Ratu Ilmu Hitam
Familiarizing oneself with another country's horror history means getting to know that country's horror stars. The actress known professionally as Suzzanna had been working since 1958. She became well known for the 1970 human trafficking drama, “Bernafas Dalam Lumpur.” At the start of the eighties, her career would begin a new phase. While macabre films had been made in the country in prior decades – Suzzanna had previously appeared in a 1972 effort, “Birth in the Grave” – Indonesian horror would really kick off in 1980 with “Satan's Slave.” The next year saw the release of “Mystics in Bali” and “The Queen of Black Magic,” two more popular and highly influential titles. The latter starred Suzanne, nearly forty at the time but still astonishingly youthful looking. Its success would lead to her starring in a number of horror flicks throughout the eighties, with “Sundel Bolong” and “Santet” being some of the better known titles internationally. That's how she earned the nickname “The Queen of Indonesian Horror.” But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to “Queen of Black Magic.”
Murni is a virginal maiden in a small Indonesian village. She is seduced by a man named Kohar, who promises to marry her before taking her to bed. Instead, he discards the girl and marries the daughter of the village's leader, granting himself a privileged status. On their wedding day, the bride begins to experience horrific visions of dead bodies, snakes, and rotting food. Kohar accuses Murni of having bewitched his new wife. He assembles an angry mob that tosses Murni off a cliff. The villagers assume her dead but she has been rescued by Gendon, a powerful sorcerer living in the jungle. He promises to teach Murni the ways of black magic, giving her the abilities she'll need to take revenge on those who have wronged her. However, it turns out that her teacher has an agenda of his own. The situation is further complicated by the arrival of Permana, a Muslim authority brought in to investigate all the strangeness, that Murni feels drawn to.
The stereotype is that Asian countries are incredibly patriarchal, which is often reflected in its cinema. This element of Indonesian society is obviously reflected in “The Queen of Black Magic.” The idea of a woman giving her virginity to anyone but the man she'll married is treated as an enormous scandal. It's enough to mark Murni as a pariah even before she's accused of witchcraft. The man, of course, receives no blow back whatsoever for sleeping around. On one level, Murni becoming a magical avenger certainly suggests this is a narrative about fighting back against these restrictive systems. Except, of course, that she's still under a man's control when learning black magic. Moreover, the second half shows Murni being increasingly manipulated by her teacher while she longs to return to traditionally feminine roles like being a mother. The ending makes sure to find a way to excuse Murni for transgressing, having her die a forgiven woman that is subservient to a good man. The moral of “The Queen of Black Magic” definitely seems to be that it's wrong for a man to pressure a woman into sex and generally mislead her... While also pointing towards the idea that a mother, wife, daughter, and sister is still the most she should aspire to.
It's easy to see why Suzzanna would become the face of the horror genre in her home country. She does have an enchanting presence. She is capable of playing both an innocent woman who has been wronged and a wicked force of vengeance. While it can be a bit tricky to tell how the film expects us to feel about her character at any given point, her performance makes sure that we're always on her side. More than anything else, “The Queen of Black Magic” is packed full of unforgettably bizarre images. Murni going somersaults through the air before a full moon or a body exploding graphically right before the end titles come up abruptly: Oh yeah, that's the stuff. That's what I seek out in cult cinema like this. While not quite the parade of lunacy that “Mystics in Bali” was, this was still a ton of fun. [7/10]
New Concorde was something like Roger Corman's third or fourth company, depending on what exactly you count. By the early nineties, the studio was absolutely in the business of producing quickie, direct-to-video sequels to whatever their latest hit was. This is why they made eight “Bloodfist” movies, five “Carnosaurs” kind of, and two sequels to “Munchies.” Clearly, the video stores is where the company was having their greatest success. That is probably why “Watchers II” went straight-to-VHS in 1990. It must have sold well but not so well as to rush a third installment out. When a deal came along that allowed Corman to make some films cheaply in Peru, I guess somebody figured that would be a good place to shoot “Watchers 3.” Marc Singer was, I guess, unavailable so instead Wings Hauser – another cult celeb casualty of 2025, sad to say – would team up with a super-smart dog against another genetically engineered monster this time.
A top secret aircraft is shot down over a jungle infested Central American country. Two creatures escape from a container that is left behind. The first is a mundane golden retriever. The second is a hideous monster, that sets about immediately tearing apart a local military encampment. Meanwhile, a decorated soldier named Ferguson is being held in military prison, for unspecified crimes. A government official named Stratten makes him an offer. Ferguson and a team of other ex-military convicts will be sent into the jungle after the monster as a black ops. unit. If they can capture the beast, their records will be cleared. Shortly after arriving, Ferguson encounters a super-smart dog that he recognizes as Einstein. Yes, it's at this point that “Watchers 3” is revealed as an actual sequel to the second movie. Oh yeah, he also realizes that the team hasn't been sent to stop the Outsider. They've been sent to prove how effective a killing machine it really is.
