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.

★★★

La mano che nutre la morte (1974)

... aka: Dykhaniye smerti (Shadow of Death)

... aka: Evil Face

... aka: Hand That Feeds Death, The

... aka: Hand That Feeds the Dead, The

... aka: Ölümün nefesi (Breath of Death)

Directed by:

Sergio Garrone

Newlyweds Masha (Katia Christine) and Alex (Ayhan Işık) are passing through the countryside when their stagecoach overturns. The driver is killed and both Masha and Alex sustain minor injuries. Thankfully, there are people nearby who hear the crash, come to their aid and take them back to their large, secluded villa to recuperate. Unfortunately, those people also happen to be Professor Sergei Nijinsky (Klaus Kinski) and his crippled hunchback servant Vania (Erol Taş). Nijinsky is the former assistant to the late Baron Ivan Rassimov (who not coincidentally shares the same name as the Italian actor who starred in the same director's debut feature; the spaghetti western If You Want to Live... Shoot!). Very controversial in his day, Rassimov was considered a madman by some and a genius by others, but he was never quite able to prove his theories since he died in a mysterious fire / lab accident.

Nijinsky is married to Rassimov's daughter, Tanja (also played by Christine), and has since become the heir to the family estate. Though he claims Rassimov took his scientific knowledge to his grave, Nijinsky's secretly carries on his experiments with skin and organ transplants. He has an array of young, unconscious, topless female victims on hand that he's kidnapped and is keeping prisoner in his basement lab, where they're hooked up to tubes constantly circulating their blood. As for wife Tanja, she was also caught up in the accident that killed her father and now has a horrible, fire-scarred face that she keeps hidden behind a black veil most of the time. If you've seen the French classic EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959), I'm sure you already have some idea where this is going...

There are two other women present in the home. The first is a bisexual prostitute named Sonia (Carmen Silva), who's been invited to come stay there by Nijinsky. After a week of no nookie, she's at a loss as to why exactly she's there. He keeps telling her he'll have a use for her soon enough and, since she's being paid to hang out there, that's good enough for her. There's also Miss Holleroch (Marzia Damon), a writer staying there temporarily under the guise of working on a book about the enigmatic Baron. While she is indeed working on a book, she is also, unbeknownst to her host, using a fake name (her real one is Katya Olenov) and also trying to find out what happened to her sister, who vanished there not long ago. After finding a ring that she believes belonged to her missing sibling, Katya knows she's on the right trail. Fearing for her safety, her boyfriend Theodore (Alessandro Perrella) goes to a police inspector (Bruno Ariè), who agrees something fishy is going on but adds that he lacks the evidence to start slinging accusations about such an "esteemed" family.

The manipulative Tanja exerts a strong hold over her husband. She refuses to make love to him unless he's able to restore her beauty while he proves to be willing to do whatever it takes (no matter how ghastly) to try to repair her and thus their marriage. Using a tuning fork-like device that emits loud sonic vibrations, Tanja is able to control Vania and force him to do her evil deeds, including kidnapping and murder. When she suspects Katya is on to them, she sends the servant out to murder Theodore. For some reason that doesn't really gel with the character (especially since she doesn't even KNOW her boyfriend has been murdered), Katya gives in to the advances of Sonia. The two are surprised in bed by Nijinsky and the servant, who attack and try to kill them. Masha, who plans on leaving in the morning, is also kidnapped and taken to the lab, while Alex finds himself entombed alive with the corpse of the late family matriarch. Things take a few unexpected turns toward the end.

Part of a two film package deal between Turkish and Italian producers, this was shot over an eight week period in both Istanbul and Rome along with Le amanti del mostro / "Lover of the Monster." Both are Gothic horror films with a 19th Century period setting that utilize the same secluded villa for exterior locations and feature most of the same actors, sets, lab equipment, costumes and props. There are plot similarities between the two (starting with the fact both stories involve mad doctors), and they even share some of the same scenes and the same solarized red-and-blue opening credits. In fact, the two are so similar that for years people thought them to be one in the same.

I went into this expecting outright trash (not that one would expect otherwise from the director of S.S. EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP and S.S. CAMP 5: WOMEN'S HELL!), so the fact this was competently directed, written and performed was quite the surprise. Not that there aren't some problems here, especially in regards to the pacing and the fact it isn't terribly original, but the production values are solid across the board, there's OK set design (of particular interest is the lab filled with bubbling beakers of blood, tubes, wires, high-voltage traveling arcs and gold-painted lab equipment lit with flashing red and green lights) and it delivers the expected female nudity, blood (the mediocre gore effects are provided by Carlo Rambaldi) and well-placed moments of questionable taste (like the rapist manservant continuing the pump away on one of female victims after he believes she's dead!) to keep you interested.

The cast also manage to sell whatever there is to sell here. The biggest drawing card, both then and now, is the presence of Kinski, who was an expert at playing crazed degenerates because, well, he actually WAS a crazed degenerate! Just don't expect much of that here. While he plays a man of questionable morals and sanity, he's rather subdued most of the time until his final scene allows him to emote somewhat. I certainly don't agree with criticisms that he's disengaged, disinterested or phoning it in. His specific character is subservient to the domineering wife and has grown weary trying to please her, which doesn't require him to rant, rave and chew the scenery, even if that's what audiences expect or want out of him.

Most attention will probably be focused on lead actresses Christine and Damon, who not only look gorgeous but also deliver adequate acting performances. Both made numerous other genre films so I'm glad I'll be getting to see more of them in the future. Male co-stars Işık and Taş, representing the Turkish contingent of the film, were two of the most popular and beloved actors in the country at this time and are both good here.

The Turkish version of the film (Ölümün nefesi) is an alternate re-edit supervised by Yilmaz Duru, who is (misleadingly) listed on both the film's poster and in the opening credits as the director. The Turkish print lists additional cast members (Gülen Aygün, Eva Curtis, Turgut Giray, Jahn Colins...) not shown in the Italian credits, though these might just be fake names. Conversely, none of the Turkish actors (not even stars Işık and Taş) are credited on the Italian print. This was held back for release until 1986 in Turkey; bypassing a theatrical release altogether and going straight to video and television. Fifteen minutes were cut for this 77 minute version and, though I only browsed through it, most of what's missing appear to be dialogue scenes.

Ignoring unsanctioned releases from bootleg companies like Cinefear, this was never officially available in the U.S. until somewhat recently. Mya Communication (who carried this under the title Evil Face) first released an English-friendly DVD in 2009 but it was a poor VHS transfer. Full Moon Features then swooped in and released a remastered version on Blu-ray in 2021. They use both English-language titles: The Hand That Feeds the Dead (for the physical release) and Evil Face (for streaming services).

★★1/2