody end when Wiktor Arlt, Stefan's hunchbacked secretary and personal assistant, went crazy and murdered all three of them with an axe. See, he too was in love with Zofia, and would often write her poems about how grueling his unrequited love for her was. After the murders, Wiktor committed suicide, and history may very well repeat itself in the present day unless our heroes can stop it.

This is often cited as one of the best Polish genre offerings from this time, which very well may be true. That's not an endorsement of its quality so much as it is the simple fact that not many horror films were produced in Poland in the 80s and two of those were THE SHE-WOLF (1983) and I LIKE BATS (1986). Some of their other genre films from this time sound promising so this may even end up on the lower half of the scale for me by the time I see the rest. Nevertheless, being slightly better than the two middling films mentioned above doesn't mean Medium is inspiring or noteworthy itself. It's not. Things open well and the intrigue is maintained until about the midway point. That, combined with the competent directing, acting and production values, keep everything watchable even after it starts becoming something of a mess. The true undoing of the film is that it's never able to make its myriad plot threads work together harmoniously.

Slow and talky most of the time, this attempts to dress up its average mystery plot with various needless complications. The script makes room for psychic powers, doppelgangers, leech treatments, telekinesis, spontaneous combustion, human lives linked to sea turtles (?), immortality, physical regression to childhood, horoscopes that combine astrology and math (birth dates and times) to predict the exact time and day of death and a solar eclipse that's somehow needed to bring the bad guy's plot together. Why? You got me! There are a LOT of ideas crammed in here; too many, and this doesn't do an adequate job explaining most of them. The overcast cinematography, funeral pacing, lack of personable characters and humor and Nazi era setting also gave me bad flashbacks to Luca Guadagnino's tedious SUSPIRIA remake from a few years back.

Stripped down to its bones, what this really is is a rehash of the mediocre Aussie film PATRICK (1978), which was a big hit in much of Europe a few years earlier. Both involve a coma patient who's fully conscious inside their unresponsive body and using their telekinetic abilities to strike out against others. There a number of other similarities between it and this one, only this opts to gum up the works with numerous ill-explained supernatural detours.

Outside of its home country, this was given a theatrical and VHS release (on the Penta Video label) in Italy under the title Mysteria replica di un omicidio ("Mystery: Replica of a Crime"), but that appears to be it as far as 80s international distribution was concerned . A West German co-production, it may have also played in some other European cinemas, or on TV, as well. It's now pretty easy to find with English subtitles and is on Youtube, Daily Motion and other websites free to view, and was even available on Netflix for a spell, though I don't know if it's still there or not. Studio Filmowe Tor / Studio Blu offer region free Blu-ray and DVD versions with English subs.

★★

Perawan di Sarang Sindikat (1986)

... aka: 地獄のバージン／女囚の地下帝国

... aka: Maiden's Revenge

... aka: Pertarungan Perawan di Sarang Sindikat (Battle of the Virgins in the Syndicate's Nest)

... aka: Virgin in the Syndicate Web, A

... aka: Virgins from Hell

... aka: Virgins of Hell

... aka: Virgins of Hell - Furien der Apocalypse (Furies of the Apocalypse)

... aka: Virgins of Hell - Sie wollen überleben (They Want to Survive)

Directed by:

Ackyl Anwari

Don't you just love it when a film's opening scene is so in tune with you and your tastes that you know right from the opening few frames you're just gonna love it? Shady gangster Maurice (Hendra Cipta) is gambling away in a smoky casino when his good luck charm / arm candy Sheila (Enny Beatrice) reminds him that they have a date. After retreating to an upstairs bedroom, the girl soon reveals that she's tricked him (Sheila has been posing as - in her own words - "a filthy whore" to gain access) and he's now in for the ass kicking of his life. Sure, she takes a few punches herself and even has a chair broken over her, but she's otherwise easily able to slap, hit and karate kick him into submission, hangs from a plastic ceiling lamp and gets him in a thigh hold, kicks his gun from his hand and then shoots him to death. Oh, and did I mention she's wearing a red headband, red vinyl crop top, frayed red vinyl hot pants and knee-high red vinyl boots during all this? Well, now you know, and now you also know why this was speaking my language. After dispatching the creep ("You son of a bitch! See ya later sucker!"), Sheila then opens the window and signals for her girls to raid the place. Her girls? Yes, Sheila is not only a bad ass chick but she also happens to front a bad ass all-female motorcycle gang who share their leader's affinity for hot pants, headbands, metal trinkets, copious amount of hair spray and horribly staged fight scenes. Hooray!

The biker chicks invade the gambling den, first by driving their red jeep with a skull painted on the hood through the wall, and proceed to clear out the place by punching, stabbing, machine gunning and sending guys through windows. They take all the cash they can grab and make a hasty retreat. A spy informs the super-sadistic owner, Mr. Tiger (Dicky Zulkarnaen), of what's occurred, so he orders his men to find and execute all of the biker chicks and dump their bodies into the river. "You know the spot!"

