Rizal Mantovani is back with yet another silly monster-romp from Indonesia. The last one I saw was
Taring, a jungle-style version of The Descent that was quite OK but mostly an excuse to show supermodels in peril (which happens to be one of my favorite genres, some day I will write an article about that!).
Jenglot Pantai Selatan is more or less an eighty minute long excuse to show a lot of cleavage. Or to be more specific, an eighty minute long excuse to show half-naked people being killed by the most bizarre monster I’ve seen in a long time: the Jenglot!
So what the heck is a Jenglot? First of all, it’s a mythological creature that’s very popular in Indonesia. Just google it and you’ll see the legend is very much alive up to this very day. To make it simple, it’s more or less a supernatural pet to magicians who practices black magic. It’s a small deformed version of a human, often with long claws, sharp teeth, skin like a newborn rat and quite hairy! It also has a tail and human ears. Cozy!
In this cinematic masterpiece we follow a bunch of twenty something kids who goes to a hip beach party to drink, dance and maybe get some action. And the girls shows their cleavage and the guys show their fit torsos. But this time they have bad luck, because a gang of Jenglots – belonging to a weird, smoking, bearded man who can be invisible to some people – decides to eat everyone that gets close to the water and yeah… everyone near the beach!
I would lie if I claimed Jenglot Pantai Selatan to be a masterpiece, because it’s not. Like Taring it’s a cheap monster-movie with sexy women and cute guys getting attacked eaten by very strange monsters. It’s not even that gory, but bloody and show some gory aftermath. The most gory scene is when one of the Jenglots burst through the chest of one of the characters. But don’t let this stop you from enjoying this piece of trash, because it’s fun trash.
The monsters themselves are cheap and strange, and I think they even put either a monkey, or a cat or a small dog inside the monster-suits in a couple of scenes. They have big human ears, pig-noses and looks god damn ugly – but fun! They also have long tails with something that looks like a human hand on the end. I mean, wtf?
It starts kinda slow, but like in every good SyFy production this also has at least one killing every tenth minute and when there’s not monsters it has half-naked people to look at instead. It’s cheap, shot on digital video – but it looks professional – and sometimes like a better soft porn flick – but uses the low budget in a creative way. I hate low budget movies that don’t show anything when the only thing they can offer is blood, monsters and nudity. Jenglot Pantai Selatan at least tries to give us as much as possible and only that makes it worth watching.
It’s nice to see that Indonesian genre cinema still lives. Give it a try!
It took me
a few years to actually watch Sergio Martino's Islandof the Fishmen, but when I finally took the time it was well worth it. Maybe I
was a bit sceptical after Martino's disastrous The Big Alligator River and the
generic and uninspired Mountain of the Cannibal God, both from the same time -
but this fishy tale had such an interesting look and feeling, almost like on of
Kevin Connor's adventure movies with Doug McClure mixed with a healthy dose
Island of Dr Moreau and Lovecraft. Can't go wrong with a combination like that!
I'm always
fond of horror movies set in the movie business, or related. Nick Marino's
Bloody Movie is a fun, violent and sentimental slasher set in the house of a
silent movie star, The Back Lot Murders from 2002 is a gory slice 'n' dice flick
set in a movie studio and Scream 3 and the Australian murder romp is also set
in the adventurous world of b-movie filmmaking. I've been aware of Dark Reel
for quite a while, but I never got around to see until today - and it was a
nice surprise. Not perfect, but a lot more ambitious than a lot of other DTV
horror movies out there. My main interest in it was of course Lance Henriksen,
an actor I love and admire since childhood - but he also have a tendency to be
a bit bored when making too much movies at the same time. I'm happy to say that
he's doing fine here!
A couple of
weeks ago I saw my first Santo-movie, the excellent and fun Santo & Blue
Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolfman (love titles like that!). I loved every
second of it and the next morning I ordered a couple of them. The first one to
arrive was Santo in the Wax Museum, in a nice English DVD release. A sharp
fullscreen print and in Spanish! Lovely! It's hard to find any deeper meanings
in a movie like this. Santo has his mask, someone gets kidnapped, he's trying
to solve the mystery and then there's a lot of wrestling, off and on the arena!
Like good old Mr J once said, it's like a Godzilla - you know exactly what you
get!
In the year
2000 I was working for a shady distributor in 
I won't
even begin trying to tell you about the storyline of Succubus, because it's
virtually impossible. There is an outline for something - a nightclub, a
producer (Jack Taylor) of nightclub acts, a beautiful woman (Janine Reynaud)
who can't see the difference between reality and fantasy, and that's about it.
Succubus is so far the most surreal and abstract Jess Franco movie I have seen,
somewhere between Bunuel and Jodorowsky and his own work. The story goes from
scene to scene, with odd dialogue taking us further and further into a very hallucinogen
saga. 
Eurociné, a
name that can induce fear in even the most hardcore sleaze collector - mostly
because the extremely uneven quality and movies that often dares to be so
boring that it's hard to understand without having seen them. It takes some
time to get used to their slow pace, cheap sets and non-existent scripts - some
once in while they strike gold and Exorcism is one of those surprisingly
complex and interesting projects. Without a doubt one of the most personal
movies Jess Franco ever made, so personal it could be a double bill together
with Bo-Arne Vibenius 1975 classic Breaking Point, a movie that shares a
similar gritty and nasty atmosphere. But where Andreas Bellis Bob Bellings just
is an office rat who goes over the boarder of insanity, Jess Franco's adult
author Mathis Vogel has been there for a very long time...
