Sundelbolong (1981)

... aka: Ghost with Hole
... aka: Ketibaan Sial (Arrival of the Damned)

... aka: Sundel Bolong
... aka: Sundelbolong: Kisah Ini Diangkat Dari Legende Rakyat

Directed by:
Sisworo Gautama Putra

Though most outside of Asia probably have no clue what a sundel bolong even is, it's a specific type of ghost in Indonesian mythology. The spirit wears a white gown, has very long hair and a huge hole in its back and is a former prostitute who died while either pregnant or during childbirth. The hole signifies where the unborn fetus was "born in the grave" and exited through the back, while the hair is there to conceal the hole so the ghost can move about us mere mortals undetected. Because the term sundel bolong has no meaning to most non-Indonesians, the common English translated title is "Ghost with Hole." While that's not entirely accurate, seeing how "sundel" means "prostitute" or "whore" and "bolong" means "hole" and that would result in a title like "Whore with Hole" and thus probably rope in the wrong kind of audience, you can see why they went with that. Similar ghosts matching the physical description of the sundel bolong are present in the folklore of several other Asian countries, such as the pontianak in Malaysia, though these aren't necessarily former prostitutes. In Indonesia they even even have a second term for a female ghost matching the exact same physical description of the sundel bolong that died while pregnant but isn't a former lady of the night called a kuntilanak. Numerous movies have been made about all of these ghosts, though this appears to be the very first film made about this particular one.

One of my favorite discoveries researching this title was learning that all of these different ghosts are so popular that they've inspired their own series of action figures from the company Setan Lokal. The same company seems to be responsible for the "Indo Psychos" line of real-life Indonesian serial killer action figures (!!!), which takes tasteless to a whole 'nother level, but we'll just ignore that and concentrate on these cool supernatural ones...

The newlywed bliss of just-married Alisa (Suzzanna) and boat captain Hendarto ("Berry" / Barry Prima) doesn't last long after he receives a letter - during his wedding reception! - telling him he'll have to go away for a spell. After he sails off into the sunset toward some unknown destination, Alisa tries to adapt to life alone in their home, knitting and anxiously waiting by the phone for a call. She does receive a call, but not from her husband. This one asks her to come to the Rudy Boutique clothing store because they're considering employing her as a model. When she arrives, she bumps into an old acquaintance, except this is someone from her past she'd rather not associate with now. You see, before she married into an upper class suburban existence, she was an afro-wig-sporting prostitute. And the two people she happens to bump into are Mami (Ruth Pelupessi), her former madam, and Rudy (Rudy Salam), the sleazy boutique owner. Rudy coerces her into the backroom of his shop, where he threatens to expose her past if she doesn't have sex with him. She refuses, slaps him in the face and promptly takes off.

As Alisa is driving home that night, she's forced to stop because of a station wagon parked in the middle of the road. The driver appears to have passed out. When she attempts to help, a bunch of men jump her, chloroform her and throw her in the car. She's taken to an abandoned warehouse where she discovers Mami and Rudy were both in on the plot to kidnap her. She's tied up and raped by Rudy and then all four of the thugs. Alisa attempts to seek justice later on, but the court throws out her case, lets her assailants go free and rubs salt in the wound by humiliating her. Returning home a defeated and depressed woman, Alisa soon finds herself vomiting and bleeding. Fearing she's pregnant from the rape, she goes to a doctor who is unable to help her (and she later envisions is chastising her; likely due to the fact she's considering abortion) and then starts losing her mind. Unable to cheer her up all this time, her motherly servant Bi Ijah (Marlia Hardi) finds Alisa dead in the bathroom. Lying in the pool of blood is a small fetus; presumably from Alisa's attempt to terminate the pregnancy herself.

Hendarto returns to find his new bride dead. Bi Ijah fills him in on what she knows, the two take flowers to the grave and, when they return home, the same flowers are on the bed. While out driving late at night, Hendarto runs into an innocent, cat-loving young woman named Shinta, who's a dead ringer for his former wife (and is also played by Suzzanna). He takes her home for tea but she promptly disappears into the night after a brief conversation. Soon after, there are a bunch of ghost sightings around town and people associated with Mami and Rudy start dropping like flies. Of course, Alisa has returned as a vengeance-seeking sundel bolong, who sometimes now goes by the new "Shinta" persona or other forms to lure victims.

