La Reine de la Magie Noire

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.

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.

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 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.

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.