Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

May the Devil Take You: Chapter 2 (2020)

Original title: Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Dua

aka May the Devil Take You Too

Two years after the demonic family massacre fun of the first film, Alfie (Chelsea Islan) is keeping the mental demons of the past at bay with pills and attitude, taking care of her step sister Nara (Hidijah Shahab) despite things being exceedingly difficult emotionally, psychologically and financially for the two.

Time doesn’t get a chance to provide further healing, because a group of masked people knock them both out and kidnap them (Alfie’s putting up quite the fight, obviously). When Alfie wakes up again, she finds herself in a dilapidated former orphanage in the country. Apparently, hers and Nara’s kidnapping is the best way a group of young women and men in their twenties could come up with to ask her for help, because who’s talking to people anymore, right? You see, the group grew up together in this orphanage. Quite happily, even, until the wife of orphanage head Lesmana (Ray Sahetapy) died and he became an abusive demon worshipper planning to sacrifice them, as you do. The kids did manage to save themselves by burning him alive, but he cursed them in the process. It looks as if that curse has really begun to hit hard the last couple of months.

Fortunately, the group have found a solution to lift the curse. They just need someone who has fought off demons before to read a spell from Lesmana’s old grimoire, and the thing should be done. And who just happened to be in the news a couple of years ago with a wild story about demons? Despite everything, Alfie eventually does agree to help out the nitwits thinking a kidnapping to be the proper way to ask for help, but her reading of the spell doesn’t lift the curse, and instead starts another night of horror. Well, at least Alfie has some practice in these things now.

It is difficult not to compare May the Devil 2 to director/writer Timo Tjahjanto’s former filmmaking partner Kimo Stamboel’s sort-of remake of Queen of Black Magic. After all, they both take place in an orphanage and concern the demonic misadventures of its former abused inhabitants. However, the film at hand feels somewhat nicer (if you can use that word for something with so much gore and goop as this one has), less interested in its horrors as a metaphor for cycles of abuse and more in making something for an audience to have a loud and creepy good time with; also one with far fewer centipedes, I can happily report. There’s still some depth to the film’s treatment of traumatic childhoods and its consequences, but that’s not really its point. To my eyes, both approaches to horror are perfectly valid, and I’m happy to have two films that could have been carbon copies of each other turn out so differently.

In style and tone, this one’s, like the first May the Devil Take You - which I never wrote up for reasons lost to time and the bad memory of a middle-aged guy, but which I enjoyed quite a bit – clearly made with at least one eye on the first two Evil Dead movies. A couple of moments directly quote Raimi’s films, quite a few more simple suggest the influence, and there’s quite a bit in Tjahjanto’s wild and wildly creative camera work hinting at that influence as well. However, the director then goes and mixes these by now classic US horror film moves with monsters and concepts about devil worship very specifically Indonesian, using Raimi’s early style to tell a story the US director could never have told this exact way. It’s a great example of how an artist can use their influences to build their own thing out of them, and keeps Tjahjanto far away from any accusation of using his clearly encyclopaedic knowledge of the Western horror tradition for mere copyism. Which, don’t get me wrong, can lead to perfectly fine films too, particularly when it’s non-Western directors copying Western ones (the other way round, things often become rather embarrassing).

While I’m still comparing, I do prefer Alfie quite a bit to Ash, what with her being much less of an asshole, and actively trying to protect the people around her and not just herself. Islan’s performance manages to make her courageous in the better meaning of the word (as in, a person fighting through her fear instead of one not having any), and she’s great at suggesting how Alfie uses her rough attitude as a survival mechanism.

There are obviously some plot problems here – mainly, why don’t the idiots ask before they kidnap and why do they dump Nara in the haunted house too? – but watching May the Devil Take You 2, I found myself much more interested in the next weird transformation or bloody mess the film would come up with than poking at its script.

Three Films Make A Rather Grumpy Post: Buckle up for a ***** ride

Stuber (2019): Well, at least that tagline is honest about the quality of the movie, which is a bit of a shame seeing how much I usually enjoy the body of work of many of people in front of the camera here. But what good is an action comedy with a script (by Tripper Clancy) that can hardly land any joke even if most of them come out of Kumail Nanjiani’s and Dave Bautista’s mouths, two gentlemen with excellent comedic timing? And what good is an action comedy whose direction (by Michael Dowse) is so bland, it completely wastes some perfectly good set-ups for violence and shouting (as well as Bautista’s and Iko Uwais’s talents in this regard)? This one’s really only recommended to people who think the title is funny, methinks.

Portals (2019): To stay very much in the same realm, the abilities of the directors behind this weird SF horror anthology – or at least three out of four of them, namely Eduardo Sánchez, Liam O’Donnell and Timo Tjahjanto – stand in inverse proportion to the quality of their movie. All segments here share more or less the same problems, featuring characters who aren’t fleshed out enough for the psychological aspects of the horror to work, a weird threat feels rather more generic than actually weird, and little sense of actual tension to anything happening. There’s not much for any audience to actually care about here, nor does the film present any idea that feels even the faintest bit fleshed out. Tjahjanto’s segment is probably the strongest because it does at least have a tiny bit of dramatic pull, but it’s still disappointingly mediocre. On the plus side, at least it’s not a bro horror anthology.


