This marks the 50th movie I've reviewed for this blog!
Thanks to all my supporters - I couldn't have got this far without you :)
Anyway, back to the high-quality and definitely not sarcastic movie reviews!
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Category: Foreign language supernatural horror
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The title of this movie roughly translates to "Black magic from the junior wife", and revolves around a successful businessman who takes a second wife who then takes it upon herself to launch a campaign of supernatural terror against the husband and his first wife for being left out of the fortune.
Now, Indonesia does things differently - I mean, it is a different place, but can they make a good horror film? Let's find out after the plot!
The plot:
The movie starts off with three women in a gym, Angel, Mayang and one other person doing some sort of yoga or Pilates session, presumably to keep them fit and desirable. After the session, Angel and Mayang discuss Angel's new boyfriend. The third woman then goes to the bathroom and notices an uncomfortable itch around her crotch. She removes her leggings and sees maggots in her underwear, her scalp then gets itchy, skin peels off, her body breaks out in pus and goo, then she seemingly drowns in a deluge of something resembling bodily fluids.
But the crux of the movie is that Angel (Carissa Perusset) has become the second (and much younger and prettier) wife of Burhan (Anjasmara), a successful property developer, much to the chargrin of Vivian (the existing wife, played by Lulu Tobing) who realises her husband is besotted with this woman. Vivian seems to be the public face of the business by being involved in philanthropic efforts and is trying to keep her family at peace and their public persona intact, hence her reluctant acceptance.
Now, this may strike western audiences as strange, but in Indonesia, polygamy is actually legal. It should be noted that the second marriage in this movie seems to be more of a cultural marriage rather than a legal or formal one. Further to this, Burhan still lives at his primary residence with Vivian, their son and domestic servants, while Angel lives in another property (also owned by Burhan, though).
But if you think the infidelity stops with Burhan, you’d be sadly mistaken as Angel is also having a fling with Leo (who Mayang warned Angel about at the beginning of the movie) as it seems Leo has a thing about black magic/non-traditional spiritual beliefs. Leo catches Angel going through his possessions which includes items used in black magic, implying that Leo has been using the dark arts to coerce Angel into a relationship with him. A scuffle ensues, a bottle breaks and Leo's eye is gruesomely injured.
Defeated and forlorn, Leo goes to his mother, Sumi (Happy Salma), a master of the dark arts who guides Leo on how to exact revenge on both Angel and Burhan (you know, rather than teaching her son to be a person of substance and character). Revenge requires the burial of two totems, one of each of Angel and Burhan, at their respective residences. Leo buries Burhan's totem on his property with ease, but when he goes to Angel's property, he is assaulted and captured by Angel's friends/enablers. Angel confirms that Leo has been using his mother, Sumi, to cast spells on people, so she decides to use Sumi to exact some revenge of her own - mostly on Burhan who still favours his existing wife in financial matters.
The first act of revenge is to seduce Roy, Burhan's nephew who has been tasked by Burhan with looking after Angel. Angel tries the old "oh, my leg hurts, can you massage it?" trick, but Roy rebuffs. Angel forces Sumi to create a seduction potion for her on the promise she will release Leo from the cage she has him in. This works, but Angel still keeps Leo in his cage because Angel still needs Sumi to do some more dirty work for her.
This time, she has Burhan cursed, who suddenly has headaches and other pains because Sumi is stabbing his totem, as well being afflicted by some form of psychosis. However, all the while, Vivian keeps up public appearances via the public charity, as well as looking after her afflicted husband and consulting with Brother Kholil (Donny Damara), the family's spiritual adviser.
Vivian finds out that Angel has seduced Roy so she gets all up in Angel's face. This, however, puts Vivian on Angel's radar. Angel makes an attempt to have Sumi target Vivian, using the threat of Leo (who now has lost a finger in a bit of hilariously bad special effect work, alongside his eye from before) to keep Sumi in line. Unfortunately for Angel, Vivian is pretty well protected from the dark arts (which is assumed to be through the advice of Brother Kholil) which forces Angel to take desperate measures - baking a cake with a cursed egg produced by Sumi. Alongside this, Vivian and Burhan remove Roy from Angel's clutches and make him go cold turkey from screwing his uncle's young and sexy wife.
Vivian, being unassuming, starts eating the cake, but then starts throwing up and her protection is shattered, allowing Sumi to work her evil ways. Eventually, Vivian is cornered in her very luxurious shower cubicle by snakes and is about to drown in blood when Burhan comes to the rescue. Brother Kholil sees what is happening and surmises that the only way to stop the drama is to confront the person causing the drama - and who knows where this person is? Roy, the person who has been driving Angel to see Sumi.
Brother Kholil confronts Sumi who does some trickery that transports everyone to the street below (rather than the cramped and dark apartment she stays in) where Sumi unleashes an army of zombies. Right before Brother Kholil gets Walking Dead-ed, Leo rocks up thanks to Roy rescuing him, meaning Sumi no longer has to do Angel's dirty work. Sumi and Leo leave Brother Kholil and Vivian alone, allowing them to turn their attention to Angel who thinks she has managed to get away from the whole situation. However, a van-load of snakes turn up and strike at Angel, ending the movie.
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Yeah. OK. Meh. The acting was OK, so were some of the set pieces, but for what is meant to be a horror movie, there was only one genuinely scary scene - the part where Vivian is cursed and tries to kill everyone in reach. But apart from that, and I don't know if there was a cultural barrier at play, or if the direction just didn't hit the mark, but I just didn't really feel it.
One thing that detracted was that the visual effects were often fairly lousy, and in some cases, hilariously so. The finger-breaking scene and the bathroom full of CGI snakes are the most striking examples, though I will give credit for the pus popping into the mirror in the opening - that was good.
One thing that made me go "Huh", though, was a flashback scene where Angel's mum tells a young Angel that she can be anything and do anything - but then a moment later, some other women come in and curse the mum out for being a whore. This then leads Angel's mum to curse Angel for ruining her life because the mum became pregnant with her, after which the mum throws herself off a building. Dramatic, sure, but without it being tied into the wider narrative of the movie, it merely shows a possible motivation for why Angel is a manipulative money-hungry bitch - if they're going to do tropes, why not do the trope of the revenge that has been decades in the making that is then exposed at the end, to at least help the plot make some more sense? You know, maybe Angel's mum was one of Burhan's previous wives, or Vivian was the one who called Angel's mum a whore. But no…
Plot holes and bad effects aside, I think what this movie does best is highlight the good vs bad dichotomy of human nature that plays on the trope of a virtuous person being attacked by an immoral person after they dared to do the right thing, only for true love and heroics to save the day. And also that people who do bad things sometimes have a motive (except Angel, who seems almost motiveless except for greed).
I really don't see much to recommend this movie, except maybe if you're learning the Indonesian language and want to test your ability to translate.
STAR RATING: 2.5/5
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