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.

Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat (Indonesia, 1983)

Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat is an odd film. Odd not just because it is an Indonesian action fantasy directed by Sundel Bolong’s Sisworo Gautama Putra and starring Suzzanna and Barry Prima, which are characteristically odd, but also odd in contrast to the expectations that such films typically raise. The best I can put it is that, for a large part of its running time, Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat is like a steamy plantation romance with all of the sex taken out. Its most erotic moment sees Suzzanna felating her own finger, followed by a shot of two frogs fucking.

I’ve often said, though perhaps not out loud, that Suzzanna and Barry Prima deserve a place alongside Tracy and Hepburn in the pantheon of great screen couples, even if they were usually cast in opposition to each other. Such pairings usually featured Prima as the righteous muscle farmer pitted against one of Suzzanna’s patented wild eyed devil women. In Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat, however, we get the rare treat of seeing both cast as protagonists, a pair of star-crossed lovers who come up against obstacles both worldly and otherworldly in their quest to be together.

Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat, which I watched bereft of the sweet mercy that subtitles might have provided, is based on an Indonesian comic book called Nyai Rangsang, which in turn might be based on the life of Indonesian national heroine Nyi Ageng Serang -- though, if it is, I feel comfortable in saying that it is very loosely based on same. In any case, the first act sees Suzzanna’s 19th century heroine, as we are so accustomed, repeatedly subjected to the worst depredations of men. In most Suzzanna films, this would be balanced out by her becoming some kind of blood thirsty vengeance demon in the second half, but in Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat, well… perhaps I should just continue with the summary.

We open on a triple tragedy, with Suzzanna’s long suffering mom, neglected by her cruel husband (H.I.M. Damsjik), dying in her bed as, meanwhile, her pregnant sister, abandoned by her unborn baby’s father, performs a violent abortion on herself with a pointy bedpost (Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat don’t mess). Afterward, the grieving Suzzanna is cast out into the stormy night by her father. Later, she is forced to marry a wealthy plantation owner who attempts to rape her on their wedding night. Suzzanna flees and, rather than be captured by her husbands’ pursuing minions, throws herself from a cliff into the raging river below. Her husband, attempting to catch her, plummets after her and dies. Later, a passing sorceress saves Suzzanna by levitating her out of the rapids using spooky hand gestures. She takes her back to her magic cave and performs a number of rituals on her which include making a diamond disappear into her forehead and sticking a needle into her cheek to seemingly no effect. Suzanna also appears to place a red hot ember against her vagina. From my vantage point, none of this had any bearing on what occurs throughout the rest of the movie.

Suzzanna eventually ends up as the kept woman of Sastro, the troll-ish plantation supervisor played by Soendjoto Adibroto, whose name we will never spell out again. The posh lifestyle attendant to this role is reflected by Suzzanna in her many amazing costumes and ornate head adornments. Unfortunately, her heart truly belongs to Broto, the studly young farm boy played by Barry Prima. Suzzanna first meets Broto when he saves her from a gang of workers who are attempting to rape her, and defends him when Sastro almost runs him and his mom down in his carriage. Suzzanna soon falls into a passionate, Vaseline lensed romance with Broto. And who can blame her? Young Barry Prima is looking especially delicious here, as we will now contemplate:

Ha ha, bros! Now you’re all gay. (While 4DK continues its long standing effect of making its straight women readers even more heterosexual.)

Sastro eventually becomes aware of Suzzanna’s dalliances and turns to a completely other sorceress for help, who has a female chorus line at her beck and call to perform the necessary disco dancing aspects of her rituals (it’s telling that, in a movie where Suzzanna plays a mortal protagonist, we need two fiery eyed witch women to compensate). Potions are devised and voodoo dolls are pricked and, just to pick up the strays, Sastro takes to roaming the plantation grounds with a deadly blowgun.

One day, Broto follows Sastro as he carries the corpse of one of his victims to the sorceress’ cave, where he turns it into a gold plated zombie. Sastro sees that the walls of the cave are lined with poor souls who have similarly been turned into such creatures. Then a quarrel breaks out between Sastro and the sorceress which ends with him tearing off her head, which flies away of its own accord. A black cat then bursts out of the sorceress’ entrails and attack Sastro, which is extremely gross and legitimately surprising.

