Alapaap (1984)

... aka: Clouds

... aka: High Clouds

Directed by:

Tata Esteban

Opening with a truly bizarre musical number featuring an apparently confused punk / New Wave-look band performing a harmonica-heavy blues rock number called "Society" in a smoky club, this doesn't get any less addled from there! The band is cut with a bunch of surreal and seemingly senseless scenes (sometimes shot with a kaleidoscope effect added or through a Vaseline-smeared lens) of a dazed audience member gazing at the band while lights flash in his face, scenes of the same man sitting at a typewriter in some foggy black void dressed in a hospital gown and surrounded by blood bags and three men attacking and raping a young woman in the woods and by a waterfall. The same man also envisions he's led to his own casket by nurses with teased 80s hair and large syringes and members of the press. A newspaper headline then announces that a decomposing body has been found near Baguio City. The victim has been identified as Baeg Longed, an 18-year old jungle "maiden". The girl's father, the tribal head, has warned police that if the crime isn't soon solved, he and the rest of the tribe will seek a bloody revenge.

The man having all of these strange hallucinations is a troubled young aspiring screenwriter named Jake (William Martinez) and there's a good reason for the disorienting opening ten minutes. It's all a drug-fueled delusion as Jake lies in his hospital recovering from his latest overdose. His mother (Rosemarie Gil) is fed up with him, yet too busy with work and her social life to offer any support. Jake and a bunch of his pals - director Dave (Mark Gil), his cameraman brother Donald (Michael De Mesa), their girlfriends, Christine (Eva Rose Palma) and Betsy (Isadora Alonzo), an aspiring Scream Queen who wants to "be the next Nastassja Kinski," and the German Shepherd Jabbar (playing himself) - decide to go to the country to shoot a movie. On the way there, Jake has multiple visions of a beautiful, mysterious woman who seems to be coming on to him but disappears just as soon as he sees her.

After some looking around, the friends are able to rent a large home from Mr. Longed (Ed Villapol), whose name may look familiar if you read the first paragraph. Mr. Longed puts them up in a nice old house with covered furniture, but only under one condition: One of the rooms, which belonged to his late daughter, is strictly off limits. Their first night there, the home is already trying to red flag them the f out. Shutters and windows open and close on their own, fireplaces light themselves, a rocking chair starts moving with nobody in it and Donald sees a wooden idol cry blood. The following morning all of the furniture in the home has been thrown around. When Donald, who witnessed some of the strange activity the night before, expresses his concerns, nobody takes him seriously.

As it transpires, Mr. Longed's daughter, Baeg (Tanya Gomez), was raped and murdered nearby just two months earlier and is now lurking the grounds in vengeful spirit form. And, for some reason that kind of defies the traumatic gang rape she'd already suffered, she's very, very horny! She possesses Betsy and has her sneak into Jake's bedroom to seduce him. And then she inhabits Christine and turns the demure girl sexually ravenous, which ends with her slapping her boyfriend in the face and then passing out. Baeg herself materializes topless near a waterfall to lure in Jake. When Dave and Donald stumble upon them having sex, they whip out their camera and secretly start filming, but no girl is in footage when they later view it, only Jake.

After enough strange / inexplicable / ghostly shit goes down that would drive any normal person away (just not these idiots), Baeg decides she's had enough fun and now wants revenge. No, she doesn't head out after the men who actually raped and murdered her, she instead decides to settle for Jake and his friends. Her justification? Well, basically she's impatient, sick of waiting and doesn't like city folk much anyway, so why not? Her father (who'd pulled her spirit out of her body and now keeps her blue decomposing corpse in the locked bedroom) pleads with her not to harm anyone but gets so worked up he keels over from a heart attack! Now with no one to stop her, she sets about possessing and slaughtering everyone in sight.

Story and performance-wise, this is pretty pedestrian stuff, with a thin plot, poor dialogue, unlikable characters and awful acting, though several of these issues could very well be chalked up to the terrible English dubbing on the print I viewed. Still, the exploitative and stylistic aspects are enough to somewhat redeem things. This offers up pretty much exactly what exploit fans want to see; blood, a bit of gore and a heaping helping of nudity and sex. Even the rape scene, which is shown merely in brief flashes at the beginning, is shown in its gratuitous entirety later on in the form of a flashback.

 

As for the death scenes, there aren't a whole lot but we do at least get a little variety. One of the ladies gets attacked and eaten by the (possessed) dog after it rips off all her clothes, a guy has his brains blown out, another dies by shards of glass after having his head pushed through three different windows and, in the most memorably silly bit, a girl blow dries herself to death (!) until her face is bloody and smoking and her eyeball falls out.

