The Queen of Black Magic

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.

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.

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.

For me, this movie is confusing - importance and emphasis are placed in wrong characters and scenes. It also offers nothing special, everything is i-have-seen-before. But acting is mostly very good, only ironically the main witch character is so stiff.

I saw this only cos of Joko Anwar's name and aft having enjoyed few Indonesian horror movies - Impetigore, May the Devil take you 1 n 2, Satan's Slaves, The 3rd Eye part 1, Macabre and Killers, i was anticipating much more but somehow i got disappointed. The settings are almost similar to most Indonesian horror movies, abandoned orphanage/house in the middle of nowhere, the mumbo jumbo stuff is also similar to most Indonesian horror movies but the black vomit n demons walking as if their joints are hyperextended are getting monotonous.

One of the worst thing is the film's editing. There is no suspense or tension apart from the repetitive bugs.

The ending is very lame. I mean aft people getting seriously tortured/wounded by supernatural stuff, they still survive.