Asih 2 (2020)

A couple of days – at best months – after the first Asih movie, our indefatigable kuntilanak (as always, Shareefa Daanish) returns, murders the protagonists of said movie, leaving the old lady (Marini) behind to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution, and kidnaps the couple’s baby Amelia. So much for surviving a horror movie.

About six years later (so about 1991), a little girl (Anantya Rezky) is hit by a car on a jungle road and brought to hospital by the driver. Apparently, the kid lives alone in the jungle, without family or home. Hospital doctor Sylvia (Marsha Timothy) decides the little girl she soon will dub Ana needs adopting rather badly. It is clear that Ana, as well as the situation in which she was found, reminds Sylvia painfully of her own daughter and the way she died some years ago, a tragedy neither she nor her cartoonist husband Razan (Ario Bayu) have emotionally recovered from. Razan is pretty sceptical about the adoption idea, but is letting himself be convinced.

As the couple quickly realizes, Ana isn’t in the best of mental health, and isn’t exactly socially adapted to life outside of the jungle. This is of course not going to be the major problem our protagonists have to cope with, for Ana is of course little Amelia after some years as Asih’s “daughter”. Thus, the very jealous and rather dead would be mother starts on her usual diet of terror.

Which, of course is the main problem Rizal Mantovani’s Asih 2 has. This is now the third movie in the Danurverse in which Asih is the main villain, and her bag of tricks really hasn’t changed much from the early days of the franchise, so our characters are spooked and creeped out by things the film’s audience will have experienced often enough for a degree of tedium to set in. There are still decent scare scenes in here, thanks to Mantovani’s considerable talent at going through the motions with a degree of style, but hardly one of them is going to surprise or shock anyone. They do deserve an appreciative nod for competent filmmaking by the director, though.

Another obvious flaw is the amount of time the film needs to show its protagonists catching up to all the things about Asih the audience has learned during the course of her other appearances. There’s little excitement in seeing them figuring out the kuntilanak’s not exactly complex backstory, and there’s really little reason for an audience to go through it yet another time, particularly since the film adds little that changes anything of much relevance. Asih’s creepiness – and really the creepiness of most supernatural threats in the movies – is not at all enhanced by us knowing every part of her in fact sad and tragic backstory in excruciating detail, and there’s certainly no need for the film to go through the material yet again when it has no plans to use it in any interesting or new ways.

Thanks to this, Asih 2 also manages to bury its more interesting elements, namely the emotional parallel Sylvia draws between Ana/Amelia and her dead daughter, the well-drawn fog of grief that has descended on hers and Razan’s relationship and what their new little girl does to that. There’s a really interesting horror film about two grief-stricken women – one living, one dead – fighting each other for an adoptive daughter buried in here, but it is buried under the dross accrued through the very real horrors of bad franchising.

Jailangkung 2 (2018)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some elements of the first movie in the synopsis!

One might have thought that following the grand finale of the first Jailangkung, ghosties and ghoulies would leave our protagonist family alone for a while at least. Alas, it’s not to be, for there are more than a few troubles coming up only shortly after the end of the first film. As it happens, Bella (still Amanda Rawles) and Rama (still Jefri Nichol) are the only characters who are not actively troubled by something supernatural or psychological at the beginning of this sequel. Bella’s father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) is still pining after his dead wife rather badly, and has now added quite a bit of guilt for the pain his attempts at coping with his grief via magic have caused his daughters to his hang-ups; on the outside, he’s trying to pretend everything’s alright now to a truly unhealthy degree.

That’s a rather minor problem by the family’s standards now, though, for Bella’s sister Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) is more and more drawn to the mysterious (and clearly evil) insta-baby she gave birth to in a graveyard in the last movie. It’s not taking long, and she’s full on obsessed with the need to protect it from everyone, particularly her own family, with newfound poltergeist style superpowers. Because that’s not enough supernatural trouble for one family, little sister Tasya (Gabriella Quinlyn) – who was mostly a plot device in the first film – is also still missing her mother, and ghostly voices as well as the family tendency to do stupid shit suggest to her that she might use Jailangkung to talk to her. Which, obviously, is not going to turn out well.

In the end, it’s up to Bella and Rama, and a not at all suspicious new student acquaintance of theirs named Bram (Naufal Samudra Weichert), to solve the increasing amount of supernatural troubles hounding them and their loved ones.

Though we also get a couple of scenes with a medium (Ratna Riantiarno) called in by Ferdi, who’ll end up having a magical special effects duel with a flying mantianak. The Warrens never get up to stuff this awesome. Which, of course, only goes to show that returning directing duo Rizal Mantovani and Jose Poernomo do understand well that a sequel needs to escalate things in an audience pleasing manner, and proceed to do just that here.

