Return to Pontianak

Asian horror movies have always been popular here, and even local film The Maid by Kelvin Tong managed to strike gold at the box office, here and overseas as well, going against the grain of thought that local movies do not make money. However, in the recent surge of local movie making, there was another Singapore horror movie made, Return to Pontianak, which seemed to hold some promise with its reimagining / retelling of the legendary Malay female spirit. There were signs that it was bad - a friend's warning, and the turnout for the screening was a paltry 10-15 persons, but I just had to watch it for myself.

The verdict? This made in 2001 movie reeks, and reminds you of failed attempts by filmmakers around the world in taking something quite established, and then giving their own creative spin on it. While some might work, most of them will go the way of the Hollywood Godzilla. If this Pontianak were to go head long with the original Pontianak in a one on one, director Djinn's version will be made to wash the original's flowing white garbs. While the originals made in the 50s and 60s (I watched Sumpah Pontianak starring Maria Menado) were cheesy and lacking in grand special effects, they had a lot of heart. This one absolutely doesn't.

Made after the highly successful Blair Witch Project (1999), this is one movie which should be seen, as a lesson learnt in how NOT to make a horror film. It's strange that much of it emulated Blair Witch, with its forest setting, characters roaming around getting routinely lost, and its highly puke inducing jerky camera motions. While Blair Witch had a reason for it, Return to Pontianak's boils down to budget. Neither has it any scary moments or atmosphere, aside from some mumbo-jumbo recitings and the awful soundtrack which is a horror in itself.

While characters in most horror movies are throwaways, and only in established classics that you have a tinge of development, the characters developed for Return to Pontianak are those that happen to be of the irritating kind. They don't look good (Hollywood compensates for the lack of story with awesome eye candy), and neither do they spout interesting lines. Dialogue is awful and contrived, and the bad sound design makes things worse. Caricatures abound, you have a group of five, led by the protagonist called Charity (Hiep Thi Le) (the last time I heard this name was in Hong Kong's StormRiders), who developed a sudden urge to seek out her biological parents in the jungles of Pontianak (hence the title, other than the reference to the "hantu"). Joining her are a fugly man-girl called Uzi (Eleanor Lee), whose mouth is automatically set to spout vulgarities like a sub-machine gun, an ignorant slacker ang mo Luke (Steve Banks), the boring techno-geek Raymond (Victor Khong), and a pretty useless and incompetent local guide called Eye (Fadali).

For the first hour, nothing much happens, and you have to endure bad bitching, bad acting, bad acting, bad sound, bad cinematography. That is until a mysterious couples appear, and the clichés associated with horror movie making come out in some force, although bad makeup, and more bad acting continue to plague the movie. Thankfully, the sound design improved in the last 30 minutes, but that's because most of the time the movie is silent, save for the rustling sounds of a tropical rainforest.

And what of Pontianak herself? Well, she comes out in the day. Which is preposterous. And she's totally lacking in prowess that made her infamous. Worse yet, this Pontianak is totally devoid of motivations and origins, and doesn't differentiate herself with any other ordinary ghost and goblin out there. For anyone not versed in the Pontianak lore, you might wonder what's the big deal. All in all, an extremely poor retelling.

But if there is any consolation, it's that perhaps the filmmakers learnt from this bad episode, and given Djinn's Perth (2005), you can see a fairly large jump in terms of storytelling craft. A better budget probably helped, and maybe the realization that something more rooted to earth is the better path for him?

Retitled Voodoo Nightmare for the overseas market, this movie has not much voodoo magic, but plenty of nightmares. Nightmares of a movie gone totally wrong.

An Asian horror movie, a creature unique to the region, a Pontianak - sounds promising, right?

Sadly, no. This is a low-budget horror movie, shot on grainy video like The Blair Witch Project, but most of the time the camera is not "motivated." That is to say, sometimes the video is that being shot by a character with a hand-held camera, but most of the time it's hand-held camera shot by a cameraman.

An adopted woman is in search of her biological mother she last saw at age four. They're out in the woods and come across a man and a strange young girl. Not much happens (though more happens than in BWP, and the characters - who also seem to be improvising - don't swear anywhere near as much). There is somewhat of a neat transformation for the strange woman, but it has little impact.

