DVD: Dangerous Seductress directed by "John Miller" aka H. Tjut Jalil

I pulled this out of the bargain bin of a used record and video store. I couldn't place the title but thought I'd take a chance on it. I'm glad I did since "Dangerous Seductress" turned out to be a 1992 Indonesian sleaze classic. Like the Italian B-movie makers of yesteryear, at the time this was made the Indonesian studios flogged their product in the US by putting up a pretence of their flicks originating there - hence the imported American "stars" (nascent scream queens Tonya Offer, Amy Weber and Kristin Ann) and SFX expert Steve Prouty. If H. Tjut Jalil had been credited under his own name rather than as John Miller, then I'd have recognised him from the coverage his earlier movies "Mystics of Bali" and "Lady Terminator" received from Pete Tombs in "Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema from around the World". On this Mondo Macabra DVD release, Tombs provides film notes as a part of the extras.

"Dangerous Seductress" starts badly with a high speed car chase and shoot out between police and jewel thieves. The getaway driver is constantly punched hard in the face by an angry fellow robber (who seems to have no worries about the car crashing) and this gives a small indication of the true madness to come. So stick with the movie because it isn't long before the blood of the thieves is bringing a thousand year old witch (played by Amy Weber) back to life. Next. Suzy (Tonya Offer) is possessed by the evil witch and is stalking the nightclubs of downtown Jakarta looking for creepy male victims whose violent deaths will satiate the blood lust of her satanic mistress. Offer boasts impressive cleavage and body shape, but somehow she just isn't attractive, and I really dug her as a butt ugly scream queen (to my way of thinking beauty is all too often insipid and bland). Likewise, since the film is in part a supernatural rape revenge shocker, I loved the fact that while Offer was endlessly dropping her dresses prior to indulging in butchery, she keeps her lacy underwear on throughout.

The majority of Offer's male victims clearly deserve to die because not only are they sexist retards, they are all wearing cheesy knickers (which contrast sharply with Offer's sexy gear). Everything about this film is slightly off kilter, it looks jerky and unreal, like some big haired eighties American soap opera ("Dallas" or whatever) meets David Lynch by way of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Indonesian folklore. There is a really productive hybridity in all this: the producers may have wanted "Dangerous Seductress" to look American but the movie is infinitely more entertaining and surreal in H. Tjut Jalil's failure to pull this off.

While not quite as bonkers as my all time Asian cult favourite "Scorpion Thunderbolt" (two unfinished and unrelated movies cut together to make up the running time of a feature), "Dangerous Seductress" is nevertheless completely insane. Which is surprising given the calm and collected way director H. Tjut Jalil comes across in his extras interview. Jalil even mentions that since it wasn't possible for him to make overtly political movies in the eighties and early nineties, the witches in his films stood in for the Indonesian government which was hated by the local audience for horror films (and therefore all I needed to do to make the film equally effective today was substitute Blair and Bush).

Even when this political subtext is left aside, "Dangerous Seductress" is one hell of a ride, and once we're over the bumpy start it puts Hollywood to shame. My favourite scene is three guys being seduced and then hung on meat hooks in an abattoir by Tonya Offer who throughout is wearing nothing more than lacy underwear and a vampire smile! Imagine an Andy Sidaris movie ("Hard Hunted" or whatever) meets Lucio Fulci at his best ("Zombie Flesh Eaters", "The Beyond"), but dumbed down to the max on crack.... Wild

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