The film's best attribute is actually Esteban, who directs things with plenty of style. There's lots of smooth camerawork, POV shots, tracking shots and weird camera placements, like way up high in the tree tops looking down and underneath a typewriter. There's also some colorful lighting, lots of fog (I guess the "clouds" of the title) and shadow play going on. Regardless of its debits, the film manages to successfully conjure up a dark, dreary atmosphere in a similar fashion to Raimi's original Evil Dead, which seems to have been a strong influence.

Esteban, who took home a FAMAS (Filipino Oscar equivalent) award for his art direction here, also made MAGIC OF THE UNIVERSE (1986), which again starred De Mesa and Gomez, plus Liza Lorena (who has a brief appearance here as a doctor), and was the production designer on SNAKE SISTERS (1984). The only home video release I'm aware of was a 1987 Japanese VHS from Sony Exc!t!ng / Mount Light Home Video. The Japanese video has the English dub, though apparently there's a version in the original Tagalog with fan-made English subtitles that's out there somewhere, which may be the better option if you can find it.

★★1/2

Misteri dari Gunung Merapi (Penghuni Rumah Tua) (1989)

... aka: Misteri dari Gunung Merapi, Episode 1: Penghuni Rumah Tua

... aka: Mystery of Mount Merapi

... aka: Mystery of Mount Merapi: The Old House's Inhabitants

... aka: Mystery of Volcanoes

Directed by:

L. (Lilik) Sudjio

There are movies that are all over the place and then there's this one. Yeesh! A volcano erupts and out shoots old wizard Ki Jabat (Piet Pagau) sitting atop a glowing, floating piece of basalt. He flies over to his young peasant disciple, Sembara (Fendy Pradana), with a proposition. 40 days from now, he's to enter the dangerous "Forbidden Forest" to increase his knowledge of supernatural powers. If he's successful (and survives), he'll be promoted from pauper to prince. Against his grieving widowed mother's wishes, Sembara accepts the challenge. He'll not only leave her behind, but also his lover, Farida (Ida Iasha). The two are in a secret Romeo and Juliet-style relationship where Farida's parents, Rosmina (Rina Hassim) and Rasiman (Asrul Zulmi), disapprove of them being together and are willing to go to great lengths to keep them apart. 

After spying on the young couple in the woods, the parents send some of their thugs out with orders to kill. Sembara is beaten, slashed with swords and has a machete stuck in his back but, before the gang can administer the final death blow, they're scared off by a black panther. Sembara removes the machete out and passes out. Instead of treating him like fancy feast, the ferocious feline lies down next to him and starts licking his wounds. The thugs report back to the parents that Sembara has been eaten, which clearly doesn't sit too well with Farida, especially after she discovers her parents ordered a hit out on him. Sembara's only crime was coming from a poor family and the evil parents merely viewed him as a roadblock in the plan to hitch their daughter to Mardian (Baron Hermanto), whom they believe is of good stock and from a good family. As we will soon see, that's not the case!

What the parent's couldn't have foreseen is that the cat they think chowed down on their unwanted future son-in-law is actually a shapeshifting creature with magical abilities named Datuk Panglima Kumbang (Gino Makasutji) and the tongue bath he'd given Sembara has completely healed / revived him. Datuk, who also goes by the name Tiger Man, has been assigned to help aid Sembara by the wizard. He also passes along a special ability that enables our hero to hear voices from afar in the wind, like Farida grieving for him back in her home and further instructions from the wizard.

Ki Jabat swings back by on his volcano rock long enough to send a boulder after Sembara, which forces him into a cave. There, he finds a giant disembodied arm lashing an old woman with a "lightning whip." He's able to rescue the woman and get the whip away from the arm, which becomes another tool in his arsenal. Next up, he's trapped inside some glass box that looks like a giant ice cube, which he easily breaks out of using his new whip. This grants him a crystal that he can use to form similar cages around his opponents. After inhaling in some smoke, he's then given the "fog blanket" power that enables him to transform into fog to sneak into tight spaces, like under doors and through keyholes.

After being gone for quite some time (dig that tropical version of time lapse using banana-ripening) but with his training regime now complete, Sembara returns to his village, where he's greeted by his mother (Nani Widjaja), and his best friend, Bachir (E.K. Soemadinata). However, he's shocked to discover that Farida, who had promised to wait for his return, is now set to marry Mardian. Unbeknownst to him, Farida's parents have given her a black magic concoction that's made her swear him off in favor of Mardian. Confused and defeated, Sembara returns home, but vows to find out exactly what's going on.

