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

Nido to Mezamenu Komori Uta (1985)

... aka: 二度と目覚めぬ子守唄

... aka: Death Lullaby, The

... aka: Lullaby for Sleep of the Death, A

... aka: Lullaby to the Big Sleep

Directed by:

Hiroshi Harada

Ugly is the key word here. There's the main character, a young, nameless schoolboy living a lonely existence in Kiryū who is, by conventional standards of beauty, physically ugly. He's taunted daily by his peers for his short stature ("dwarf!") and buck teeth ("protruding tooth deppa!" ["deppa" is a Chinese word for a mope or a dull, spiritless person]), because finding those insecurity scabs and picking at them incessantly is what bullies like to do. The boy is hounded so mercilessly (punched, hit with balls, beaten with a stick, told to die...) that his first inclination when the final school bells rings is to run and find a place to hide where his tormentors can't find him. He's not always lucky. The frequent dehumanization is manifesting itself as another kind of ugly: A constant scowl on the face of a child that has been completely sapped of his joy, curiosity and sense of wonder and imagination. Only a repressed anger and inner rage linger in his eyes, which may one day erupt into violence.

The behavior of the bullies is far uglier because it's an inner ugliness; an emotional and psychological corruption and a lack of soul and empathy. Receiving an affirming, positive emotional response from intentionally making another human being feel terrible about themselves, with zero regard for how your actions may harm or even kill that person, is perhaps the nadir of human ugliness. And these bullies, with their early onset sociopathic bent, will eventually (at least physically speaking) grow up. After they spend their childhood railroading through the weak and vulnerable, then what will their interests be?

Perhaps they'll seek out a profession that enables them some leverage and power over the majority. After all, they'd already spent their youth elevating themselves by knocking others down and THAT made them feel good. For children, words and fists may give them an upper hand but, as adults, nothing speaks louder, gives more leverage or provides more societal advantages, than wealth. If they're in a position of power over the poor, the sick, the weak, the physically and / or emotionally damaged, then they can still resume their bullying, just in more adult, socially acceptable ways. And then, most of society will look upon them favorably because the greatest metric of success in the adult world is money.

Perhaps they can oversee some big project. Maybe that project would even come with non-monetary perks, like the pleasing feeling of nostalgia they get in demolishing through low income areas populated with damaged souls; souls like "Deppa" who've had it beaten into them from a young age that they're inferior and not of much value. The Deppa's of the world, who've had their abilities to get an education, develop a sense of self-worth and make peace with their differences all taken away, now get to have their homes torn down by bulldozers, get toxic fumes pumped into their air and chemicals dumped into their water by the very same people who had a hand in diminishing them in their formative years and now require more money to maintain their "superior" position.

Deppa lives in an impoverished, cramped, ugly part of the working class city. Airplanes constantly fly overhead; so loud that the citizens have to plug their ears as they pass, and they spit out their fumes as they go, which fall like a blanket on the slums. Beaming TV newscasters brag about advancement in the form of a new "superexpress" train system being built through the city that will be the new "Japanese pride." Old buildings must come down so the bulldozers roll in and big steel beams are planted right in between homes for the upcoming track. Textile and silk mills in the area (the chief employers) dump their waste into the water, where scores of dead, smooth-eyed fish float. The skies are always orange and red and hazy and filled with smog. And billboards try to convince everyone to pay their taxes and support whatever next project those at the top are pushing at any given time.

We get flashbacks to the bullied boy's youth, which show how a fall as a toddler messed up his teeth. After the death of both his grandfather (to disease) and his father (a military man who was killed in a war), he and his mother were forced to live in a home with another poor couple. After his mother started suffering from mental problems, she was placed in a hospital (where she will later commit suicide), while "Deppa" was sent to live with distant relatives, who aren't too fond of his presence. His existence is one of social isolation, constant loneliness and ridicule. If the bullies knew any of this, would they stop tormenting him? Would this knowledge make the adults who laugh at and mock him think twice about what they're doing? In both cases, likely not. If you first need to know someone's life history and past traumas in order to treat them with a bare minimum of respect, you're probably already a lost cause.

There's a lot to unpack in this lightning-fast, 27-minute short, which utilizes animation, drawn and photographic stills, live action shots (filmed with 8mm), newsreel footage and surreal imagery. What's most important to note are the overt political themes, how they parallel the bullying story and why they parallel the bullying story. The primary real world reference used here is the construction of the Narita International Airport, which found the Japanese government basically steamrolling over local residents, students protesters and left wing activists until they got their way. Just like that socially acceptable bullying I was talking about earlier, this is yet another example of the little man getting crushed in the name of capitalism and progress by a much more powerful entity. On the other hand, construction of the Narita Shinkansen (bullet train) through the same city (the "superexpress" referenced here), a concern on the director's mind at the time he made this, was successfully stopped by protests in 1983.

The wonderful thing about this multi-layered short is that the bullying and urban development angles perfectly compliment one another and both aspects of the film are affecting. Though you can certainly absorb how the parallel plot threads feed off one another, this also allows viewers to put primary focus on either aspect of the film, as the "secondary" content works well to accentuate whichever area you choose to put your attention on.

This took three years to complete. The director (20 years old at the time) also wrote, produced, photographed, did the animation, character design, sound, Moog synthesizer score and basically everything else! He'd go on to make the controversial and grotesque Midori (1992), which took five years to complete and was also basically a one man show for the talented Harada.

This was given a limited release in Japanese theaters in 1986 and played at film festivals in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy and the UK, but was never given any kind of official home video release until 2021. The current Japanese distributor (TACO ché) offers a remastered version with lots of extras, including slideshows of the original drawings, an interview with the director, some of his other short films, a graphic novel and more. This is also available on Youtube with English subtitles.

★★★1/2