The sundel bolong is depicted here pretty closely to how it's described in Javanese mythology, though this one can take on the appearance of any woman it wants, shows up as a pocong (shrouded) ghost in one scene and even decides to transform into a skull-faced leyak / krasue (detached flying head with entrails) at one point. Hey, I guess, why not? Alisa / Shinta drowns a guy in the bathtub, causes a guy to wreck his car after lifting it up by the bumper, bends steel bars with her hands and visits a food stand where she devours a plate full of meat and drinks soto ayam soup from a steaming pot, which all leaks out of her back hole!

The ghost uses various methods to kill, including busting her arms right through a wall to strangle a guy, trapping a guy inside a white brick building and impaling him with her own tombstone, tossing someone off a balcony right onto electrical wires and detaching her arms, multiplying them and then sending them after some goons who get their throats clawed out and impaled! Sensing how his number's coming up soon, Rudy enlists the aid of a black magician to try to exorcise the ghost but he ends up getting crushed under a tree and set on fire instead. While all that's going on, Hendarto survives an attack by Rudy's thugs and teams up with the police to put a stop to things.

Expecting straight up horror schlock, I was surprised by how serious the first half of this plays out. While it moves slowly, it does a decent job establishing the lead character and her plight going into the more fast-paced supernatural revenge spree of the second half. Touching on topics like abortion and depression was unexpected, as was the use of surrealism during Alisa's baby nightmare scene, which also memorably employs a few babies with actual birth defects. However, the tone is all over the place once Alisa is dead and back to avenge her death. While the kills themselves are frequently imaginative, a lot of these bits are silly and clearly played for laughs. This tonal shift results in less than compelling viewing. Further hampering the horror and potency of the ghost's revenge are comic scenes featuring pedicab driver Amin (Dorman Borisman) and the brothel bartender (Bokir) having run-in's with the ghost. Some of these bits are comically sped up like on The Benny Hill Show.

On the plus side, Suzzanna is great and you can see why she was able to build a career in horror by examining her work here. Her role gives her the opportunity to flex her acting muscles during the dramatic first half, be scary as the ghost and even amuse with her dry dialogue delivery dealing with some blathering idiots when she's forced into the some of the more comedic scenes. There's a reason her films continue to frequently run on Indonesian TV to this day. The cast also includes Indo horror regulars H.I.M. Damsyik as thug Jeffrey, Eddy Hansudi as (the pigtailed) thug Dadung, Rukman Herman as thug Tom and El Koesno as thug Bram, plus Jafar Freeyork (from Putra's PRIMITIVES, along with Prima and Herman) and S. Parya (THE WARRIOR).

This was a hit in its home country and the third highest grossing domestic film of its year. It was remade as Suzzanna: Bernapas dalam Kubur (Suzzanna: Buried Alive) in 2018 with Luna Mora taking over the lead role, which has been renamed Suzzanna in honor of the late star who originated the part. Suzzanna got to play a similar role in Telaga Angker ("Lake Eerie"), though this time a murdered pregnant author who returns as a ghost. This sundel bolong also was the basis of numerous other Indonesian horror films including The Legend of Sundel Bolong (2007) and Kafan Sundel Bolong (2012).

★★1/2

Zheng Jinyi de gui gu shi (1990)

... aka: 鄭進一的鬼故事
... aka: Cheng Chin-I's Ghost Story
... aka: De gui gu shi
... aka: Ghost Story
... aka: Zheng Jinyi's Ghost Story

Directed by:
Cheng Chin-I (Chun-Yat Cheng)

Broke college junior Tze Shen Li (Yu-Nan Chang), who's studying fine art at a university in Taipei, arrives in a remote mountain town via train. Instead of resting on his winter break, he's decided to pay a visit to a reclusive sculptor / doll maker Master Au Lung (played by the director) in hopes he'll allow him to be his student and teach him everything he knows. After hearing his credentials (he's the top student in his class) and learning he's traveled very far to meet him, Au Lung puts him up in a spare bedroom. Also staying there is spastic, retarded servant Au Tu (Hsiao-shun Hsu), who is constantly either laughing or crying, bounces up and down, picks his nose, throws Tze Shen's clothes on the floor and sometimes keeps a monkey on a chain that usually lies on top of his head. Master Lung forgets to even mention he also has a daughter named Hsien Chi (Hsing-Chi Wang), who surprises the new guest late his first night bringing him some tea. The next morning, Au Tu finds his beloved monkey dead and, curiously, the Master orders it to be drained of all its blood before it's buried. He claims that will "keep it from harming humans" as a ghost.

