Dukun Ilmu Hitam (1981)

... aka: Black Magic Shaman
... aka: Black Magic Wizard

Directed by:
A. (Abdillah) Harris

In a small village, an evil shaman / black magician (Dadang Iskandar) occasionally turns into a hairy-faced, werewolf-like creature and is attacking local ladies. His equally evil wife Dewi (Ruth Pelupessi, who also played a similar role in THE SNAKE QUEEN) is a cave-dweller snake woman who sometimes appears as a scaly-faced human and sometimes appears as a python. The two have a baby daughter who's just hatched from her egg. Dewi would like her to have a sister so she goes to a home, kills the mother (in her snake form), injures the father (in her human form) and then steals their baby. With maggots burrowing in his face, the father manages to crawl to a teacher's (W.D. Mochtar) farm where, after a few blows to the stomach and head, he pukes up a bunch of bloody maggots and centipedes. He then puts in a dying request for the teacher to find / save his daughter and notes he'll know who she is because she has a unique black birthmark on her wrist. Still, she's won't be easy to find. Before transforming back into a snake, Dewi handed the two babies off to her husband to raise, which he does in complete seclusion.

Many years pass and the babies are now teenagers. Sari (Farida Pasha), birth daughter of the snake woman and shaman, has the same cheekbone facial scales as her mother and an angry temperament to match, while Maya (Dian Ariestya), the stolen human baby, has turned into a cute and sweet-natured young woman. The shaman treats the girls no differently though and teaches both all he knows about black magic. Soon, they're casting various spells, controlling a killer rubber-bat-on-a-wire pet, transforming into bats themselves, creating fireballs and learning how to fly. Sari is, of course, jealous of her sister's beauty and normalcy as a human, and the two don't get along very well.

While doing laundry, a piece of Maya's clothing washes down the river. When she goes to retrieve it, she meets Panji (Ray Sahetapy), a student of the same teacher Maya's father had spoken to before dying. The two start frequently meeting by the river to talk and eventually fall in love. Because Maya isn't ready to divulge much about her home life, Panji decides to secretly follow her there. Once he learns who she's living with, he reports it to the teacher. A meeting is arranged and Maya is informed all about her lineage and what became of her birth parents. That prompts her to abandon her evil family and start studying at the school. Meanwhile, the shaman is up to no good, especially after Dewi returns to the picture. Angry their daughter has left them, the two start transforming into their animal forms to kill villagers, which leads a torch-carrying mob to burn down their home. Temporarily defeated, Dewi slithers away at Sari's request while Sari and her father are driven back into a cave.

About a decade later, Panji and Maya have married and are raising a daughter named Ayu. All that time, Sari and the shaman have been sharpening up on their black magic skills. Wanting to get back at her sister, Sari sneaks into her niece's bedroom and force feeds her a baby snake. When Maya discovers what's happened, she unsuccessfully tries to pull the snake out but then must suck it out with her mouth and becomes possessed. In scenes clearly ripping off Cronenberg's RABID (1977), she runs around the village trying to seduce and feed off men using a snake that sometimes pops out of a bloody wound on her neck. The disappointing, unexciting finale is a black magic showdown featuring talismans, a magic dagger, fireballs, one of the characters continuing to fight after losing their head and the worst cheap-o laser fx I believe I've ever seen.

Either I've seen one too many of these things by now and the charm is starting to wear off or this is just a mediocre version of this type of film. Seeing how I doubt I'll ever really tire of things like witches turning into disco balls and fire-breathing decapitated heads, I'd say this just isn't all that good. It's a really low budget production, even by 80s Southeast Asia standards. As a result there's a lot of talk (including far too many bland romantic scenes between the two young leads), minimal action, flat lighting and photography, bland art direction and awful special effects. All that I could live with had this been crazy enough... or trashy enough... or imaginative enough... or energetic enough... or even unintentionally funny enough. However, it's none of those things. Most of the "best" stuff is relegated to the first ten minutes and finale. Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene Part 4" must have been insanely popular in Asia at the time as this is about the tenth film early 80s film I've see use it!

Like most pre-2000s Indonesian films, this was never released in English, which is automatically going to make it a no-go for most viewers who don't speak the language. The fact it isn't very good and you can find similar yet much better films elsewhere is likely to doom it to this fate.

★1/2

Le lac des morts vivants (1981)

... aka: Lake of the Living Dead
... aka: Lake of the Zombies
... aka: Nazi Zombies: Terror from Below
... aka: Sumpf der lebenden Toten (Swamp of the Living Dead)
... aka: Zombie Lake
... aka: Zombies Lake

Directed by:
"J.A. Laser" (Jean Rollin)

Ever since Romero redefined the zombie as reanimated flesh-eating corpses in 1968, some of our more ambitious directors have sought to either elaborate on his creation or to explore all of the metaphorical possibilities inherent in creatures that are, at the end of the day, essentially just reflections of ourselves. And then you have directors like Jean Rollin, who utilizes the zombie as a excuse to show naked girls swimming and thrashing around in the water to give viewers as many spread eagle shots as possible. Sorry to sound so crude, but it is what it is, folks! Zombie Lake frequently tops lists of "Worst Zombie Movie of All Time" and, while it truly is bad, it probably no longer deserves to be on such a list thanks to all of the no budget digital crap being made nowadays. At least this was shot on film in a nice-looking French village instead of being "filmed" with someone's iPhone in their backyard. Hey, I'm grasping at straws here!

