Lokis. Rekopis profesora Wittembacha (1970)

... aka: Локис

... aka: A medveember (The Bearman)

... aka: Bear, The

... aka: Lokis

... aka: Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach

Directed by:

Janusz Majewski

Devout German pastor, ethnology professor, world traveler and Königsberg Biblical Society representative K.M. Wittembach (Edmund Fetting) is on his way to the Samogitian region of Lithuania to do some research when he's asked to join three women - elderly duchess Catherine (Irena Horecka), her beautiful niece Julia Dowgiello (Malgorzata Braunek) and Julia's dim young British governess, Pamela Leemon (Hanna Stankówna), for tea in their train compartment. The ladies, who don't live far from where the Professor will be staying, invite him to visit them whenever he wishes. Wittembach then catches a buggy ride with a superstitious driver, who fills his head with all kinds of dreary, scary stories about the region he's visiting. After passing by a swamp, the two lose a wheel during a rainstorm, which forces the driver to take his horse into town to find a blacksmith. The professor ducks into an old cemetery crypt filled with Satanic paintings on the wall and a skeleton in a glass coffin. An old drunk wandering through takes one look at him and, with a terrified facial expression, proclaims him to be "evil" before running off.

His journey not quite off to a great start, Wittembach finally makes it to his destination; the palace of young, wealthy Count Michał Szemiot (Józef Duriasz, who has a great scowl) and his mother (Zofia Mrozowska). Strangely, both of them are too ill to see to him right away. The Count claims to be suffering from a migraine while the Countess has been afflicted with a much more debilitating condition that she's been suffering from for thirty long years. Dr. Froeber (Gustaw Lutkiewicz), who's probably best described as jovially nihilistic, is also staying at the palace looking for a way to cure the Countess. Froeber explains that years earlier she was out hunting with the men and had an incident with a bear. It tore her clothes, scratched her up and she's been crazy ever since. Not only that, but she gave birth not long after the attack, freaked out, labeled the newborn Michał a "beast" and unsuccessfully tried to kill him.

Local gossip has it that Count Szemiot is the bi-product of the attack; the bear somehow managing to rape and impregnate the Countess, but that's only a silly rumor. Well, maybe. What we can definitely surmise is that the Count is rather peculiar. The Professor catches him in a tree outside his bedroom window late at night peeping in on him before they even have a chance to formally meet and his subsequent behavior is every bit as bizarre. He stakes a chicken in the yard so he can capture a hawk (with his bare hands!) to add to his "curio collection;" a special room filled with animals he's killed and stuffed as part of his taxidermy hobby. Other animals are captured, locked in cages and kept as his "prisoners." The Count, who's rather glum most of the time, occasionally perks up, like whenever the Professor tells a story about getting lost in Uruguay and having to survive on horse's blood.

Even the staff at the palace is strange. The Count's main servant, Lvan (Pawel Unrug), refuses to acknowledge there may be anything amiss with his master, and the rest of the servants seem to basically be operating on auto-pilot even when assisting in some rather questionable activities. Also thrown into the mix, for some reason that escapes me, is a toothless, swamp-dwelling backwoods witch (played by [male] actor Stanislaw Milski) who usually hangs out around an old tree rumored to have been the site of human sacrifices. She begs for liquor, charms snakes, is able to walk on pond scum and may or may not have placed a curse on the palace.

The unhinged Countess is mostly kept locked in a tower, is sometimes tied down to her bed, is subjected to abusive, primitive "treatments" like being put in a cage and repeatedly submerged in the lake and keeps going on and on (and on and on) about how "the beast" must be killed. Despite having her as a potential mother-in-law, and having to acclimate herself to the Count's odd ways, Julia is finally won over and agrees to marry him. Admittedly, he does have some things going in his favor, including wealth, fair-haired good looks and an appealing air of brooding mystery about him, but this spends no time establishing the relationship between he and Julia. We never really learn what exactly draws her to him in particular, especially seeing how every young guy in the area seems interested in courting her.

Lokis is extremely slow-moving, filled with implication and pseudo-philosophical dialogue and the horror elements, while present, are so subdued you feel like you're watching a costume drama most of the time. While there's just enough plot intrigue to keep you going and I didn't mind the more ambiguous aspects of the story, I also didn't always find the characters nor their conversations terribly interesting. That said, this is a generally well-performed, handsomely-made film so it at least nails the visuals and atmosphere. The 19th Century setting is very efficiently brought to life through the sumptuous art direction and costumes, while the director and DOP Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz make excellent use of various lovely outdoor locations.

Based on the Prosper Mérimée story of the same name, which was first published in the Revue des deux Mondes in September 1869. The same story was also the basis for the early Russian silent horror film Medvezhya svadba / "The Marriage of the Bear" (1925), as well as Walerian Borowczyk's controversial bestiality fairy tale The Beast (1975). Mérimée is best known for the novella Carmen, which has been adapted numerous times over the years and became the basis for the famous Georges Bizet opera.

The director, who won a Best Director award at the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival in 1971 for this film, also made quite a few short subjects that should be of interest to genre fans. For a nice run down of these titles, let me redirect you to an article at The Bedlam Files RIGHT HERE. Three of these ended up being English dubbed and were released as part of the TV anthology series Theatre Macabre hosted by Christopher Lee, though I'm not sure whether or not these were made specifically for that program or just released to an international audience through this series (my best guess is that it's the latter).

This appears to have bypassed the entire VHS era but started cropping up on DVD eventually. Here in the U.S., a subtitled, widescreen print was first distributed by Sinister Cinema. It was also available on DVD from Film Polski, which came with optional English subtitles. And, in 2021, it was included in Severin's 20 film Blu-ray box set All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium Of Folk Horror, which also includes the Polish WILCZYCA (1983).

