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

Za ryôjoku (1987)

... aka: ザ・凌辱

... aka: Beast-Man (Wolf)

... aka: Hunting Love

... aka: Rape and Torture

Directed by:

Shûji Kataoka

With titles in his arsenal like S&M Hunter, Subway Serial Rape and Female Prisoners: Brutal Treatment, it was only a matter of time until I took a gander at the filmography of this particular director. Working almost exclusively in the pink / erotica movie realm, Kataoka has amassed around sixty directorial credits stretching from the mid 80s until today, though he was much more prolific as a writer, having penned over a hundred scripts for both himself and other directors. It wasn't until I glanced over his filmography that I realized I'd already watched and reviewed a couple of films he was involved in, though not as primary director. He was an assistant director on HIGH NOON RIPPER (1984) and produced Hisayasu Satô's interesting MUSCLE (1989), for instance. Kataoka would win a number of Pink Film Awards for his work, including Best Director and Best Screenplay. Three of his film were even selected as the Best Film of their respective years.

While I can't speak about the quality of his other work, this one is, uh, pretty memorable. Technically, it's not up to much, but it did at least manage to shock me a few times, which isn't easy to do at this stage!

Teenager Eto (Hiromi Saotome) has had a rocky relationship with her twin sister over the years and even welcomes her absence when she goes on a vacation. That all changes when she receives a phone call from a police officer informing her that her sister is dead. Feeling guilty, Eto travels to the small mountain village her sister was visiting when she died to investigate matters. Upon arrival, she learns that her sister wasn't just killed, she was ripped to shreds and mostly consumed by a wolf. Now only miscellaneous parts and skeletal remains are left of her. During an autopsy it's uncovered that she has semen inside of her from either sex or a rape, though the semen is from a non-human source. Eto offers to pay the policeman to organize a posse of hunters to track down the wolf. He tells her he'll think about it, though he - nor anyone else in the area - has any intention of actually helping her out.

While at her hotel, Eto is surprised when the drunken Dr. Nozawa (Shirô Shimomoto), the local coroner, shows up unannounced. He barges in, informs her that he's the only person in the area on her side and then proves that by attempting to rape her (!) She manages to stop him by biting his tongue and he then calms down long enough to tell her that the villagers won't help because they believe the sister went into the woods willingly looking to have sex with the wolf and got herself killed in the process. The next day, the policeman clues Eto in that Dr. Nozawa, who apparently did something bad enough to lose his license and job in the city, cannot be trusted himself. Determined to avenge her sister's death, Eto whips out a bunch of guns and knives, throws on combat boots, dog tags, a tank top, a headband and camo shorts and heads out into the woods to hunt down the wolf herself.

Caught in a rain storm, Eto seeks refuge in a (she thinks) abandoned hut, which turns out to be occupied by a creepy old woman. The woman eats a live snake, makes Eto strip out of her wet clothes, complements her "juicy body" and then tells her about the wolf attack-plagued history of the area, which we then get to see in two separate flashbacks.

Forty years earlier, a young woman (Kyôko Hashimoto, a pink film regular who also had a small role in EVIL DEAD TRAP) arrived there from Tokyo to buy some goods and instead got gang raped by the landlord's spoiled son (Bunmei Tobayama) and his friend. Afterward, they dragged her deep into the forest, tied her to a tree and left her for dead ("You could have died in the bombing as well. It's all the same!"). A lumberjack eventually stumbled upon her and (of course!) attempted to rape her, but a wolf in shining armor showed up just in the nick of time. After killing the man and indulging in a little romantic moonlight gut-munching, woman and wolf fell for each other and became lovers.

Twenty years later, the now middle-aged landlord's son has his own teenage daughter, who has met and fallen in love with a city boy and brought him home to meet the family. The boy just so happens to be the offspring of the woman and the wolf and he's actually there looking for revenge. After transforming into a (terrible looking!) werewolf that looks more like a Bigfoot, he bites out the father's throat, rips off the daughter's clothes, rapes her and then kills her. Revenge complete! Returning back to present day, the story comes full circle when the wolfman finally shows up at the shack and the old woman reveals her true identity.

Running just 55 minutes, this is packed with more T&A and sex than most feature length exploitation films, and it manages to be more graphic than the vast majority of others despite Japan's ban on showing full frontal nudity. There are numerous lengthy and, quite frankly, pretty boring sex and rape scenes here, but what separates this from the pack are the participants in some of these scenes. First, this boasts not one, but two, werewolf rape scenes. Yep, a fully transformed werewolf gets it on with several human actresses here and, not surprisingly, the were-man likes it rough! This also shows a nice close-up of a furry werewolf erection, which is hilarious considering Japanese censors would have blurred this had it been a human penis.

The most shocking thing here (yes, even more shocking than werewolf rape and werewolf boners), are multiple bestiality scenes featuring several of the actresses and the regular "wolf", which is actually played by a husky. One of the actresses lets the dog "make out" with her (licking all over her mouth), which is gross enough as is, but this goes even further with a long close-up shot of the dog actually mounting her, which has been pixelated out by the censors. Now I'm not sure if this really shows the dog humping the actress or if the censors merely objected to the thrusting motion of the dog, but this is still pretty surprising even if it is simulated. What's perhaps worse than that, and does not appear to be fake, is the dog sticking its snout in a bent-over woman's crotch and licking away, probably trying to clean off whatever tasty substance they coated the woman's backside with.

Aside from that, most of the performances are poor (the actress playing the old woman in the shack does the best job), the plot is minimal and predictable and the make-up effects are weak. The director had clearly seen An American Werewolf in London, THE HOWLING and The Company of Wolves, because he rips off scenes from all three of those. 

The one and only release that I'm aware of was a late 80s Japanese VHS on the Golden More label, though this has leaked online and fan-made English subtitles are now available. Seeing how this has yet to receive enough votes to even register a rating on either Letterboxd or IMDb (which only requires five votes), it appears that almost no one has watched this crazy ass film.

★★