As for the reason the girls have it out for Mr. Tiger and his men to begin with, well, it basically stems from a property dispute. When Sheila's parents refused to sell their land to him, he had them killed and simply took their home (actually a CASTLE) and land. Now Sheila and her sister Karen (Yenny Farida), who both witnessed the crime, are out for revenge. The girls they've recruited to help out have been promised that they'll get their cut after they help to take out Mr. Tiger, who is using the property for his drug smuggling operation. In his underground lair, kidnapped doctors are being forced to work on drugs. If they fail, they're executed. Young medical student Larry (Harry Capri) is next in line, but does he have the skills to help Tiger "take over the worldwide aphrodisiac market?" Why yes. Yes he does.

After a change of wardrobe (don't fret, the tattered, multi-colored new streetwalker outfits are still outstanding), the ladies raid the castle compound, which results in a hilarious machine gun battle filled with staged motorcycle stunts (including a levitating bike on a wire getting blown up) and all kinds of explosions. The guards retreat, the girls get by the entrance, a trap door opens and half of them fall into an underground cavern. The others who haven't already been killed are then rounded up and everyone is stuck in a large prison cell in a cave... and then this thing suddenly becomes the equivalent of a women-in-prison torture flick with all of the expected (and plenty of not so expected!) trappings.

When they aren't being tortured, sexually assaulted and killed, the women are forced to do manual labor, like wheeling around huge carts like donkeys and climbing trees to harvest coconuts (!) A captive named Janet is given the drug and then raped by Tiger's "business partner" Sam (August Melasz). Another poor girl (a virgin no less) stabs one of her attackers (S. Parya) in the crotch with a knife, but still gets gang raped and hangs herself as a result. There's also plenty of torture of the non-sexual nature, including lots of beatings, whippings and getting sliced up by a barbed wire "swing," strapped to a spit and roasted over an open fire, tied up in a sack with a rabid rodent and much more. On the plus side, the cave prison comes with a large, luxurious swimming hole for the women to lounge around in, so it's not all bad.

There's also plenty of girl drama, which leads to countless bicker sessions and cat fights. Sheila, Karen and Vicky (Leily Sagita) attempt to escape into the jungle, but Karen and Vicky (who makes the mistake of trying to hide in a leech-filled swamp) are apprehended. Sheila ends up getting washed downstream and is injured during a wrestling match with an alligator, which ends with her ripping out its eyeball with her bare hands! Thankfully, Sheila stumbles upon an old mystic who heals her with traditional medicine.

Meanwhile, Lisa (Ratna Debby Ardi) and her pal Julie (Yetty Loren) sell out the other girls and are promoted as guards for their efforts. They're forced to throw Mr. Tiger an 80s synth private dance party wearing sheer nighties, which ends with him handcuffing them together, pulling their hair, slapping them around, whipping them and basically terrifying the shit out of both of them with his extremely bizarre behavior! For an encore, he force feeds them wine and tries to drown them in a bathtub! While he's busy with them, Tiger's tattooed female guard, Dutch, takes advantage of Karen while she's asleep and licks her cleavage and a bloody wound on her leg (!!) before Karen wakes up screaming "Get off me, you lezbo!"

Two others also escape the compound. Larry kills a bunch of guards (including blowing one up and causing the other to have a full body meltdown complete with blood-bursting boils!), before being seriously wounded himself. With Sheila now gone, Dina (Nina Anwar) is forced to temporarily take the reigns. Feigning injury using rat blood, she defeats several guards and eventually locates an unconscious Larry. After she's caught molesting (!!) the nearly-dead student by Sheila, her new mystic buddy heals Larry's wound by sticking a snake in his bloody wound to retrieve the bullet (!!!) Sheila, Dina and Larry then team up to raid the camp and rescue the remaining captive girls.

This is one of those films that's basically impossible to rate as it straddles the line between SBIG and being an intentional trash film that has no real aspirations aside from being action-packed brainless entertainment. (I'm so confused right now I'm just going with the former rating). Say what you will about how some shots are clearly out of focus, how some of the action scenes are "enhanced" by speeding up the film and the ridiculousness of the entire plot, there's nary a dull moment here. It's loaded with violence, fighting, action, stunts and gore (including some serious blood-spurting) and also boasts some very decent pyro fx and explosions. There's also a memorable, lip-licking (literally!) camp performance from a heavily-made-up Zulkarnaen as the main bad guy, who also has some fantastic wardrobe selections. Perhaps the most peculiar thing of all is that despite being filled to the rafters with various sleazy goings-on, this somehow does the impossible by having no nudity whatsoever. Not that this film really needs it!

You never know just where some of these things might pop up on home video. I found only two early releases: a 1987 Japanese VHS that roughly translates to "Virgin of Hell: Underground Empire of Female Visitors" by Mount Light Home Video / Sony Exc!t!ng and a 1988 German release (dubbed into German) on the IVE label. Aside from some ancient Asian VCD releases, this title sat pretty much dormant until 2006 when it made its official U.S. debut thanks to Mondo Macabro. In Germany, they also received a DVD release in 2006 on the Retrofilm label, which comes with Indonesian, English and German audio tracks.

SBIG