Immediately following the wedding ceremony, Farida is not only horrified to discover she's now married to Mardian, but has even more reason for alarm when her honeymoon turns into a horror show and her new groom suddenly makes a werewolf-like transformation (!) into full-fledged tiger in their bedroom! While she manages to escape, her mother Rosmina isn't so lucky. The tiger attacks and bites her before escaping into the woods. Now infected with the tiger virus herself, Rosmina also transforms into a cat and runs off.

After murdering a young woman by a lake, Mardian finds himself seeking shelter in a huge, seemingly-abandoned, gated mansion, which very well could be the most brightly lit and inappropriately dressed "old dark house" of all time. Destroyed furnishings in one room reassemble themselves before cackling, ugly witch Mak Lampir (Farida Pasha) makes her presence known. She informs him that she's merely the caretaker there and the home is actually owned by Nyai Kembang (Yurike Prastica). Trapped in a cellar with rats and skeletons, Mardian decides to go through with a blood pact quickie "marriage" to Nyai Kembang. Unbeknownst to him, there are actually sort of two Nyai Kembang's. One is the dead Nyai, a bloodless though well-preserved corpse who lies in bed awaiting a blood transfusion that will return her to life and the other (the one Mardian has been interacting with) is her wandering spirit.

Mak Lampir manages to hypnotize not only Mardian but also Farida, who she lures to the mansion because she needs fresh virgin blood for a ceremony. The witch chains them both up in a hidden underground room / torture chamber / sacrificial altar that can only be accessed by going through a Jacuzzi bath (?) There, she introduces them to the skeletal remains of both Nyai and her former lover, Adolf Peter (Muni Cader), while a giant stuffed bat with glowing eyes sits and squawks in the background (!) This leads to an attempt to transfer souls from the deceased to the new hosts, but it's all interrupted by our hero, who engages in a lengthy and wild kung fu fight with the witch that's better watched by you than described by me!

This nearly 2-hour-long Indonesian whack-fest starts out as your standard fantasy-adventure 'hero on a quest' type of movie and then becomes a star-crossed lovers family drama of sorts and then gets all were-catty before finally settling into a haunted house romp and the whole thing is punctuated with frequent martial arts, sword fighting and flying-around-and-flipping-in-the-air-on-visible-wires scenes with all kinds of fun little touches tossed in along the way. It's quite something... something every bit as entertainingly zany as it is mind numbing!

The ads for this one promised a "Super colossal film with sophisticated tricks processed in Hollywood (America)!" In reality, the effects are nowhere near up to late 80s Hollywood standards. Visual effects look more like what you'd see in very low budget films produced at the beginning of the previous decade. Not surprisingly, the credited U.S. studio (Image Transform Inc. out of North Hollywood) had been around since 1971. There's also some very crude and poorly-executed stop-motion work (a decomposing corpse with chunks of pink Play-doh flaking off is especially bad) and hilariously unconvincing stuffed panther and tiger heads mixed with newly-shot tiger footage and stock footage for the cat stuff. However, it's all rather fitting in this particular context, with the wonky fx being a good fit for the the slapdash nature of the rest of the film. Robert Santoso also deserves a shout out for doing a nice job with the action and fight choreography here, especially in the final fight scene.

Based on a radio play of the same name by Asmadi Syafar (who is given a story credit here), this was followed by two immediate sequels. The first of these; Misteri dari Gunung Merapi II (Titisan Roh Nyai Kembang) / "The Mystery of Mount Merapi II: Incarnation of the Spirit of Nyai Kembang)" (1990), is announced in the end credits and features most of the same principle characters seen here. The second sequel was Misteri dari Gunung Merapi III (Perempuan Berambut Api) / "Mystery of Mount Merapi III: Fire-Haired Woman" (also released in 1990). All three were made by the same director, writer, producers and crew. There was also a Merapi TV series that lasted three seasons, spread out from 1998 to 2005, as well as Merapi books released.

Cast standout Pasha, who seems to be having a ball playing the evil witch, was able to reprise the role in both sequels, the TV series and in the 2012 horror-comedy Mama Minta Pulsa (2012). Sadly, she passed away of complications from COVID-19 early last year at the age of just 68. There were numerous VCD and DVD releases for the title, but only in Indonesia to my knowledge. None of them come with English subs.

★★★