Crazy Indonesia: Samson dan Delilah on DVD!!!

How utterly awesome!! It's come to my attention (thanks to Kothar, another hardcore Indo film collector!) that Sisworo Gautama Putra's Indonesian movie SAMSON DAN DELILAH (1987) has been released on DVD in France! Actually, it seems it's been out a while and there are no less than two DVD releases and a VHS release! Gee, sometimes you think these world-weird films aren't available anywhere other than on Malay VCD and then they turn up on Euro DVD!

As I said, SAMSON DAN DELILAH is directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra who also did THE WARRIOR (aka Jaka Sembung), THE SNAKE QUEEN and SRIGALA. Check his filmography here (a much better film base for world-weird cinema than the bloody IMDb!!). I have never watched the film but I remember reading about it on Günter Müller's cool (and sadly long gone) site WEIRD ASIA. I think I might have his review on my old computer. I'll check and post it here if I do. According to the credits on CITWF the film stars none other than Indo horror queen Suzzanna! (from QUEEN OF BLACK MAGIC, SNAKE QUEEN, SUNDEL BOLONG (aka Ghost With Hole), and tons more Indo horror films).

The French title is La Revanche de Samson and you don't need fluency in French to figure out it means "the revenge of Samson" in English. The DVD is available from eBay France and not surprisingly it's not English friendly. I don't know if it carries the original Indonesian audio. However, my collector friend has informed me that the DVD is both widescreen and fully uncut! In fact it runs 6 minutes longer than the Malay VCD! Needless to say, I've ordered it right away! YAY! SPIFFY!!




Plot description translated by our friends at Google:

Samson, aged 11, sees his mother murdered by a soldier from the Netherlands. Now he feels an implacable hatred for the invaders in his heart. His grandfather sends him supernatural powers and makes him invulnerable. As an adult Samson is ready for revenge and no force can stop him. He survives the worst violence and the occult powers of his enemies. His actions win the sympathy of the people. Then the sumptuous Delilah decides to seduce him. Spells of love they have reason to Samson?

I tried to correct it somewhat but, uh, I think I'll just leave that last bit there. No idea what they mean. LOL.

EDIT: Holy fuck!!! Check out this clip from the film that I found on YouTube (you'll need to turn the sound down first as it's very loud):



And one more scene...



Video-cd/Malaysia/fullscreen/Indonesian audio/no subs/cut by 6 minutes!

Thanks to Peter (Kothar) for all the info and the VCD cover scan!

The Filipino NIKITA remake still wanted!

I posted about the Filipino remake of NIKITA a while back and it has led to... absolutely zero! Nothing. Nichts. Nada. So, again, if anybody out there has this on VHS or DVD-R and can do a DVD-R please get in touch. Cheers.


BURADOR, ANG BABAING SUGO (Philippines, 2000)



My original post:

Check this trailer out; it's a remake of the French classic LA FEMME NIKITA from the Philippines!!! And it looks awesome! The Nikita character is played by Filipino actress January Isaac who starred in a bunch of action film from 1997 thru to 2004.

I posted the trailer on my Filipino blog recently but it NEEDS to be posted here as well cos it's just too cool!! And, uh, also cos my extensive search for a copy of the film has brought me... nothing. I'm pretty sure it was only released on VHS and maybe there's a VCD in the Philippines. The trailer was uploaded by Dvdmaniacs member Robert who's located in the US and he tells me the trailer stems from a locally released tape (with a different film) that his parents rented many years ago.

Unfortunately, Robert doesn't have the film either. If any of you have a copy... well, you know in which direction to send a DVD-R (hint hint). Unfortunately, I have a feeling a copy isn't gonna turn up any day soon. Boo-hoo.

L'Ossessa (Italy, 1974)

aka Enter the Devil / The Devil Obsession / The Eerie Midnight Horror Show / The Sexorcist / The Tormented

VHS/Japan/letterbox/Italian dialogue/Japanese subs/uncut print but "underhair" fogged
[click scan for bigger size]

I watched Mario Gariazzo's Italian THE EXORCIST rip-off L'OSSESSA last night. It was even made the same year (1974) as the original and contained some of the scenes we've become accustomed to by now; the possessed girl writhing on her bed, spewing green goo, and being just generally blasphemous and swearing. I must admit she was a major letdown to the film; I mean instead of Linda Blair we get a twenty year old Italian girl with black hair and a perfect body. She ruined every frame she was in! laugh.gif (picture Homer Simpson, head lump-sided, drooling, and going "arrrrrr"). No, actually the only real letdown was the atrociously bad print from Alpha Video (in the States). Fullscreen, a master so obviously taken from a bad video master, and with colours so faint they looked as thought the print were recorded using a cheap two headed vcr! Anyway, none of that ruins the film which was enjoyable. Not at all in the same league as the film it rips off but pretty cool never the less.

The title for the dvd that I bought is The Eerie Midnight Horror Show (!!!) huh.gif
The distributor who came up with that title should be tarred and feathered!! Linking it to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is so way off course that you're just going huh??? The two films have nothing in common!

UPDATE: I wrote this review for Cinehound a little while back. Since then I've got hold of two more versions, one of which you see a scan of in this post; Yes, I was the happy winner of the rare Japanese VHS! (the other tape is an old UK release which I haven't even checked yet but I believe it's letterboxed + English dub and uncut). The Japanese VHS print totally blows away the crappy American DVD! It's a beautiful letterboxed print with colours that don't look like a fucking 3rd generation dupe. It also carries the original Italian audio instead of the atrocious English dub. The tape is uncut but stems from a time when the Japanese still fogged the private parts (which when most Danes say that sounds like something else cos most Danes can't pronounce hard "K" but say "G", haha).

