Dangerous Seductress

Fleeing from an abusive relationship, Susan departs Los Angeles to visit her sister Linda in Indonesia. With Linda soon away on a modelling assignment, Susan happens upon a black magic volume given her sister by an occult scholar, and unwisely summons the recently revived Evil Queen who offers her power in exchange for the victims she needs to complete her escape from Hell. Susan accepts and begins to slaughter her way through the bars and nightclubs of downtown Jakarta…

A conscious attempt to combine the eastern exoticism of his earlier Mystics in Bali with the more export-oriented, western-audience friendly approach of Lady Terminator, H. Tjut Jlalil's 1992 horror Dangerous Seductress, making its home format debut here on this Region 0 DVD from Mondo Macabro, sadly emerges as something of a disappointment compared to its predecessors, with the general impression of the ideas for a 45 minute piece stretched out to twice that length.

With opportunities to accomplish this via dialogue and performance necessarily limited – one barfly's idea of a chat-up line is to asks Susan "ever had sex on the beach?", while most of the supporting cast look like they've been recruited by wandering up to random strangers and asking them if they wanted to be in the film – the result is too many sequences that contribute nothing to the narrative or go on long after making their point: Susan deciding what to wear for her seduce and destroy mission, dancing and shooting pool with victims-to-be; Linda and her fellow models at work on what looks like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition shoot; or just stock helicopter shots of cityscapes and Indonesian Airways planes.

True, similar complaints could be levelled against many low budget exploitation films, regardless of their place of origin. The difference, one would submit, is that the better examples of the form can invest such moments with something more, such as a personal and distictive vision. Unfortunately, whereas a Jesus Franco (at his best) will use them to experiment, subvert and just plain enjoy himself, Jlalil is here functioning – as he humbly admits in the extras interview – as an impersonal hired hand, essentially doing whatever it takes to get enough footage in the can as efficiently as possible.

More positively, then, the unashamed commerciality and anonymity of the piece affords it greater sociological value as a document of Suharto's Indonesia in the early 1990s. We get to see what Indonesians felt foreigners would want to see of their country and what they themselves would appear to have perceived as stylish, sophisticated and modern: big hair for the ladies and the slick gelled look for the guys; brick-sized mobile phones; music dominated by robotic drum machine rhythms and porn sax, and sundry other examples of what passed for fashion in the west a good five years earlier – if ever.

We also get a curious mixture of kinky sexual shenanigans – Susan cuts one victim's torso with a fishhook then licks the blood, and takes another three into a storage locker filled with slabs of frozen meat for fun and maims – and a curious reluctance to actually show anything, the occasional instances of exposed breasts and/or bush concealed through the none-too-subtle application of lighting effects; a combination that perhaps indicates Jlalil's caution about pushing things too far in the domestic context but which one suspects must have hampered the film's prospects in an international marketplace then dominated by Basic Instinct-styled 'erotic thrillers'.

Dangerous Seductress has enough to be worthwhile, then, and is very definely enjoyable when watched drunk and/or with company willing to get into the spirit of the piece, but is not quite up to the – admittedly high – standards of Mystics in Bali for sheer weirdness and Lady Terminator for jaw-dropping so-bad-its-good awfulness.

In terms of picture and sound the disc is about as good as can be expected for a low-budget Indonesian production. There's the occasional sign of print damage and the sound is maybe a bit flat, with some hiss and snap/crackle/pop at times, but nothing to seriously get in the way of appreciating the film, Mondo Macabro having clearly doing the best they can with the available materials by making a new anamorphic transfer.

Perhaps recognising that prospective purchasers are quite likely to already have the Mystics in Bali and/or Lady Terminator discs in their collections, Mondo Macabro have omitted their general documentary on Indonesian fantasy and horror cinema this time round in favour of more film-specific interviews with director Jlalil and FX man Steve Prouty (running 15 and 12 minutes respectively, both men discussing the film and its overall place in their respective careers) and a shorter (four minute) commentary with Prouty talking through the Queen of Evil's reincarnation effects.

The disc is rounded off with a text essay on Indonesian horror, filmographies and trailer reel.