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!