 

The entire tone for Lake is set in the opening few minutes as a young lady strips to sunbathe nude as the camera slowly pans up the entire length of her body. Now the poor thing is all hot and sweaty. What's a girl to do? Well, if you're this girl, you're going to take a refreshing dip in the lake... and you're not going to let some stupid warning sign featuring the drawing of a swimmer next to a skull and crossbones deter you either! Needless to say, that turns out to be a mistake as she's attacked and pulled under by a green-faced, one-eyed zombie. Having not had his fill, the same ghoul decides to kill a woman doing her laundry, which proves that, yes, these zombies will also attack women wearing clothes. Townspeople find the second victim's body and leave it on the doorstep of the Mayor (Howard Vernon) as a none-too-subtle way to say "Uh, would you please do something about this?" He promises help is on its way.

Chatty reporter Katya Muse (Marcia Sharif) shows up in town to do some research in hopes of writing "an unusual little yarn about that weird lake of yours." Local Mr. Chanac (Youri Radionow) takes her to visit the Mayor, who relates a flashback that explains the local legend. During WWII, a blonde-haired German soldier (Pierre-Marie Escourrou) was injured saving a female villager (Nadine Pascal) from a bomb. Eager to reward him for saving her life, the girl took him to a barn for a literal roll in the hay. She became pregnant, gave birth to a girl she named Helena and then died shortly thereafter. The soldier was then killed himself after his platoon was ambushed by villagers. In lieu of proper burial, the bodies were just sunk in the lake and the lake has been haunted by them ever since.

A very confused girl's sporting team, who arrive in a van with "Basket" written on the side then hop out and start hitting a volleyball around, provide both a full course meal for the zombies and a veritable beaver buffet via pervy underwater camera shots when they go skinny dipping. One lucky blonde (Gilda Arancio) manages to escape and runs back into town topless. Due to all the recent murders, disappearances and zombie sightings, the Mayor finally calls for police reinforcement but is sent two rude dimwits; Inspectors Moran ("Burt Altman" / Bertrand Altmann) and Spitz (the director), who tell him "murder is our business, not fairy tales" before going to the tavern to disregard the locals as a "heap of hicks." By the time they actually start believing the townsfolk, they're already dead.

After taking care of the inspectors, the zombies emerge to paint the village red during a mini rampage that includes killing a woman and her boyfriend as they're getting ready to bonk in the barn, a topless girl bathing outside in a tub and a woman walking down the sidewalk who stops to adjust her stocking. Despite now being a zombie, the blonde Nazi seen in the flashback manages to hunt down his daughter Helena, who's now about 12, being raised by her granny (Yvonne Dany) and is played by producer Daniel Lesoeur's daughter, Anouchka. The zombie dad gives her a necklace that belonged to her late mother and has such a soft spot for his girl that he protects her from the other zombies. When the Mayor pressures her to help, Helena decides to exploit her father's emotional attachment to lure the zombies to their napalm / flamethrower demise.

We'd be here all day if I did a detailed break down of all the continuity errors, flubs, extras looking at the camera and glimpses of crew and equipment that made their way into the finished product that is Zombie Lake. It would likewise take an eternity to accurately describe the ever-changing and decidedly non-water resistant green finger paint makeup that changes from shot to shot. This is a film where virtually everything - the direction, acting, editing, writing, fx - is on the same plane of terrible so it's difficult to concentrate on just one area. And to make matters worse, its shortcomings are further exacerbated by a cringe-worthy English dub more interested in matching lips than making sense.

But the real question is: Is this a good bad movie? To that I can only say, I once found this utterly boring but its sheer awfulness has grown on me a bit over the years and every now and then I actually find myself in the mood to watch this horrid thing again. That's more than I can say for many of the same director's meandering "arty" vampire movies that have gained him a small cult following over the years. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit that but, hey, I'm pretty much way past that point now.

Jesus Franco gets a co-writer credit and was supposed to direct it too but dropped out at the last minute. But don't feel cheated. He later got to direct his own awful zombie movie for Eurociné called Oasis of the Zombies. And despite not technically directing, a lot of other Franco world connections still remain. The war footage used in the flashbacks is pilfered from the Franco co-directed Convoy of Girls (1978), the Daniel White score has been swiped from Franco's Female Vampire (1973) and regular rotation Franco movie actors Vernon and "Robert Foster" / Antonio Mayans (playing a Nazi general and the zombie missing an eye; not the inspector as IMDb incorrectly states) both have prominent roles.

 

Throughout the video era, Zombie Lake was the easiest Rollin film to find here in America as it received a well-circulated 1985 VHS release from Wizard in one of their trademark eye-catching big boxes. Since then it's received a number of DVD releases (Image, Sinister and others) and, in 2013, made its Blu-ray debut on the Redemption label out of the UK. Alternate scenes of the female victims frolicking in their underwear instead of naked were used for release in more restrictive markets. Rollin himself hated the film and felt it an embarrassment.

SBIG