I should also mention that, just in case Sastro doesn’t seem reprehensible enough to you at this point, he also hobnobs with those bastard Dutch. (Be forewarned that I fully intend to use my one quarter Dutch heritage as license to malign that people at every opportunity. However, should you who are free of my native blood dare to call my people “tulip chewers” – which I’ve just learned is one of the only extent slurs for Dutch people – you will taste my fists. “Tulip chewers” is our word!) This leads to Suzzanna receiving the unwanted attentions of a Dutch nobleman played by an actor whom, due to my not knowing his name, I will simply refer to as Indonesia’s Tom Alter.

Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat roars to a close with the desperate Sastro taking Suzzanna hostage and Barry Prima’s Broto risking all kinds of death traps to save her. This section also offers us some nice martial sequences as both Barry and Suzzanna fight their way out of the cave, sending golden zombies and evil minions alike flying hither and thither. Oh, and then we get some nice exploding lair action to put the icing on the cake, which is not the kind of ending I would have expected from this film given the tear-plumbing melodrama that it started out with.

Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat is one of those films about which there appears to be a lot of information on the internet, until you find that each site simply re-pastes its meager Indonesian Wikipedia entry. What I did learn from that entry is that Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat was Indonesia’s third highest grossing film of 1985. Despite arousing suspicion that the author of that entry suffered some confusion around the movie’s actual release date, I can totally understand it being that popular. I admit to being baffled by Nyi Ageng Ratu Pemikat at first, but, by the end, I was so on board with it that no amount of counter-hexing could break its spell. Score one more for Indonesia.

Tarzan comes to Bali

2010 was a year of highlights here at 4DK, and certainly the lowest was Jungle Adventure Month. Over the course of that harrowing thirty days of wrestling rabid chimps and swatting at tsi tsi flies, I checked in with versions of Tarzan from corners of the world as far flung as Israel, Mexico, Egypt, and India –- two in the latter case: one chaste and one nasty!

Of course, as much as I may have hoped otherwise, I knew that I was not done surveying the various international incarnations of the famed ape man. After all, how could any national cinema lay claim to legitimacy without its own version of Tarzan? That’s like not having your own James Bond, or Superman, or… or Darna.

Fortunately, my latest stop on the Tarzan tour takes me to Indonesia, so at least we’re guaranteed a lot of action and gore, and hopefully some Southeast Asian mysticism realized by way of lots of gooey practical effects. So let’s go!

1989’s Tarzan Raja Rimba looks even more promising for the fact that it stars the great Barry Prima, and was helmed by the director of the riotous Virgins From Hell, Ackyl Anwari. This was the first of two turns by Prima in the Tarzan role, the second being in the following year’s Tarzan Penunggu Harta Karun directed by M. Agnar Romli.

In the grand tradition of Tarzan films, Tarzan Raja Rimba shows our hero coming up against destructive forces from the civilized world, in this case a corrupt logging crew that is chainsaw-ing its way through the Indonesian rainforest like there’s no tomorrow. Of course, while this is a Tarzan film in name, it is, more importantly, a Barry Prima film, and so we get a version of Tarzan who gorily kung fus people to death. Yay! Tarzan’s favorite method of dispatch is to toss an opponent onto a convenient bamboo spike or pointy tree limb, but the logging aspect of the story also provides a generous supply of nasty hardware to further the carnage, including a band saw which Tarzan tests against the villain’s neck during the climactic fight.

Much like the many Indian takes on the Tarzan story, Tarzan Raja Rimba puts an emphasis on the irresistible sexual pull that Tarzan exerts upon any woman in his orbit. Early in the film, Karina, a female member of the logging team, is shown tossing restlessly in her bed, consumed by thoughts of the muscled jungle man. (And, after all, this is Barry Prima we’re talking about –- and he does look amazing in his loincloth and little leopard skin boots –- so who can blame her?) Later, she somehow falls afoul of her crooked colleagues and is forced to flee the camp. The expected menu of jungle perils follows, and she is ultimately driven into the protective arms of Tarzan. However, Prima’s Tarzan is not the thick-skulled, unwitting sexual catalyst that we see in, say, the Zimbo movies, but is rather played by the star as being articulate, authoritative, and not a little bit arrogant.