While the master and servant are away, Tze Shen uses the opportunity to try to romance Hsien Chi. He follows her through the woods and is led to a boiling pot of blood. After the dead monkey's head leaps out at him, he runs off and has a late night stroll with Hsien Chi, who seems to appear and disappear at will. Ghost or no, the two become lovers. But Tze Shen soon finds out the man whose work he's idolized all this time isn't such a great man after all. He doesn't offer up much in the way of instruction, refuses to discuss or even acknowledge his daughter, worships a mysterious God and slaps the annoying but otherwise harmless Au Tu in the face. When Au Tu turns up dead, he refuses to even honor him at his funeral. Turns out, there's a good reason for that.

Late one night, Tze Shen stumbles across Master Lung out in the wood practicing some kind of black magic ritual using Au Tu's corpse. His hands catch fire and then he shoots some blue lasers at the body; reviving it long enough for a bunch of blood to start gushing out of the neck. But if you think you have a handle on where this movie's going with the generic title, the ghost, the black magic, the over-the-top retarded character... think again. This isn't another Hong Kong ghost comedy. It's mostly serious in tone and the ghost isn't even the primary focus. Plus there's one other plot detail I've not yet mentioned... Killer dolls!

Yes, the Master's creations have a life of their own. He achieves this through something he calls "blood injected soul power:" Killing someone, sculpting a doll in their image, giving them a bath in fresh blood and then transferring their souls into dolls using black magic. POV camerawork follows the dolls from under sheets and shuffling around the house, they're seen feasting on a corpse in a nightmare and there's even some lovably crude stop motion animation to bring them to life. The score (also by the director), photography and camerawork are all surprisingly good. My next pleasant surprise was that this "ghost story" (called "Master Au Ruen's Folk Art Doll" in the credits) turned out to be just the first half of a two story anthology.

Next up is something the subs call "Don't Fing the Ghost" which I'm pretty sure was meant to be "Don't RING the Ghost." We start with a short vignette as three couples sit around telling scary stories. Deng (Vent Teng) recalls a European urban legend he once heard. Supposedly, if you dial "0" thirteen times on your phone at the stroke of midnight you get direct access to hell and can even talk to deceased friends and relatives. The three men do it, pass the phone around and one of them ends up possessed.

Widowed businesswoman Hsiu Chuen (Chung-Mei Liu) is the take-no-shit general manager of a company and a single mother to a little girl named Tin Tin (Tang Tang). A drug addicted, disgruntled former employee (Mi Ah) whom she had fired for sexual harassment decides to terrorize her with heavy-breathing obscene phone calls. If that's not bad enough, immature employee Lan Yiu (Lan Tsao) keeps trying to fix her up with her brother (Jun-Rong Yang) and her sleazy ex-boyfriend, Chia Fen (Yu-Hou Chou), keeps hitting her up for money, even going so far as to break into her car and then crashing her daughter's birthday party just to humiliate her for not caving in to his monetary demands. At the party, one of the guests (Yung-Cheng Chang) brings up the dial-0-13-times-for-hell "rumor" he heard, which plants an idea in Tin Tin's little head. Why not call so she can speak to her dead father?

I didn't expect this to be up to the standard of the first half but it's also good in its own way. The story mixes up a number of horror subgenres: telephone terror, stalker / sex maniac, evil kid, slasher, ghost / possession and more into a fun and unpredictable way. Scenes of the put upon heroine dealing with one extreme annoyance after another are depicted in a genuinely amusing and blackly comic way and the horror elements all come together nicely during the finale.

For some reason, there's no IMDb page for this title and it's missing from most other horror databases. I don't think it was ever officially released here in America but the VCD and DVD versions distributed in Asia have burnt-in English subtitles. Even better, the English version has been hiding out on Youtube for years now just waiting to be watched. Added bonus: the quality of the upload isn't terrible. Check it out!

★★★