Vox Lux (2018): Let’s finish this as grumpily as we started, with Brady Corbet’s – also director of the much superior The Childhood of a Leader – anti-pop movie full of songs that may mirror the most insipid side of mainstream pop music but too much in loathing with it to come up with songs for its protagonist that could still believably be hits. One can’t help but think that Sia, who is responsible for the songs, just used old songs of her own deigned too bad to put them out under her own name. Our main character Celeste starts as something of a human being but increasingly turns into a caricature, something that’s not at all helped but the most misguided performance by the usually extremely capable Natalie Portman I’ve ever seen. Structurally and stylistically, the film is more straining to acquire an artsy patina instead of actually doing anything artistically interesting. I also can’t help but raise an eyebrow at a film that so clearly wants to criticize the commodification of pain in popular culture but actually does exactly the same thing, just with an expression of general loathing for said culture on its face.

Headshot (2016)

A man (Iko Uwais) with a headshot wound is washed ashore in a small Indonesian fishing town. Young doctor Ailin (Chelsea Islan), manning the place’s small clinic for a time, manages to save his life, and clearly develops a bit of a thing for him while he’s still in a coma. Because she’s reading “Moby Dick” at the time (she’s clearly a woman of excellent taste), she privately dubs the guy Ishmael. That name is going to stick once he wakes up, for he has only the faintest traces of memories of his past, so Ishmael he is now.

Of course, people do not find themselves getting shot in the head without a reason, and his past is going to catch up to him rather sooner than later. And because movie bad guys are cruel like that, Ailin and a random little girl are going to be dragged into his affairs rather more than anyone deserves; and Ishmael will learn that he’d probably rather have not remembered what the people from his past coming for him drag back to the surface again.

It’s really interesting to compare the joint Kimo Stamboel/Timo Tjahjanto feature Headshot with Tjahjanto’s directorial solo outing The Night Comes for Us. Both, once they get going, are action films of relentless pace, each of which contains about as much set-piece violence as two normal action films. As a matter of fact, you could argue that there’s a bit too much crushing of heads, shooting of bodies and so on and so forth, going on here, the directors clearly working from the theory that when one action scene is great, two must be even better. It’s a bit exhausting to watch at times, to be frank, but on the other hand, every single action scene (again in both films), is so inventive, so excellently staged, and so over the top in its violence, one can hardly blame a director for not leaving any one out. As a viewer, one simply needs to be prepared to be overwhelmed.

The films also share their tendency to be over-the-top gory, with so much blood and other bodily fluids bathing the surviving characters, the classic Japanese blood fountain seems rather reserved in comparison. Again, it might get a bit much for some viewers, but when you go in prepared for excess, you’ll have a great time simply mumbling “did they really just do that?”.

Headshot’s action is a bit different in nature than that of The Night, though, for where the later, Stamboel-less film is an action movie with martial arts sequences, this one’s very much a martial arts movie that puts most of its thoughts into coming up with new ways of getting two or a dozen people killed by Iko Uwais’s fists and feet. So there are quite a few moments echoing classic martial arts cinema, like the scene where Uwais has to fight off his attackers in a police station while handcuffed to a desk. The film also consistently sets Uwais against actors who are just as great screen fighters as he is, so there’s never a moment where we get the Indonesian version of having to pretend Keanu Reeves could beat Mark Dacascos in a martial arts fight. Now, if it where a contest in waving one’s arms around…But I digress.

The other big difference between the two films is in the nature of their protagonists. As Joe Taslim’s Ito in the later film, Ishmael has done terrible things, but where Taslim chose a life as a gangster and did have some, if dubious, degree of choice in his life (even though he tries to become a full human being eventually), Headshot’s protagonist is the victim of a man who kidnaps children, brainwashes them, and uses them as weapons, making him sympathetic even in his most violent moments. The film does use this quite cleverly to keep the audience’s sympathy on Ishmael’s side, emphasising the horror of his upbringing, the irony of him now using what has been taught to him to bring his “father” down, as well as the tragedy that the people he’s killing throughout the film – they don’t leave him much of a choice, mind you – are the closest he ever had to a family and loved ones.


It’s actually rather more cleverly done than you’d expect in a film that’s quite this fond of outrageous violence, but I for one am not going to complain about a film giving me the violence as well as some hidden complexities.

The Night Comes for Us (2018)

Indonesian Ito (Joe Taslim) has been working for the Chinese Triads as an international enforcer for three years now. But when he and his men are tasked with massacring a whole village, something in him changes, and he can’t bring himself to kill the last survivor, the little girl Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez). Instead, he kills his own men and flees with Reina to his native Jakarta, where he was a gang leader before he and his protégé Arian (Iko Uwais) had to hire themselves out to the triads to protect the rest of the gang.