While making some concessions to the film’s tropical setting (when Tarzan forages for Karina, he returns with watermelon), Tarzan Raja Rimba still manages to deliver on at least the minimum of those ingredients that are internationally agreed upon as constituting a Tarzan movie. The most notable change in this regard is that, rather than an ape, Tarzan’s faithful animal companion is instead a bear –- and a bear played by a man in a very obvious bear costume, at that. (In fact, I think we may be seeing here an early appearance by the Masturbating Bear, back in the days before he succumbed to compulsive onanism). This bear leads the climactic elephant charge upon the villain’s camp at the movie’s conclusion, and also gruesomely mauls to death one of the female bad guys. At least, I think that’s what he’s doing.

Still, if you put these Burroughsian –- or Weismullarian? -- trappings aside, Tarzan Raja Rimba is pretty much indistinguishable from one of Prima’s Jaka Sembung movies, though sadly one without all the mystical flying around and modular body parts. There’s the “tournament” style scene, where Prima’s martial arts skills are tested against a towering, carnivalesque goon in the bad guys’ employ, who seems to have been hanging around in the wings for just that purpose. And then of course there is the requisite tableau of martyrdom in which Prima is chained and abused before dramatically freeing himself to wreak havoc upon his oppressors. All of this, in sum, means that, if you are a Prima fan –- as I most certainly am –- this will probably be the best Tarzan movie you’ve ever seen.

While Tarzan Raja Rimba is relatively straight-faced, films like Ismail Yassin’s Tarzan and Tin Tan, el Hombre Lobo have shown us that interpretations of Tarzan from non-English speaking countries are just as likely to be satirical as they are reverent, and furthermore -- as with the Zimbo movies -- there is often a very fine line between the two. It’s hard to imagine that filmmakers of color -- especially those from countries that had seen white colonial rule –- didn’t encounter difficulties in uncritically addressing the idea of this white interloper, god-like in his physical perfection, who proves himself capable of outdoing indigenous people even at their own indigenousness. (I mean, really, what are Dances With Wolves and Avatar, at their core, other than simply the Tarzan fantasy in different drag?) Given that, one might expect to find at least a little ambivalence in their depictions of our loincloth clad friend.

And, indeed, reverence is about the last thing you can expect from 1976’s Tarsan Pensiunan. Directed by the prolific Lilik Sudjio -- who also gave us Neraka Lembah Tengorak, Darna Ajaib, and the Suzzanna fronted horror classic Queen of Black Magic –- the film is a vehicle for popular Indonesian comedian and singer Benyamin Sueb. Sueb, a member of Jakarta’s Betawi ethnic group, made close to fifty low budget films in the brief period between 1970 and 1978, many of them spoofing Western archetypes from the distinct cultural perspective of the Betawis.

Now, I’d love to tell you what Tarsan Pensiunan is about, but I’m afraid it resisted my entry as vigorously as Tarzan Raja Rimba, with all of its familiar tropes, welcomed it. And given that there is little likelihood that it might ever make the transition beyond unsubtitled Southeast Asian market VCDs, I imagine that it will stay that way. Sadly, the film’s humor is overwhelmingly dialog-based, and its attitude toward pacing and narrative so relaxed that I had to wonder how big a role pot plays in Betawi culture. I couldn’t even tell you for sure whether Benyamin Sueb was meant to be playing Tarzan or simply someone who thought he was Tarzan.

What I did manage to figure out –- I think –- was that Sueb’s character, who repeatedly refers to himself in the third person as “Tarzan”, was having trouble adjusting to the civilized life back in Jakarta. The film’s title apparently translates as “Retired Tarzan”, and I had to wonder, based on the way it’s pronounced in the film, if the word “Pensiunan” was simply an Indo-friendly phonetic spelling of the word “pension”. In any case, what we have for a good part of the film is Sueb –- who wears the same outfit of tee-shirt and striped boxers throughout –- puttering around aimlessly and driving the two (I think) relatives he’s living with crazy.

Eventually, he makes his way back to the wild, where he shows himself to be not very apt at swinging on vines, then has a run in with a couple of hunters/poachers and the female estate owner who employs them. Eventually the film ambles back to Jakarta, where it spends a lot of time on Sueb himself ambling about with a friend of his who has taken to wearing an ape costume. They do a fake trick monkey act to defraud spectators, and then go to a public park and scare passers-by. Occasionally Sueb sings one of his songs, which tend to be rather unremarkable but inoffensive fusion-y rock numbers. The film is over two hours long.