In the end, I'm not too much sure what the movie was about, and I don't care. I'm just glad to be rid of it.

Return to Pontianak is an ultra-low budget Blair-Witch-knock-off shot in the jungle near Borneo. A Pontianak is a female ghost (like a banshee, the film synopsis at the film festival said, only it wasn't like a banshee at all, it was a lot quieter and more violent). The film was unquestionably a Blair Witch knock off--shot on DV, a similar structure, similar feel to the dialogue, that sort of thing. But unlike some Blair Witch knock-offs (like, say, Blair Witch 2), this one knew what made Blair Witch good, and it worked it. The creepy stuff was genuinely creepy--there's an exploring-the-abandoned-shack-like-an-idiot sequence which had me squirming in my seat (soon followed by a close-up-on-scary-looking-eyes shot that must rank among the best ever). To the films credit, there's a lot going on--there's more texture to the baddie, for instance. But there were definite weaknesses. You get the feeling they didn't have the plot all the way worked out, and you also get the feeling they couldn't afford as many takes as they might've liked. People were always wandering off and wandering back for no good reason. And when characters started getting whacked, it didn't seem to effect the other characters that much--maybe b/c all of them were so shrill to start off with. But it's definitely worth seeing, if you like that sort of thing. It's got the right kind of ending--this is the kind of evil that you can't fix and you can't escape from. It's evil and it's wrong and it sucks to be you and that's just the way it is. (7/10)

The Pontianak is perhaps the scariest ghoul in Singapore & Malaysia. Many black and white Malay films have been made in its honor and none of them comes close to being scary. Not that you expect them to be scary. Filmmakers back in the 60s had no special effects to scare a 90s filmgoer like myself. Which was why I truly looked forward to Djinn's Return to Pontianak. Yet, I was horribly disappointed.

The plot is very weak. An American-Asian woman has been having dreams of her birth mother. With the help of some others, she ventures into some Malaysian-Borneo jungles, where they get lost and encounter a mysterious girl. The filming is done in a very Blair Witch manner, but it doesn't work for this particular story. When you speak of the Pontianak, whose very name is taboo among the superstitious, you expect to be scared silly, but this film will probably irk its viewers. For one, it's too draggy. After a while, you'll start screaming for a view of the Pontianak. The bad acting doesn't help and when she finally appears, the Pontianak looks more like a pretty beggar. And WHAT is she doing wandering about in broad daylight?? Everyone knows Malay ghosts come out only after dusk. Also there are only two "scare scenes" and they don't impress!

What's silliest, though, is Djinn's definition of a Pontianak. In reality, this demon is actually the spirit of a woman who died at childbirth. Period. According to Djinn, however, she's an undead who died at childbirth and is now controlled by a witch doctor. Huh??? The Pontianak is a lone ranger! She listens to no witch doctor, man! She lives in banyan trees (some say banana) and not at the base of some ugly hut!

Djinn needs to do more research and he should have focused more on the Pontianak instead of the irritating cast. Only Hiep Thi Le manages to please acting-wise. She's restrained and doesn't overact like the guy playing Raymond or that annoying girl playing Uzi. At the end of the day, when we watch a Pontianak film, we just want to see the Pontianak kill people. We want to see fangs and hear shrieky laughter. We want to shake in our little seats! And one last advice to Djinn, the next time you make a horror movie, please film it at night. Pontianaks just aren't fun in broad daylight!

Now, I LOVE bad movies but even I couldn't stomach this one. It consists largely of a group of total strangers who travel together to an obscure corner of Malaysia, to hunt up the long-missing mother of the group leader. They promptly get lost in the middle of nowhere and spend the entire time trekking through the woods, arguing in quacking, droning voices that made me want to pound my head on the floor to get away from the sound. They are warned by a passing priest that the area they are entering is "unclean" but they go right ahead. Sure enough, they are killed off one at a time by SOMETHING IN THE WOODS that looks like a beautiful woman having a really bad day. WILL ANYONE SURVIVE? I didn't care by the time the movie was half over. I imagine you won't, either. Bad acting, bad FX, bad character development, bad everything.