The Conjuring movies do come to my mind for a reason here, for, while divided by cultural specifics and budgets, both movie series do tend to eschew exploring interesting thematical or character depth, and really go for a mix of horror set pieces and melodramatics to keep their audiences hooked. Jailangkung 2 works very well for me in that regard, thanks to a series of pretty great set pieces (and a complete lack of boring Evangelical Christian demons) that really do climax on a pretty weird and awesome sequence involving our protagonist family, some black magic touting bad guys, our main monster, said medium/exorcist character, a lot of shouting, camera shaking, and peculiar monster fighting techniques.

On the way there, the directors include some very fun other set pieces. A personal favourite starts with a female shape in the background exactly and very creepily mirroring Bella’s movements in an empty and dark gas station, escalating from unease about a bizarre situation into a chase involving more than one spirit. Later on, we also get the rolling heads of dead Dutch colonialists menacing our characters in a lighthouse, with no Jaka Sembung around to kick them away.

It’s all very good fun in a high end haunted house ride manner. For my tastes even more so than the first movie was, because Jailangkung 2 also escalates the weirdness of the supernatural menaces, and if a film is not aiming for serious character work, weirder is usually better in horror. It certainly is here.

In short: Jailangkung (2017)

When their father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) falls into a mysterious, medically inexplicable coma, sisters Bella (Amanda Rawles) and Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) learn some rather disquieting facts about what he has been up to during the last years. Apparently, their father has regularly retreated into a secret house in Eastern Java when they thought he was jetting around the country doing charity work. There, he attempted to contact the spirit of his dead wife, their mother, with the help of something called Jailangkung, a divination ritual that uses an abstracted sort of puppet (and about which you can find some more information here, keeping in mind that the film uses a pretty different variant of what’s described in the article). Eventually, he did indeed manage to have a chat or two with the dead woman, but he also accidentally invited something terrible into his life that is the reason for his illness now.

With the help of Bella’s friend Rama (Jefri Nichol), who studies the supernatural from a religious-mystical angle, the sisters attempt to help Ferdi where medicine won’t. At first, though, these attempts only cause further problems in the form of more supernatural ingressions.

To my mind, Jailangkung’s co-director Rizal Mantovani (here working with Jose Poernomo as a co-director) was on of the best directors in the last big Indonesian horror boom. This later movie is not on the level of something like the original Kuntilanak trilogy, but it’s a fine, fun piece of Indonesian horror nonetheless. The film’s major missteps mostly concern its treatment of the familial relations of its characters with its tendency towards the saccharine, which does undermine some of the film’s darker strings of thought somewhat.

This is, after all, a film whose inciting incident is caused by a man who is at once incredibly grief-stricken and completely unable to communicate the depth of his grief to his daughters, rather turning to weird folk magic than revealing what’s actually going on with him emotionally. This would probably hit harder and be more thematically resonant when it would actually show in what we see of the family relationships instead of incessant niceness and willingness to sacrifice.

On the other hand, Mantovani and Poernomo do have quite a bit of fun with the supernatural business at hand, going through all kinds of spooky shenanigans, from a ghost riding on Dad’s back to a very sudden and rather disquieting supernatural pregnancy, including a ghost ambulance and delivery in a graveyard. The hauntings are often shot with a nice sense for the appropriately spooky mood and a total willingness to get weird. Thanks to the set-up, this huge diversity in supernatural occurrences even makes sense beyond the needs of not boring an audience. It’s always nice when filmmakers put at least a little thought into these things, and that goes doubly so when thought leads to making a film more entertaining (in the appropriately creepy manner).

In short: Air Terjun Pengantin (2009)