Eventually it occurred to me that, just as Tarzan Raja Rimba is more of a Barry Prima film than a Tarzan film, Tarsan Pensiunan is really just all about Benyamin Sueb. Not that I can say for sure, mind you, but the movie appears to be mining absurdity from the spectacle of the low key Sueb basically going around being himself while half-heartedly pretending to be Tarzan. In other words, if this movie could be said to be about Tarzan at all, there’s such a yawning ironic distance between him and any of the characters we see on screen that his presence is vestigial at best.

Both of the above described movies point once again to the astonishing elasticity of the whole Tarzan concept. And I think the only conclusions you can draw from that are either that that concept is so sturdily anchored within popular culture that it can stand up to any punishment thrown at it, or that, instead, Tarzan is as semiotically naked as he is naked naked, and can mean whatever whose wearing his skin at the moment wants him to. If I found Tarzan more interesting than the things that Indonesian, Egyptian, Indian and Mexican filmmakers did with him, I might devote more thought to that. But, to be honest, if it weren’t for films like these, I’d never give the dumb brute a second thought. Back to civilization!

Nyi Blorong, aka Snake Queen (Indonesia, 1982)

Nyi Blorong is a film starring Indonesian horror queen Suzzanna and Indonesian action king Barry Prima that is thematically neither a horror or an action film, but rather more of a straightforward fantasy picture based in Indonesian folklore. Still, director Sisworo Gautama Putra (who earlier directed Prima in the hit Jaka Sembung, aka The Warrior) provides enough spooky atmosphere and ooky gore to at least please fans of the former genre, even if we don’t get to see Barry spin kick anyone in the mug.

The Snake Queen is one of those mystical figures who is known to grant wishes to those who honor her, but always at a price -- and usually that price ends up making the deal not worth it in the first place. But does that stop people? Consider, for instance, the one supplicant who, in exchange for her consideration of his wish, is forced by the Queen (Suzzanna) to eat human flesh, only to return home to find the partially devoured remains of his young child. (Most world cinema buffs will have already noted that Asian film cultures don’t harbor the same taboos about depicting harm to children on screen that those in the West do, and that the practice seems to gain in enthusiasm once you hit the Southeast Asian countries.)

Central to Nyi Blorong’s narrative is another such supplicant, a wealthy family man who, in his desire to increase his riches, has made a deal with the Queen that, as we see in the movie’s opening scene, has already cost him dearly. In that sequence we see this man’s wife wrapped in her funeral shroud, a gory, telltale bite wound on her neck. Soon thereafter, the Snake Queen rises up out of the ocean and deposits herself on the shore inside a giant pulsating egg, from which she emerges in human form, taking the guise of a female relative (I think) by the name of “Devi” to insinuate herself into the man’s family. Now at this point you might get the sneaking feeling that we have encountered the Snake Queen before in our journeys through Indonesian exploitation cinema, and you would be right. She is one of the many guises of that figure of Javanese legend also known as the South Seas Queen –- she who played such a delightful role in the lurid events of Lady Terminator.

And like Lady Terminator’s version of the South Seas Queen, the Snake Queen here is something of a randy old lass. As such, it’s not long before she has set her amorous sights on Andika (Prima), the hunky young fiancé of her host’s easy-on-the-eyes daughter Shashti (Nena Rosier). Andika in turn falls under the Queen’s spell, and is soon making what would otherwise be referred to as the beast with two backs with her -- if a half human/half snake creature could indeed be said to have a back. This freaky affair is eventually discovered by Shashti, which results in her becoming a target of the Queen’s supernatural wrath.

As films like Lady Terminator demonstrate, the Indonesian film industry was not above occasionally tailoring their product with an eye toward Western distribution -- a tendency that indeed accounts in part for the steady employment of Western-looking, Eurasian actors like Prima and Suzzanna. Nyi Blorong, however -- and despite whatever distribution history it may have had -- is clearly a picture aimed at the locals. As such, it’s one of those films that gives outsiders like myself the kind of voyeuristic thrill that can only come from feeling like you’ve been afforded a peek into another culture's dream life. The film handles its outré subject matter, not with the trashy, winking enthusiasm of the exploitation genre, but instead with a solemnity that adds considerably to its overall atmosphere of dread and disquiet.

