Wash My Fierce Hand In's Heart
Aug. 15th, 2012 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustGot the page proofs for "Nanny Grey" today, which means that Solaris Books' Magic anthology is coming out next week. The final line-up looks amazing, with contributors running the gamut from Audrey Niffnegger and Storm Constantine to Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem and Christopher Fowler. Well worth anyone's money, IMSHO.
Meanwhile, sovay has asked me to talk about the classic Indonesian horror film Queen of Black Magic, which I got from Mondo Macabro over the weekend. Sadly, I must preface my review by admitting that contrary to popular belief, Queen does NOT, in fact, involve a penanggalan. Instead, it "only" involves a guy who gets cursed by being beaned in the face with a flying magic egg, then proceeds to rip his own head off, after which the head develops glowing eyes and fangs and starts flying around biting people, eventually ripping a large chunk of flesh out of the dead guy's father-in-law's arm before being exorcized by a passing Imam. And since this whole sequence takes up maybe five minutes' worth of overall running time, this may give you some vague idea what the rest of the movie is like.
The titular Queen of Black Magic herself is a girl named Murni (Suzzanna), already deflowered by local lothario Kohar, who's forced to watch him marry the village headman's daughter. Feeling ill, she goes home to weep in private, which is when her rival starts hallucinating that Kohar and his wedding party attendants have turned into rotting corpses and demons. Obviously, black magic is involved--and to Kohar, at least, it's "obvious" that it must be Murni's fault, so (naturally enough) he leads a bunch of drunken friends over to burn down her house, beat up her mother and throw Murni over a nearby cliff.
Unfortunately for them, after bouncing a few times, Murni falls right into the open arms of the misanthropic hermit that lives at the gorge's bottom, who heals her wounds and teaches her enough black magic to take her revenge. So the moral of the story, from its outset, seems to be: "If you fuck around with a woman and then accuse her of witchcraft to cover up for your own guilt, what most likely will happen is that she will actually then turn into a witch, and kill everybody you know in various weird but creative ways. So seriously, dudes, bad plan."
Murni's crimes range from making one guy sink into a rice paddy and re-emerge covered in flesh-eating slugs to hanging another guy from a tree by his own scarf, telekinetically stealing a baby (she returns it later on, even though it seems to be Kohar's), and using rag doll fetishes to make at least two guys swell up and explode. However, she's not a "bad" person per se; she keeps wanting to stop, move away and have a normal life, especially once Kohar (who gets the rip-his-own-head-off curse) is disposed of. But the hermit, who covets Kohar's father-in-law's headman position and probably was the person who laid a curse on the guy's daughter in the first place, isn't having any of that.
Eventually, that roaming Imam I mentioned comes to town and briefly romances Murni before defeating her in magic vs. faith combat, but then also allows her to redeem herself in a final showdown with the hermit, revealing him as the real villain of the piece. (We'll skip over the slightly squicky fact that their plan to elope together is derailed by the discovery that they are, in fact, long-estranged brother and sister.) One way or the other, Murni emerges from the film looking pretty bad-ass, having only used her black magic powers to kill bad guys--one assumes she probably goes to Paradise, but it's hard to tell, because the credits start rolling before we can even confirm she's dead.
In related news, my copy of Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus finally arrived, so I've been revelling in the incredible bloodthirstiness of that particular text. This entry's title is from a speech by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), whose homoerotic mutually assured destruction obsession with Coriolanus is like a Foe-Yay 101 course all to itself. Other great things about that adaptation include Coriolanus's crazy relationship with his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) and the skillful juggling of exposition through "Roman" media coverage of various events. It goes nowhere good, but you can see that coming from frame one.
Okay, back to "Scarlet Town", to which I added over 1,000 mainly-new words yesterday. I'm fighting a cold, but at least things are improving.
Meanwhile, sovay has asked me to talk about the classic Indonesian horror film Queen of Black Magic, which I got from Mondo Macabro over the weekend. Sadly, I must preface my review by admitting that contrary to popular belief, Queen does NOT, in fact, involve a penanggalan. Instead, it "only" involves a guy who gets cursed by being beaned in the face with a flying magic egg, then proceeds to rip his own head off, after which the head develops glowing eyes and fangs and starts flying around biting people, eventually ripping a large chunk of flesh out of the dead guy's father-in-law's arm before being exorcized by a passing Imam. And since this whole sequence takes up maybe five minutes' worth of overall running time, this may give you some vague idea what the rest of the movie is like.
The titular Queen of Black Magic herself is a girl named Murni (Suzzanna), already deflowered by local lothario Kohar, who's forced to watch him marry the village headman's daughter. Feeling ill, she goes home to weep in private, which is when her rival starts hallucinating that Kohar and his wedding party attendants have turned into rotting corpses and demons. Obviously, black magic is involved--and to Kohar, at least, it's "obvious" that it must be Murni's fault, so (naturally enough) he leads a bunch of drunken friends over to burn down her house, beat up her mother and throw Murni over a nearby cliff.
Unfortunately for them, after bouncing a few times, Murni falls right into the open arms of the misanthropic hermit that lives at the gorge's bottom, who heals her wounds and teaches her enough black magic to take her revenge. So the moral of the story, from its outset, seems to be: "If you fuck around with a woman and then accuse her of witchcraft to cover up for your own guilt, what most likely will happen is that she will actually then turn into a witch, and kill everybody you know in various weird but creative ways. So seriously, dudes, bad plan."
Murni's crimes range from making one guy sink into a rice paddy and re-emerge covered in flesh-eating slugs to hanging another guy from a tree by his own scarf, telekinetically stealing a baby (she returns it later on, even though it seems to be Kohar's), and using rag doll fetishes to make at least two guys swell up and explode. However, she's not a "bad" person per se; she keeps wanting to stop, move away and have a normal life, especially once Kohar (who gets the rip-his-own-head-off curse) is disposed of. But the hermit, who covets Kohar's father-in-law's headman position and probably was the person who laid a curse on the guy's daughter in the first place, isn't having any of that.
Eventually, that roaming Imam I mentioned comes to town and briefly romances Murni before defeating her in magic vs. faith combat, but then also allows her to redeem herself in a final showdown with the hermit, revealing him as the real villain of the piece. (We'll skip over the slightly squicky fact that their plan to elope together is derailed by the discovery that they are, in fact, long-estranged brother and sister.) One way or the other, Murni emerges from the film looking pretty bad-ass, having only used her black magic powers to kill bad guys--one assumes she probably goes to Paradise, but it's hard to tell, because the credits start rolling before we can even confirm she's dead.
In related news, my copy of Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus finally arrived, so I've been revelling in the incredible bloodthirstiness of that particular text. This entry's title is from a speech by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), whose homoerotic mutually assured destruction obsession with Coriolanus is like a Foe-Yay 101 course all to itself. Other great things about that adaptation include Coriolanus's crazy relationship with his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) and the skillful juggling of exposition through "Roman" media coverage of various events. It goes nowhere good, but you can see that coming from frame one.
Okay, back to "Scarlet Town", to which I added over 1,000 mainly-new words yesterday. I'm fighting a cold, but at least things are improving.
