The Devil's Sword (1983)

  

Director: Ratno Timoer

Screenplay: Imam Tantowi

Cast: Barry Prima as Mandala; Gudi Sintara as the Queen of the White Alligator Demon; Advent Bangun as Banyunjaga; Enny Christina as Pitaloka

Ephemeral Waves

 

You smell worse than death itself.

Synth playing over a lowering dusk sun - looking like a prog rock album from Indonesia - adds a lot of promise to a film. From a bludgeoning period of genre filmmaking behind the likes of this to horror films like Mystics in Bali (1981), a meteorite falls to the Earth and, in a fantasy version of Indonesia, a sword is thus forged from its core centre of dangerous power many desire. This sets up a film which in itself has a lot of background of note - that its producer Gope T. Samtani, through Rapi Films, has been a huge prescience in terms of Indonesian cinema, and the type of films Mondo Macabro, the British-born world cinema distributors embraced in the DVD days like The Devil's Sword, be it an executive producer on Queen of Black Magic (1981) to producer on Virgins from Hell (1987), these heightened genre films along a variety of other productions less well known.

This is an Indonesian spin into the burgeoning fantasy genre of the early eighties, between Conan the Barbarian (1982) with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Hollywood production to many lower budgeted versions from the likes of Roger Corman's produced Deathstalker franchise. Other countries embraced this too - The Devil's Sword is eyeing Lucio Fulci's Conquest (1983) from Italy as one of the most delirious of this period of fantasy films - though noticeably The Devil's Sword is also influenced by the wave of martial arts films made between Hong Kong to South Korea that were prolific over decades. This even has the English dub that includes more swearing to emphasis this later touch. In this narrative, like Conquest being around an evil seductive witch queen, we have here the Queen of the White Alligator Demon (Gudi Sintara), a supernatural figure whose only desire is as many nubile young man as she can lust over and have in her bed, the villages having to sacrifice theirs as offerings at the lake holding her underwater lair not to anger her, all so she can have her harem of sexy men.

The lair is a spectacle in itself, a few minutes into the film introduced into the clear artificiality that is also the film's charm, between fake jewellery, costumes on people barely hiding their bodies, plastic sheeting, and sculptures from casts which evoke an old Hollywood fantasy epic from decades earlier, only in colour, than eighties cinema. (That Tokyo in Japan is noticeably in the laboratory work for the film in the opening credits shows how Rapi Films, making these films, were looking with an eye internationally as much as cribbing from clear influences around them). The Queen specifically wants one man, from a village who refused to give an offering, sending one of her best men, and a lover, to take him on his wedding day. The surreality of the film, also its finest trait, is witnessed when, villain or not, probably the best entrance anyone can have is kicking a giant bolder in the air and surfing it to the wedding reception to slaughter as many as possible in his goal's way.

Alongside that this is the kind of film where the bride herself, not pleased by any of this at all, thankfully joins in to fight the man trying to kidnap her husband, but The Devil's Sword's many quirks include how ridiculously gory it also is. The martial arts of the film, even including the sound effects, is from the seventies and eighties era of lower budgeted films I have seen, still an accomplishment but not the elaborate or spectacular work of other films especially from Hong Kong. In contrast to many of those films however, it is by only fifteen minutes or less into the production where we have already had a few decapitations and disembowelling in just this initial battle. The only real sense of disappointment in honesty in the film is that, introduced wandering into the fight after a considerable period within it and most of the village having been slaughtered by one man, is that the actual lead Mandala, as played by Barry Prima, is frankly a generic lead. Despite being played by a figure a figure famous for working on Indonesian films like this or The Warrior (1981), his character is one note, his only skin in the game being that the man after the groom is his fellow pupil under their master, who turned evil, and with said master poisoned so severely Mandala has to hastily amputate both his legs later on in bloody detail to save him. Mandala is the generic male lead whose goals is to rescue the groom, and prevent the Crocodile Queen from acquiring the titular sword, carved from a meteorite, which could have easily been passed onto the figure of the Bride herself who follows him along and can fight too.

The film's casual nature to its content is blasé. This feels like both a martial arts film and a fantasy one which is tinged with a sense of the strange. Initially, upon finding the film, I admit I was not as strongly positive on The Devil's Sword, partially because this is still a traditional martial arts genre film at heart in its beats, alongside being over an hour and forty minutes, which still feels ten minutes longer than these films normally would be in pace, feeling that length The mood, returning to the film, won me over however finally, and I now bat an eye at the details which are more entertaining now. One is the "Crocodile Men", the henchmen of the villainess who are actors in crocodile costumes, with crocodile heads, seeing how both charmingly fake the costumes are but also charming as being tangible. The mood in general, even in spite of its gore and goofier moments, is there when the leads will land upon a raft driven by a skull faced boatman, one who is neither a character nor an enemy, just a Styx-like ferryman there for atmosphere who disappears as soon as he appears. Conquest, as mentioned earlier in the review, is probably the stranger film, Lucio Fulci's fantasy film both in its own head trip, and having goofy moments of summoning dolphins to rescue someone using stock footage, and I am sure Hong Kong has provided equally strange work, even legitimate gems like Tsui Hawk's Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983).  This Indonesian production has a lot still though, in comparison to admire.

Or that this will take some unexpected turns in context to the tropes it has. One is when it introduces a trio of cartoonish villains - a witch, a bald man with a guillotine hat, and a snake man who can slither underground and turns a snake into a staff - only to have them kill each over the titular sword, which far from a disappointment is actually a creative twist on this idea. The film does eventually become a series of events in the end, which as for my younger self was far less appealing than a film which fully dipped itself into more illogical tangents; but even within this context, especially for the fantasy genre The Devil's Sword leans towards, this does have the fascinating homemade quality which you wish to root for contrasted by how that, inherently, has a strange edge to it. A homemade Cyclops monster is the guardian of the titular sword, and alongside wishing to praise the people who put that costume together, it is inherently strange to witness on camera, even if you are aware an actor is in a stiff costume, shambling along. Green lasers are added in post-production for one single moment, where Barry Prima and his arch-nemesis can do so, just because. And barring the knowledge Conan the Barbarian ended with a snake cult orgy, this crocodile person orgy is contrasted by dance writhing by the extras to moody ambient music and real fire near them, which is both the most eighties take on this you can have and is compelling despite arguably taking too much screen time as a sequence. Your interest in this film is entirely is anything remotely intrigues you as a viewer, but there is as well the sense that, within this fantasy sub-genre, the film too manages to feel unique to itself, as a production from Indonesia which can stand out with its heritage even whilst being goofy fun.