This atmosphere in turn serves to smooth over those elements of the film that might otherwise seem laughably makeshift or over-the-top. In the case of the special effects sequences, which are indeed cheap and plentiful, the film also benefits from the fact that, in the best tradition of Indonesian horror, the cheesiness of those effects ends up being trumped by their weirdness. In one scene, one of Andika’s friends enlists the help of a bumbling mystic, and together the two confront a figure with a flaming head whose lower body detaches and does a shimmying dance independent of its top portion. Later, the Queen appears to Shashti in her true form, her head and torso towering stories above the girl perched atop an enormous snake body. And little I can say can communicate just how creepy was the sight of the Queen silently traversing the sky in a ghostly, golden hued horse-drawn carriage. All of this came across as so culturally specific that I found it a bit jarring when a later scene, in which Shashti is momentarily possessed by the Queen, paid an apparent tribute to The Exorcist. That didn’t make it any less spooky, though, when the blue faced Shashti levitated and started doing cartwheels on the ceiling.

As I’m finding is the case with a lot of the most effective Indonesian horrors, Nyi Blorong also makes good use of a very sparingly applied musical score, with many of the most dramatic and disturbing scenes eerily playing out against a muted backdrop of ambient natural sounds. It also doesn’t hurt that the score, when it does chime in, is a hauntingly atonal and minimalist one featuring traditional Indonesian instruments. In fact, the only Western sounding theme to be heard at any point is a woozy string quartet piece that plays during the romantic scenes between the Snake Queen and Andika -- the significance of which I won’t speculate upon, but which is nonetheless deserving of consideration.

And finally, there is Suzzanna’s performance as the titular Snake Queen, which is surprising for its quiet stoicism, as if she is portraying a creature so assured of her power that any overt expression of menace would be unnecessary. For his part, Barry Prima is really just here to provide the beefcake this time around, which he does more than sufficiently. In fact, I found it impressive that, despite the nature of Prima’s fame at the time, the filmmakers at no point in the movie provided any type of showcase for his fighting skills. What final battle there is, in fact, takes place between the Snake Queen and a crone-like old sorceress, both of whom fly about on wires quite wonderfully as magical explosions go off on all sides of them.

Of course, the world that Nyi Blorong presents is far too much of a downbeat and sorrow-filled place for Barry Prima to be allowed to simply come along and punch its woes out of existence. After all, as awesome as Barry is, the Snake Queen, her appetites, and her thirst for payback are eternal -- forces to be reckoned with again and again for as long as man’s greed drives him to write checks that his soul can’t cash. There’s just no competition.

Bajing Ireng dan Jaka Sembung (Indonesia, 1985)

If you've seen Mondo Macabro's interview with Barry Prima, you know that he doesn't look too kindly upon those exploitation films that made him one of Indonesia's biggest stars during the 80s, nor does he hold in high esteem anyone who would seek such movies out. Well, guess what, Barry? I'm going to continue watching your shitty old movies, because they're awesome and you're a god. So screw you -- er, in the most respectful and heterosexual way possible, that is.

Bajing Ireng dan Jaka Sembung -- aka The Warrior and the Ninja, aka Warrior 3 -- is Barry's third go-around in his star-making role as the hero Jaka Sembung*. To be honest, I haven't seen the second film in the series, Si Buta Iawa Jaka Sembung, but the lovely and talented Houseinrlyeh has written a very thorough review of it over at The Horror!? if you want to get up to speed. As for this entry, it's helmed by H. Djut Djalil, who also directed Mystics in Bali, Lady Terminator and Dangerous Seductress, which bodes very well for Bajing Ireng dan Jaka Sembung indeed.

As the mournful introductory music would indicate, this film starts out with things pretty much already in the crapper for our hero and his people. For starters, the inhabitants of Java still have yet to get out from under the tyrannical boot heels of those bastards the Dutch. (Full disclosure: I am one quarter Dutch.... and 100% bastard.) To make things worse, a volcanic eruption has forced the righteous freedom fighter Jaka Sembung and his fellow villagers to flee their homes in search of safety elsewhere. After a long, solemn trek through the parched wilderness, they come upon a town that is under the control of the despotic Captain De Koeneng, who, as is so often the case with these colonialist types, maintains order through a cadre of local collaborators that include all manner of evil sorcerers and unscrupulous wielders of black magic.

