The Queen of Black Magic

Absolutely loved this film.

It's quite refreshing to see a simple story of spiritual revenge.

Some great gross out gory creepiness scenes with relentless dread. My only disappointment was how easily the bad guy went down.

A vision of hell on Earth. Brilliant film.

Great collaboration between Kimo Stamboel and Joko Anwar presents a barrage of terror throughout the film. Coupled with a fairly solid story for the size of horror movies. Ratu Ilmu Hitam adds to the list of indonesian horror films that should be apreciated.

Following a similar plot of haunted orphanages in horror movies, where an old wrong must be corrected to stop evil wreaking havoc, this movie goes for gore and blood. The frames are well shot, and the gore is quite effective. The acting is quite decent but the little boy comes off as most natural. Despite the gore, the movie fails plotwise and completely drops the supporting characters entirely at the end of the movie. It is basically a bunch of horror scenarios threaded together to make a movie. Scary for kids, but mildly entertaining for above average horror moviegoers.

I found this movie to be very successful for what it was.

Solid story and the pacing was quite good, kept you on your feet and never got slow. There were a couple of blatant continuity issues that bothered me and I feel like it was lacking a bit in character development and depth. There were a lot of characters in this, but a lot that goes unexplained as far as their background/ intentions go.

Sometimes the special effects looked good and sometimes they really did not, a bit inconsistent on that front. Acting seemed... fine, from what I could tell as an English speaker and it certainly wasn't distracting. Felt like they were setting it up for a sequel, which I would for sure watch and also interested in watching the original.

With all that said, over all I was thoroughly entertained with a solid, quite creepy witch/supernatural/gorefest horror. Would definitely recommend to horror fans.

It lures you in making you think it's gonna be a low key haunting flick, before taking a sharp turn and turning everything up to 11. From there it's a roller-coaster of blood, bugs and people screaming in agony. Approaching the excess of Evil Dead without the cartoonish sense of humour. It's certainly the most extreme of the Joko Anwar films that I've seen, maybe letting someone else handle directing duties this time around allowed things to run amok. There's some unfortunate CGI that should have been practical, and don't go in asking for too much character depth. It's just a ghost movie on steroids, gleefully ridiculous in all it's squeamish excess.