There’s not much left of Ito’s old life. Most of his former friends and partners are dead or in jail. His former girlfriend Shinta (Salvita Decorte), his old friend and partner Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya), his frenemie Bobby (Zack Lee) and Fatih’s nephew Wisnu (Dimas Anggara) are really what’s left of his past relations. Ito’s not happy with getting them involved in his troubles, but he believes he needs all the help he can get to come up with enough money and resources to bring him and Reina out of the triads’ reach. For of course, the triads don’t take to Ito’s betrayal kindly, and have sent a veritable horde out to kill him and the little girl. Among them is Arian who doesn’t seem to be completely on board with the project.

Things are further complicated by the fact that the triads are using their search for Ito as an excuse to move in on Jakarta, eventually offering the local crown to Arian if he is willing to betray his old friends. Also involved is a nameless government killer (Julie Estelle), who actually may be on Ito’s side.

I’m pretty sure that once the production of Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us was over and done with, there was no stage blood left in Jakarta, for the film is an unrelenting series of incredibly bloody action sequences. There’s a bit of obviously Heroic Bloodshed inspired personal business between men involved too, but the emphasis here is really on inspired on-screen violence that attempts to be as gritty and icky as the film can get away with – which is apparently a lot when you can get a deal with Netflix for distribution outside of Indonesia.

Tonally, the action is focused on that most tricky kind of choreography: creating fights that look and feel brutal and realistic, sloppy and inelegant like real fights do (probably), with a side note of desperation. Tijahjanto’s direction is tight, with a preference for action taking place in enclosed spaces that add a dimension of claustrophobia to the physical threat and the general violent insanity going around. The film also does what the more hyperviolently gritty side of action and martial arts cinema seldom does (because the hyperviolence makes this sort of thing rather difficult), defining characters through their fighting styles more than by the things they say: so Ito’s a brutal street fighter who just takes hits in the face and is willing to use just about anything to kill you, the government operator is controlled and efficient even when losing a finger or two, Bobby’s an insane berserker, and Arian’s at once elegant, and treacherous, and so on.


Inside of its basic tenet of being as brutal as possible, the film’s action is surprisingly diverse, with a whole load of fighting styles, action styles, and set piece ideas that never really repeat themselves beyond the good guys (good by default, because the bad guys are definitely even worse) being outnumbered, so the film’s action never becomes monotonous despite being quite so unrelenting. The whole blood and guts style of the affair - Tjahjanto’s experience in gory horror is always visible – puts this in great contrast to the much more antiseptic mass violence in something like the John Wick films that go for the videogame approach to bloody violence that may like a bit of gore, but prefers to ignore how messy, unpredictable and downright unpleasant all this bloody murder and human bodies are. Which isn’t to say that The Night Comes for Us is pretending to be more or deeper than it actually is, it’s just curiously human for a film this brutal.

Three Films Make A Post: KARLOFF TURNS KILLER IN A HORROR-CRAMMED THRILLER!

V/H/S/2 (2013): I was less than enthusiastic about the first part of this horror anthology but the second beats the first one easily and with style, forgoing the attempts to look as fugly as possible for more reasonable POV techniques, and doing much better work telling its very simple genre stories. Then there's the film's absolute highlight, Gareth Evans's (of The Raid fame) and Timo Tjahjanto's (of The Mo Brothers fame) segment "Safe Haven", which goes from mildly creepy, to heavily creepy, to insane what-the-fuckery during the course of half an hour or so, and left me actually slightly breathless. Saying it alone is worth the price of admission is putting it mildly.

Ambushed aka Hard Rush (2013): One thing to keep in mind when making a movie in a genre as rich as the gangster film is that you really need to bring something original or something of your own to the table when making one, because there will already be dozens of movies in existence who did the standards better than you did. Giorgio Serafini's Ambushed really doesn't, and instead tries its luck at squeezing as many worn out tropes into the movie as possible, without achieving any other effect than that of disjointedness and an inability to focus on any one theme or character. Instead, the film is a series of barely explored clichés that is made even less consistent by being the kind of Anchor Bay production that has to feature larger than a cameo but smaller than a substantial role parts for Dolph Lundgren, professional racist Vinnie Jones, and Randy Coutoure (another in a long line of acting ex-wrestlers who can't act for shit), instead of casting actors actually fit for their roles and available for enough shooting days to actually be effective as parts of a movie.

Needless to say, Ambushed is not a movie that stays in mind.

Kiss the Abyss (2010): I'm often rather down on "indie horror" as a genre but Ken Winkler's film avoids most of the pitfalls of what has become a style. So the narrative is rather concentrated without needless digressions, the acting - particularly by leads Nicole Moore and Scott Wilson - solid, and the film is clearly made with an idea of what can be achieved under the circumstances of its production and what can't. The story - boy loses girl to death, boy and rich father go to sorcerer for help, girl returns but develops socially unacceptable habits - isn't exactly original but told with conviction and an eye for the Weird, resulting in a film that makes much out of little in the best possible way.