Despite what you might think, though, it turns our that Jaka Sembung's services might not be needed, because this town already has a righteous freedom fighter of its own. That would be Bajing Ireng (Zurmaini), who is a humble peasant woman by day and, by night, an ass-kicking lady ninja who steals the wealth of the white occupiers for distribution among the poor townsfolk. Of course, since no one can imagine that anyone else could be as awesome as Jaka Sembung, the powers that be assume that he is responsible for these crimes, and so begin a reign of terror against the inhabitants of the town in order to shake him out. This indeed brings our hero out of hiding, and also into an alliance with Bajing Ireng, which makes for some pretty spectacular scenes of the Dutch forces being gorily dispatched by their combined fu.

If all of these goings on sound too sedate for your tastes, let me point out that, meanwhile, the volcanic eruption seen at the beginning of the film has freed an indestructible and apparently completely insane warrior who was confined to the bowels of the Earth some time ago by Jaka Sembung's old master. Volcano Guy, as I will call him, then rampages through the countryside, beating people with uprooted trees and giving them third degree burns with his hands, all the while grunting and growling like a rabid Bonobo. The Dutch, realizing a good thing when they see one, decide to recruit this excitable fellow for the purpose of putting paid to their accounts with Jaka Sembung once and for all.

The resulting confrontation is indeed a close match, but Jaka ultimately calls upon his magical powers, delivering a blow to Volcano Guy that literally shatters him into pieces. The hero then thoughtfully has Volcano Guy's head delivered to the colonial forces. This, of course, only leads to more suffering for the common folk, and the virtuous Jaka must eventually turn himself in to the authorities in order to put a stop to it. This in turn leads to the tableau of martyrdom that sits at the center of every Jaka Sembung film, in this case with Barry being stretched on the rack before being strapped underneath a razor sharp pendulum. (And it is in this moment that the lack of subtitles is most acutely felt, as we non-Indonesian speakers don't get to be privy to the impassioned patriotic speechifying that Prima engages in throughout.) Of course, the real thrill of this sequence is that, by the time Barry is going through his agonies, we have been thoroughly sucked into the moral logic of the film, and are eagerly awaiting the moment when Bajing Ireng will show up to free him and, with him, turn the tables on the white devils and their cronies with resounding finality.

And when this moment comes, it is indeed an occasion for much whooping and hollering. Bajing Ireng shows up with an army of rebellious townsfolk in tow, most of them women, and, after a chaotic, drawn out battle involving all hands, her and Barry take part in parallel fights in which each goes one-on-one against one of the big bads. In Barry's case, it's a crippled mystic who fights only with his hands while sitting in a lotus position. This may not, in fact, sound like a very involving match-up, but it's to Bajing Ireng dan Jaka Sembung's credit -- or perhaps my own willingness to buy into the crazy universe that it presents -- that it ends up being pretty kinetic and exciting. For Zurmaini's part, she pairs off against an evil sorceress, delivering the film's standout OMG moment when, in a final burst of rage, she grabs her opponent and quite literally tears her fucking face off.

With its wall-to-wall martial arts action, period setting, cross-gender ass kicking, and frequent one-against-all battles, Bajing Ireng dan Jaka Sembung reminded me of nothing so much as an old school Shaw Brothers joint that had been injected with a delightful dose of Indonesian mystical freakiness. And if you don't read that as a compliment, you're reading the wrong blog. Of course, as thrilling as it is, the film still doesn't live up to the fevered absurdity of the original Jaka Sembung, thought that is more a testament to the high bar set by Indonesian trash cinema as a whole than it is to any real shortcomings on Bajing Ireng dan Jaka Sembung's part.

In fact, the comparatively down-to-earth nature of the film's approach works in some ways to its advantage, as, with less reliance on wire work and effects, we get to see more of a display of both Prima's and Zurmaini's (or their stunt doubles') real world skills as martial artists, which are, in both case, indeed impressive. (Though Zurmaini, unfortunately, is ill served by a couple of poorly lit night time action scenes.) In other words, despite what he might say, Barry Prima has nothing to be ashamed of here. Really, Barry, I would think that the fact alone that you made a man who is really way too old to be enjoying these type of films whip off his shirt and drunkenly twirl it over his head in excitement would be a great source of pride for you. That's right, I said pride. (Though perhaps not so much for me.)

*I had originally thought that Prima only starred in the initial trilogy of Jaka Sembung films, but Jack J. from En lejemorder ser tilbage set me straight: There were two further Jaka Sembung films made in the 90s in which he also starred.