Special Silencers (Indonesia, 1979)

My pal Durian Dave just got back from Malaysia and delivered unto me a sack-load of VCDs of crazy looking Malaysian and Indonesian movies, so, not surprisingly, those are going to comprise a lot of what you’ll be reading about here at 4DK over the coming weeks. Of course, none of these VCDs are subtitled, but I imagine that won’t be too much of a problem. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’m sure you’ve long ago given up on me ever reviewing a film that I actually understand anyway.

First up is Special Silencers (Indonesian title Batas Impian Serbuan Halilintar), a vehicle for Indonesian action star Barry Prima that I’ve been wanting to see for quite some time. Barry’s The Warrior co-star -- and one time wife -- Eva Arnaz, is also on hand, and shows herself to be no slouch in the fighting department herself, although the filmmakers seem to use her high-kicking exploits more as an excuse for lots of up-skirt shots. I guess, given Indonesia’s strict codes of film censorship, opportunities for titillating content had to be taken where they could. (Unless you were Lady Terminator and just didn’t give a f**k.)

So, anyway, now I have seen Special Silencers, and it is indeed special. But, although parts of it left me speechless, I refuse to be silenced. Actually, I don’t really know why the movie is called Special Silencers. My guess would be that it was an attempt by those cagey Indonesians to fool distributors into thinking it was some kind of straightforward, Western style action movie. It’s not, though. Instead it’s another example of Indonesian mysticism-inflected freakiness, in this case mixed in with lots of scenes of Barry Prima and Eva Arnaz dispatching goons with airborne kicks.

So here’s what I can tell you about Special Silencers aside from the huge swaths of the story that I had absolutely no comprehension of at all. There’s a guy, see, and he steals an amulet containing a bunch of little red pills from an old holy man. He than goes around and surreptitiously slips these pills to a series of people without their knowing, and then hangs around in the shadows to watch what happens. And what happens is that these pills, once ingested, apparently make a full-sized tree instantly grow inside the digestive tract of the victim, with the result that the gore-soaked branches come poking up out of their stomachs and kill them. This, of course, is portrayed with an almost documentary-like realism.

One of the victims is the traveling companion of Eva Arnaz, who just happens to have recently made the acquaintance of motorcycle-riding free spirit Barry Prima. This man may have been Eva’s husband or boyfriend, but, once he’s out of the way, Barry makes his move pret-ty fast, is all I’m saying. Barry and Eva then take it upon themselves to get to the bottom of this whole abdominal tree sprouting business, with the result that the pill guy starts sending wave after wave of his minions to kill them, which in turn results in lots of entertaining ass-kicking. Finally pill guy captures Eva and submits her to all kinds of unspeakable tortures, which include her having to smell some guy’s smelly gym shoes (true). Needless to say, Barry eventually saves the day, and pill guy, as Fletcher Hanks would say, is made to die “by his own evil creation”.

 (Spoiler)

Special Silencers has pretty much everything you’d want from an Indonesian exploitation movie. It has an outlandish central concept that’s inexpertly realized yet earnestly presented, hella gore, motorcycle stunts, farty synthesizer music, and nonstop action almost exclusively involving Barry Prima and Eva Arnaz yelling and spin-kicking people in the face. In fact, if it’s not a standout of the genre, it’s only because there is so much competition within the genre in terms of sheer apeshit insanity. In other words, they can’t all be Mystics in Bali or Lady Terminator, but that still leaves quite a lot of room for goodness.