Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Blind Warrior (1987)

When you least expect it a movie finally lives up to it's hype. Blind Warrior is the movie and I can recommend it wholeheartedly! This was the last in the Indonesian Warrior-franchise, the first one was of course The Warrior with Barry Prima, and I wonder if Mondo Macabro wouldn't have sold better if they started with Blind Warrior instead of the first one? Because here we have everything you want, and a little bit more.

The Blind Warrior, let's call him BW, wanders around in the countryside rescuing people from other (evil) people. The evil leader of the country has a habit of sacrificing virgins (they don't say that, but we all know!) to a big evil god. But what the people don't know is that the women survives this and is doomed to be fucked by the evil leader in some kinda stone-bathtub with little.. polystyrene... balls? Sounds ok anyway. But a young woman don't want to marry the evil leader, and of course her whole village is slaughtered by the evil army... and BW, our man, comes to rescue! (that was six "evil" by the way).

Ah, you know how it is. The stories in these Indonesian adventure-movies are often very thin. It's the basic crap about good vs evil, people in funny costumes and huge amounts of gore. Yes, but more on that later. I read reviews that claim that the first hour is kinda slow. Maybe it is, but it still has to massacres and a couple of minor action-scenes, clumsy fights mostly - you know where they just stand and wait in line to get killed. But this first hour works fine, and story works and not so much unnecessary scenes. It's just basic, competent storytelling. The whole movie also has a big feeling to it, which makes it look more expensive than it actually is. The baddies lair is especially impressive with that enormous statue in the middle. Cool.

But the thing that will make all of you wanna see this movie is the gore and splatter. Because if you just wait a little bit, and look beyond those first bloodless (but exciting) fights, you will get your reward in the last half hour. Here we have some very cool splatter-stuff! Lot's of impalings, cut throats, three decapitations, some different kinds of body-rippings and a lot more. A lot of graphic stuff here, and even if it's cheap and cheesy, it's well worth the wait. Blood-spurts for whole the family! Did I mention all the big explosions too? There's a lot to love in this flick.

I have a DVD-release of this. I guess it's a bootleg, it says Terror-Vision in the beginning and has both an English and a German language track. The quality is VHS, but it's quite good anyway. You see everything and it's uncut. Fullscreen too, and during one scene Japanese subtitles shows up. But it's a great DVD anyway, and the quality is good enough until some kind human out there releases a 3-disc special edition.

2 comments:

Jack J said...

Cool post, Fred! I like this film very much too as I'm sure you figure.

I don't think it would have changed anything if MM had put out The Blind Warrior instead of The Warrior (aka Jaka Sembung). According to a post on Cinehound by Pete Tombs the release was killed when the film was made available for free from a popular torrent site. I'm sure it would have been the same with The Blind Warrior.

By the way, there is no "Warrior franchise". The original film + the sequels are all made by Rapi films. A franchise would mean they sold the rights to another company to do sequels.

Ninja Dixon said...

Yeah, it's a great movie.

Or maybe people aren't interested in indonesian movies? I'm sure the majority out there would call them "bad" movies and don't give a fuck about them - which is a pity, because I think they're great. They probably had their time, but not anymore :/

It can be called a "franchise", even if it's not sold off to someone else. It's just a common expression.