★★1/2

Anita (1984)

... aka: Anita: Female Snake

... aka: Anita (Ular Betina)

Directed by:

"M. Syarifudin" (M. Sharieffudin A.)

Disapproving of plans for an arranged marriage, Juwita (Enny Beatrice) is chastised by her mother, Sofia (Ade Irawan), and then slapped in the face by her father, Thomas (Deddy Sutomo). As if that wasn't enough punishment already, she's then taken deep into the jungle on a remote island, tied to stakes in the ground and is left for dead (!) And then something even stranger happens. She's freed when lasers shoot the ropes holding her down and a huge python slithers between her legs. This particular snake has special powers and the ability to impregnate humans, which is exactly what happens when it gets busy (!) with a writhing Juwita. Afterward, Juwita goes a little crazy. Her guilt-stricken parents (the mother starts having nightmares about snakes attacking her in her garden) soon regret their decision and hire a posse of hunters, led by Hendra (Harry Capri), the man Juwita was to wed, to go find her and bring her back.

After Hendra locates a dirty and disheveled Juwita, a laser beam shoots out of the sun (?), speeds along her pregnancy, induces labor and she then gives birth to a huge egg. Once the egg cracks open, a bunch of slithering serpents emerge. A panicked Hendra starts frantically chopping them up with his machete (yes, real snakes are killed), is tripped up by one of them and accidentally stabs Juwita in the stomach. After Harry (Syarief Friant), one of Hendra's pissed off fellow hunters, engages him in a comically overlong fight, the men agree to keep what truly happened a secret. They bury Juwita in a shallow grave and then go on their way.

Unbeknownst to the hunters, one of the baby snakes managed to get away and it grows into a beautiful young woman named Anita (also played by Beatrice). Anita likes to swing from vines, bathe topless under waterfalls (which was blurred out on the version I viewed) and do hilarious erotic dances with snakes to generic elevator muzak. While performing one such dance, she passes out and wakes up in a cave surrounded by snake women decked out in snake-skin crop tops and miniskirts. All of the snake women can switch from human to snake form at will, as can Anita. The queen of the snake women (Poppy Soraya) is pleased with the new addition to their tribe, teaches her some snake fu moves and then shoots her with a laser and gives her a Medusa-head full of live snakes. I guess in snake woman world that's considered some kind of promotion.

A wildlife photographer (Advent Bangun) is canoeing around the island snapping photos when a pesky gator shows up, eats his guide and makes him wreck his boat. After stabbing it to death, he makes his way inland and is immediately ambushed by a half dozen snake warrior women, whom he defeats in a fight. One well-placed booby trap later and he's shirtless, sweaty and tied up in the cave, where snake ladies perform their patented seductive dance for him, which involves swaying their hips, slithering their arms, bowing before him and, uh, standing on his chest (?) Afterward, he has a fight with Anita and an errant laser shot hits the Queen and kills her. Now it's time for Anita to take charge and she wants the photographer to be her lover / assistant; a position he gladly accepts (might have something to do with him being shot with a green laser beam though).

Meanwhile, Juwita's father organizes an expedition to the island, which includes Hendra, Harry and five other dudes (including Dadang Iskandar and Yacob Essad from another Beatrice vehicle called ALLIGATOR QUEEN), who get picked off one by one. Several are killed by snakes, there's another alligator attack and, in an ironic death, Hendra gets impaled with a machete against the same tree Juwita died in front of. The survivors flee and make it back to their vehicle and to civilization. However, Anita (in snake form) has managed to hitch a ride on the bottom of their jeep. At around the same time, Lina (Linda Lolita Husein), who is either Juwita's kid sister or a niece, shows up at the house for a visit. Her first night there, she's welcomed by a cobra slithering into bed with her, which is "killed" with an umbrella but then transforms into a piece of rope.

Anita keeps tormenting the family, mostly in her cobra form, and bites a face, slithers inside a pants leg, traps Lina inside a car with constrictor snakes and knocks her off a dock into the water and causes people to shoot one another. Whenever it's time for hand-to-hand combat, Anita transforms back into her human form. The finale takes place in the woods and at a huge rock quarry and features an arm hacked off with a machete, laser snakes, numerous people knocked over a rocky embankment to their deaths, a neck snapped with a thigh, a snake fight, lots more human fighting and a female spiritualist (Connie Sutedja) who has a laser battle with Anita and then transforms into a giant frog (!?) before dying.

While this starts getting a little sloppy toward the end and I can definitely do without seeing real animal slaughter (there's also a completely pointless bit where a constrictor is put inside a cage with a rabbit), this hits all of the other right notes one would want out of such a film. It's filled with action and martial arts (the fight scenes are actually pretty good), magic, cheap special effects, animal attacks, flash editing, fun costumes, nice shooting locations and has a fast-paced, bizarre, sometimes incoherent and highly entertaining plot that combines jungle adventure, fantasy, snake horror and even a little haunted house flick in the last 30 minutes.

Anita is a very good vehicle for Beatrice, who must have been pretty popular in Indonesia in the 80s because this was one of 14 (!) films she did in 1984 alone. Here, she's nice to look at, enthusiastic, acquits herself pretty well with the martial arts demands and is obviously brave to spend half the movie with snakes crawling all over her, not to mention wearing that live snake headdress for most of her scenes. Beatrice abruptly disappeared from films for good in the late 80s after marrying (and having six children with) wealthy Malaysian businessman Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor, who was dabbling in film production at the time. He would go on to become a politician, serving on the Malaysian Parliament and as the countries Minister of Tourism, and has been embroiled in bribery, corruption and tax evasion scandals in the past few years.

This has never been released in America nor is it available in an English language version. I could only track down one home video release; an Indonesian one on the VCD format.

★★★