HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2020: Mystics of Bali (1981)

And here we go...

Our sponsor for this first day is my friend, Los Angeles-based critic and proudly self-proclaimed ‘cinema snob’ Witney Seibold!  Witney, along with his podcast brother William Bibbiani (who will be programming tomorrow), maintains the Critically Acclaimed Network, a very vast repository of film and television based podcasts including Cancelled Too Soon (television series that lasted one season or less), Episode Zero (looking at the films that influenced influential films and film series, starting with Star Wars) and, recently Wholly Batman (covering every episode of the ‘66 TV show).  They’ve really stepped up in this time of the pandemic, and if you sign up for their Patreon, you’ll literally have a metric crapton of podcasts to occupy your time during The Year O’ The Plague!

(I suppose I should also mention that Witney is our Special Guest Announcer for Public Domain Comic Book Theater: Flee The Phantoms.  If you don’t know what that is, go here)

Witney is representing The Trevor Project, an organization that provides crisis and suicide prevention services to at danger LGTBQ youth.  If you donate to this worthy concern, you will get to choose a film for a later date in the Horrorfest!  More info below.

So to launch this year’s Gauntlet of Ghoulishness, Witney chose the Indonesian horror flick Mystics In Bali, which I watched previously during my tenure on Ken MacIntyre’s Movies About Girls podcast a long time ago.

To paraphrase my esteemed friend Patrick A. Walsh of ScreamQueenz, this 1981 entry is a ‘One Dumb Bitch’ movie.  Cathy Kean (Ilona Agathe Bastian, who looks like she should be playing bass for the Go-Gos) is researching a book on ‘black magic.’  She’s already learned the secrets of voodoo--the ‘black magic of Africa’--and wants her Indonesian boyfriend Mahendra (Yos Santo) to introduce her to a practitioner of Leak, the Indonesian Black Art.  Mahendra wants to get into Cathy’s (very short) pants, so he introduces her to Old Leak Queen (Sofia WD), who agrees to take Cathy on as her disciple.  The Queen gets her hooks into Cathy and turns her into a pennaghalan, a gruesome blood-drinking spirit that appears to be a flying disembodied head with her internal organs still attatched.  Mehendra must collaborate with his uncle, a local holy man, to prevent Cathy from being forever damned.

This film has a reputation for being silly, strange and, among some viewers, very bad.  It is obviously low budget, the continuity on the version I saw is out of whack, and the dubbing on most prints does it no favors by being awful.  But here’s the deal--this is closer to At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul  than it is to The Blood Drinkers* in that, even though there is an American lead character, I don’t think it was meant to be shown overseas.  It’s a film by H. Tjut Djalil, an Indonesian filmmaker, based on an Indonesian novel, for an Indonesian audience familiar with the supernatural lore of their home country.  And that’s why I think it feels so alien to us...and why it can be so entertaining both as an ironic and non-ironic watch.

You see, even though there is some hand holding expository dialogue, the film presumes a familiarity with the myths of the Leak and Pennaghalan the way an European film would expect us to be familiar with vampires and werewolves.  There is stuff here that, because of the primitiveness of the special effects and the fact we’re literally in foreign territory that looks goofy when, in fact, it’s terrifying.  The shot of Pennaghalan Cathy feeding off of a pregnant woman looks weird, the woman’s belly deflating...unless you know that what’s going on is that the pennaghalan is sucking the woman’s baby out of her, and her internal organs are following, causing the woman’s death.

Some of these set pieces are really strange, which I think is to the benefit of the film.  After establishing the Leak can shapeshift, we are treated to a scene of the creature interacting with our leads as a bush with an impossibly long prehensile serpent tonuge.  There’s a scene of Cathy and the Leak transforming into snakes...followed by a scene of Cathy waking  to vomit up several live mice.  I can see why most people ridicule these scenes, as well as the cheap-ass blue screen effects and the animated magic fight, but I saw it as more evidence of this strange unknown territory I was trespassing on and felt it helped rather than hindered its effect.

I also rather liked that the two people you are set up to believe are the heroes fail.  And while it seems that the white wizard who shows up to save the day seems deus ex machina, his presence is set up thanks to some dialogue in the film’s first act.  There’s a sense of family saving the day that probably seems alien to us...but this wasn’t aimed at us.

I can’t get over the fact that the film seems really ineptly edited.  There’s a whole character who comes out of nowhere in the third act that I have to assume had a bigger part initially, and there are scenes that quite frankly seem out of sequence which gave me moments of confusion.  But to honest, I think I enjoyed it more this viewing, where my recently acquired knowledge of Asian folklore and cinema gave me a better viewing position.  I do recommend this, especially as it’s fairly easy to find--I found several versions of the film for free on Youtube!

Tomorrow, it’ll be Witney’s podbrother William Bibbiani sponsoring a viewing of a classic--and at points thought lost--James Whale film, namely 1932‘s The Old Dark House!  William will be representing the American Civil Liberties Union.

There are Twelve Sponsorship Slots Left in the Halloween Horrorfest this year.  To claim one, do one of four things:

1) You can become a Domicile of Dread Patreon at any level.  Patreons always get a free slot, as well as advance access to podcasts and other goodies!

2) You can buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi.  Suggested donation is $3

3) You can make a donation to Black Lives Matter.  Suggested donation is $10.  Please forward your receipt to me as proof.

4) You can choose to make a donation to the charity chosen by a sponsor on his/her/their day. Like with the third possibility, please forward me proof of donation.

As with last year, if I end up with more sponsors than there are days in October, I will go into Horrorfest Overtime, which means Halloween goes into November for me--and you!

*--I am never going to escape that stupid-ass film, am I?