Dedicated final girl Tiara (Tamara Bleszynski), plagued by flashback trauma concerning her car collision with a black cat and subsequently being trapped inside, invites her sister (I think) Mandy and a veritable horde of Mandy's young, pretty and totally non-descript friends out to a trip to a seemingly empty island not very well known as "the Bride Island". There's a tragic story about a black magician trying to steal a bride there, only killing her in the process, but these are modern times, so that's surely no reason to get nervous.
So, little does anyone expect the island not to be quite empty, but instead inhabited by a charming guy with an excellent mask who soon proceeds to slaughter the pretty hordes, drinking their blood to become invulnerable, per the recommendations of a hallucination (well, or a ghost, but since the guy's invulnerability will turn out to be quite limited, I'd bet on a hallucination). You know the rest.
I really could go two ways with this write-up. One possibility would be to bemoan the fate of Air Terjun Pengantin's director Rizal Mantovani, who started his career with the Kuntinalak trilogy, possibly the best films coming out of the great Indonesian horror boom of the second half of the Oughts, but has now come down so much in the movie life he has to helm Maxima productions with a (un)healthy emphasis on the non-softcore the Indonesian censorship allows, with much cavorting of pretty if surgically enhanced girls and boys in their underwear and swimwear while horrible music plays in the background.
However, and here's where the second and friendlier way to look at the film comes in, while it is undoubtedly true Air Terjun Pengantin can't compare with Mantovani's classier films, it actually does work quite well as what it is: a very low budgeted little slasher movie out to show nearly nude young people, some friendly yet effective gore, and to let its (clearly rather young and not oriented towards a traditional Indonesian life-style, whatever that may be) audience have a fun time with getting (sort of) scared. It may sound strange to some of you, but this sort of highly exploitative, commercially oriented horror cinema always feels very innocent to me, for instead of claiming any higher artistic goals, its proponents are never less than honest about the kind of transaction they are after: we give them our money, and they give us as much sexiness (in this case taking place in front of a landscape that's pretty pleasing to the eye, too) and blood as the censors allow (typically, Indonesian censors allow much more blood than sex, which makes the film's attempts at sleaze look even more innocent to eyes used to pink cinema and Italian sleaze like mine). It's nothing if not honest.
From time to time, Mantovani even has the opportunity to let some of his talent shine through. The latter parts of the movie - thankfully, this is a film that knows you gotta stop with the sleaze once the killing starts or lose any possibility of tension - still look cheap as hell, but also demonstrate a nice sense of pacing, and from time to time even give the director a moment or two to set up an elegantly framed shot (I'm especially thinking of Bleszynski tied to a tree in front of a waterfall, which is pretty brilliant in its horror paperback novel cover way).
The rest is routine, cheap, yet competent slashing with some small, yet appreciated, influences of Indonesian culture like the killer's mask and the motive for his violence. In this case, that turned out to be enough for me.

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Kuntilanak (2006)

aka The Chanting

Samantha (Julie Estelle) is a troubled young woman. Her life's like a certain type of country song: she is plagued by highly disturbing recurring nightmares, her mother just died, and something has happened that convinces her to keep her distance from her boyfriend Agung (Evan Sanders). And that's not enough. Her step-dad would very much like her to take her mother's place in his bed.

Obviously, Sam isn't going to live at home for much longer and moves into an exceedingly cheap boarding house specialized in catering to poor young people. I wouldn't know who else would want to move in there - the building is rather run-down, its entrance can only be reached by strolling through a small but creepy graveyard and nearly the first thing the landlady tells Samantha is that a Kuntilanak - a ghostly cross of white-haired corpse woman and horse with an unhealthy connection to children - is said to live in the big tree in the middle of the cemetery. While she claims not to believe in the Kuntilanak, the woman is wildly enthusiastic about the legend. She even sings Sam a chant that is supposedly used to summon the creature.

The chant has a strange effect on the girl, nearly letting her collapse on the floor.

Samantha's nightmares aren't stopping in her new home and while Agung, who studies psychology, tries to find out what his secluded girlfriend's dreams mean, ever stranger things start to happen.

Whenever Samantha feels threatened or upset, she falls into a trance-like state and starts to sing the Kuntilanak's chant. Her (not necessarily undeserving) victim bleeds from the nose, Samantha herself pukes maggots and a little later, the Kuntilanak pays a lethal little visit.

Apart from the ghost problem, there's something else just not right with the boarding house. Rumor has it that it belonged to a satanic cult that somehow used the Kuntilanak's powers to gain fortune. It really doesn't look to good for Samantha's health and sanity here.

Kuntilanak is a mighty fine part of the Indonesian share of the big Asian horror wave. The budget may be low, but director Rizal Mantovani is more than able to hide the rubberiness of his monsters. Even better: Mantovani has a real talent for using the decrepitude and decay of his locations to build a creepy mood and he avoids using too much jump cuts or other stylistic flourishes I still like to blame MTV for.

The plot isn't exactly what I'd call original, but the cliched elements the film is made of are put together cleverly and with classical genre verve. I may have heard this song a hundred times before, but the new cover version is still great. And look, it even has traditional Indonesian instruments (or ghosts), but uses them in a modern enough way.

It's also a nicely straightforward plot, without the sort of underhanded bad twists which have ruined more than one film for me with their insistence on acting as if there were no difference between inanity and cleverness. Instead, Kuntilanak puts its energy into old-fashioned values like logical plot progression, and not deep but believable characterization and wins at least my heart with craftsmanship you might as well call art.

The acting is very solid. Julie Estelle is a little awkward from time to time, but this awkwardness fits Sam's character better than your typical clever young method actor ticks would. Estelle is also quite adept at looking creepy into the camera while chanting, which is a real plus and she has no problems selling her character's thematically and plot-important inner strength while still seeming vulnerable. Sanders' Agung doesn't have much to do, but I'm certainly not going to complain about a film that decides to let its heroine rescue the hero and take care of her own troubles.

Kuntilanak is exactly the type of movie that can make me fall in love with genre movies again and again, doing the same thing every other film does, just better and with a handful of thoughtful changes to the formula that really make it worth my while.

 

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