I don't know why New Horizon decided to produce a blatant knock-off of “Predator,” four years after the cloaked extraterrestrial hunter lurked through the big city. What I do know is that the budget clearly was not here to emulate the pyrotechnics and over-the-top action that made “Predator” a classic. Instead, “Watchers 3” seems to feature a lot of downtime for its team of ex-con bad-asses. There are a handful of encounters with the Outsider in the first half but none are allowed to escalate very far. This means the runtime is padded out with many sequences of the guys bickering among themselves. The one female on the squad is harassed by the biggest asshole on the team, encouraging Ferguson to bark about how he's a dad now or whatever. There's lots of scenes of the dudes challenging his authority, debating what to do, or looking back on their time in Vietnam. Wings Hauser had a certain raspy charm but that can only go so far. A long sequence in which he explains the events of the previous movie, while leaning against a tree, only gives the impression that this life-or-death situation is not so urgent after all.
“Watchers 3” cooks a little bit of “Rambo: First Blood Part II” into its premise as well, what with the good guy being released from prison only to be screwed over by the man in charge. Because this is a half-assed and low-budget rip-off, we don't get to see Wings get revenge on the stuffed-shirt CIA pencil-pusher who sent him off to die. We do, however, get to see Wings sit down from across a large black man and say “I'm black.” (They are about to play chess, har-har.) There's also an amusingly overheated moment where one of his army buddies has a Vietnam flashback right at the moment of death, leading to much overacting from both parties involved. Does that make “Watchers 3” worth watching? Not really. This one definitely needed more dog. [5/10]
Of all the prominent celebrity deaths in 2025, the one that hit me the hardest was Michelle Trachtenberg. I'll admit, I had a crush on her back in my middle school days, going so far as to pin a poster of her from the official “Buffy” magazine up on my bedroom wall. I've decided to pay homage to Miss Trachtenberg by digging up an overlooked series she hosted. In 1996, Discovery Channel launched a kid-centric spin-off network called, fittingly enough, Discovery Kids. At the time, Discovery was still a brand associated with actual educational programming and this venture was meant to bring the same quality of documentaries and science shows to a younger audience. One such program was “Truth or Scare,” which was basically a version of “In Search Of...” targeted at the 7-to-12 crowd. From a bitchin' looking creepy library set, “Michelle Trachtenberg of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,”” as the credits referred to her, would brings us a little bit of the history behind legends like Dracula, werewolves, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and haunted locations from all around the world.
Of the twenty-two episodes, “The True Story of Halloween” is obviously the most fitting for this time of year. Over a half-hour, Trachtenberg describes a brief summation of Halloween's roots as a Celtic celebration and how this practice was eventually Christianized and secularized into the holiday we know today. The narration is fairly simplified but the information covered is essentially true. The script has the annoying habit of relying legends under the guise of “a man claims to have seen” something but it gets the message across. A kid watching this would learn that Halloween began as a celebration of the harvest, a commemoration of the spirits of the dead, and a time when spiritual awareness was heightened. Stories like human sacrifices or black cats being burned at this time are mentioned and smartly dismissed as legends. Instead, the origins of bobbing for apples as a form of divination or trick-or-treating's probable beginnings as the Catholic tradition of souling are high-lighted. Good stuff for a eight year old to learn back in October of 2001.
Les pays loin
Before Jean Rollin started making his dreamy sexploitation movies about naked lady vampires and an immediately recognizable beach, he was a young filmmaker trying to establish himself. After failing to make a documentary about Francisco Franco, he directed a surreal short entitled "The Far Countries." It concerns a young man wandering through the streets of a ruined city, covered with rubble. He has few memories and only knows he is seeking the town center. The people he meets speak a strange unearthly language, always too busy to help him. In an underground tunnel, he meets a young woman who speaks French. Her memories are also fragmented but, together, the two attempt to navigate through this strange, inhospitable place.
Rollin was a filmmaker obsessed with reoccurring ideas and images. He returned to many of them over and over again throughout his career, like reprises during an orchestral piece. "The Far Countries" lacks the sexploitation or gothic elements of his later work but does zero in on another persistent theme. Here, we see a man wandering through a strange city. He doesn't know anything about it, other than he doesn't belong here. Rollin protagonists are always misfits and, more often than not, they wander through labyrinth locations where they do not fit in. The lack of memory – revisited in "Night of the Hunted" – and not speaking the language makes the outsiderdom in "The Far Countries" even more existential. The man doesn't know how he got here, where he's going, and can't make anyone understand how lost he is. You can't help but interpret the film as a metaphor for life when you're a confused young person, with not much behind you and no idea of what's ahead, surrounded by a hostile landscape where everyone around you doesn't even speak the same words as you.
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