Chinese film flyers, 1991-96

Due to a long-term relationship, I lived in Melbourne (Australia) on and off from 1991-96. I had already discovered the wonders of Hong Kong cinema when I lived in London in the late 80s-90 and so I'd often go to see HK movies at the Chinese cinemas in Melbourne.

Every week the cinemas would put out cheap two colour flyers that you could pick up and needless to say I tried to collect them all. Unfortunately, most of mine are long gone by now but the one I probably remember the most is this one for PRISON ON FIRE 2 which I'm posting here.

The funny thing is that this isn't a scan of my own copy but a scan made by someone else who also went to the same cinemas in Melbourne during the same period. The funny (i.e. funny weird) thing is that we never met! Or maybe we met (we most likely did) but we never met and spoke.

And mind you, we were easy to spot in those days as we would have been some of the very few white guys there. This may be hard to imagine to fans of Asian cinema in 2010 but 20 years ago these films were only beginning to get discovered by fans outside of Asia. And by "fans" I don't mean fans of mainstream or arthouse cinema but hardcore horror and splatter movie fans who'd be reading photocopied fanzines and trying to seek out new movies to deliver the guts and gore. If you're 20 years old you might think I'm trying to pull your leg by saying this but believe it or not but we didn't actually have access to computers or the Internet as we do nowadays. I know; sounds wild. It was a different world back then. LMAO.

The same actually goes for animé; What many people forget these days (or don't know) is that in 1990 these Japanese cartoons weren't discovered by little 13 y.o. nerdy fanboys but (again) by fans who lived on a steady diet of RE-ANIMATOR and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART II type films who wanted new thrills. Well, they (i.e. WE) sure found them.

Many years later, someone left a comment on my other blog in regards to a post about a John Woo film and although he didn't say who he was I recognised him right away as a reviewer named Mark Savage from an Aussie film fanzine called Fatal Visions. I used to buy the mag and remembered him clearly because he used to do a regular section on HK cinema. With each new ish I'd always flick quickly thru the pages and read (devour) that section right away! LOL. Later he also became a film director in his own right but that's not really important in this regard.

But it's weird to think that we could have the same hardcore interest in HK's new wave cinema, and we could go to the same movies for 6 yrs, and yet we wouldn't meet until 13 yrs later when he's in the US and I'm in Scandinavia and it happens on-line! Hah! I remember writing to him saying it was a pity we never met back then and he said "sure is". Life is weird sometimes, just like the films on this blog, LOL.

Go here for more flyers.

Fellow blogs that FLY UNDER THE RADAR but that you OUGHT to know about!!!

Kult Eye Bleeder went on air just over a week ago and it's already amongst the ones I check every day. And to a Filipino & Indo film aficionado it's definitely a welcome read! The writer is probably gonna include films from other territories as well but so far it's been a cool world-weird ride all the way.

What I really like about this blog writer is his ability to combine enthusiastic reviews with useful info and keeping it short! If I had a dime (or Daim if you're in Scandinavia, lol) for every time I've come across a review and the writer didn't even bother to mention who the bloody hell the director is, or who the lead actors are, or even which country the damn film was made in then... I would have a lot of dimes!

And sometimes overly enthusiastic reviewers keep going for miles on end. You'll get plot descriptions that are easily two or three times as long as the original screenplay! Please reviewers, you don't need to let us know every little detail. Godzilla took a step forward, then another one, then yet another one, and one more. He looked at King Ghidorah. King Ghidorah looked back. Then King Ghidorah also took a step forward. And another one. And one more. He looked at Godzilla. Then they began to fight. You get the point. And the Kult Eye Bleeder guy seems to know and understand this (okay, he forgets the director's name a few times but, hey, all beginnings are difficult, LOL). I hope he keeps the blog afloat, there's enough dead blogs floating in (Cyber) space already! Highly recommended. Check it out here.


[Credit where credit is due: Yes, the Godzilla example is inspired by a similar one in an ish of OC]

I'd rather live in Pittsburgh - if you can call that living

I'm posting this cos it's got ZOMBIES in it and they're walking in THAT MALL in Pittsburgh again and there's an almost okay cover of Roky Erickson's "I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE":




- And I'm posting THIS cos it's the original awesome version by Roky Erickson:

Could it be any more embarrassing

Disclaimer: Please understand I'm not one of these people. I just live here.

Trashy zombie film recomandations

I wrote about BURIAL GROUND last night (or this morning, whatever) and incidentally Brian of Wildside Cinema just posted a list of his trashy zombie film recommendations (which obviously includes BURIAL GROUND, otherwise it'd be a crappy coincidence, duh! Haha). Check them here. Oh, and check out Wildside cinema. It's not at all a bad site (he says with a touch of understating Aussie jargon).

More zombies from Another World

AWE are releasing Andrea Bianchi's Italian masterpiece BURIAL GROUND (Le Notti del Terrore, 1981) in October. The new Danish title is Zombie Nattens Terror. "New" because usually when AWE use Danish titles they're old cinema or video titles. This one is an AWE creation. If you haven't watched the film before then... well... what can I tell you; BURIAL GROUND is kinda on the same level as ZOMBI 3 but not quite as good as HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD!!! As usually with these films from AWE the disc is only going to carry the English dub. I wish they would include the original Italian audio for these films as well! But if nothing else, it's an awesome front cover me thinks. xD

The Fog / Phantasm trailer

Check out this rare TV trailer for a double program of THE FOG and THE PHANTASM! The trailer is from circa 1980.