As always, this review of The Queen of Black Magic will contain no spoilers, only enough information to convey the basic plot of the film. Rest easy, Review Reader!
This time around we have a gruesome little tale of black magic and buried secrets, 2021’s The Queen of Black Magic. Director Kimo Stamboel has been working for a while. I haven’t seen his other releases, but that may change soon. It helps that the current king of Indonesian horror, Joko Anwar, furnished the script. Joko Anwar is, of course, the writer and director who turned in a terrific remake of Satan’s Slaves, and his latest, Impetigore, is going to be Indonesia’s entry for the Academy Awards. Not too shabby, right?
The Queen of Black Magic is a remake, too, and for those unfamiliar, you’ll be able to check out the original 1981 film when horror powerhouse Shudder brings it to their streaming service in February of 2021.
The Queen of Black Magic is a largely traditional horror film. Three couples and their children return to the orphanage in which the men were raised. The orphanage’s director lies dying, and this reunion of sorts is arranged so that they can see the man who cared for them one last time. At the orphanage, those who moved on are reunited with the orphanage’s new caretakers and their old friends, Maman and Siti, both of whom are physically deformed in different ways. Maman has an uncontrollable facial tic, reminiscent of someone with Tourette’s, while Siti has been burned on one side of her face, leaving one eye wounded and sagging.
Also looming over the trip, too, is an accident on the road, where one of our leads, Hanif, struck a deer. Only maybe it wasn’t a deer. Soon, revelation after revelation will be uncovered and the titular Queen of Black Magic will be revealed.
There is a common thread in a lot of the recent Indonesian horror offerings, perhaps because Joko Anwar is such a force in cinema there. This feels like prime Joko Anwar, using the dramatic trappings of this reunion of childhood friends, and then swerving into the macabre. It’s not unlike Stephen King’s philosophy of horror, in which the ordinary collides with the supernatural in violent and often gruesome ways. I maintain that the best example of this remains Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves, which nails both the atmosphere and the shocks with equal aplomb. This is a good formula, and it works here, too, although not with the same success.
In many ways, this feels like a lost entry in Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, where melodrama is met with a mean-spirited gore. Or maybe it’s just all the centipedes. I couldn’t shake the comparison, though, and it had me missing Fulci’s lush colors in comparison with the plainer lens of The Queen of Black Magic. And not only is the color a little less grand, the family drama loses ground to a familiar slasher path in the soggy second act. If you’ve seen any of the mostly terrible Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, you know that when someone starts talking about their moral failings, like vanity or germaphobia, it’s a pretty safe bet their end will feature those elements. It can be a good time to sing along with these same tunes, but it does the end of the film a bit of a disservice.
I don’t traffic in spoilers, but I will suggest that you stick it out if you start this film. Not only is the front end of the film an interesting drama with just enough atmosphere to keep things spooky, the final twenty minutes of The Queen of Black Magic reaches a fever pitch and remains there. It’s like hitting a tough note and holding it in a song, and Kimo Stamboel was able to wake me up out of the malaise of the second act with some truly terrifying and savage imagery.
While I wish there were some more surprises in the middle to go along with the very good beginning and end of the film, I still think this is a nasty bit of business that you can have a good time with, if you don’t mind all the Fulci-esque bugs and worms. I’m giving The Queen of Black Magic (2021) 3 /12 stars out of five.
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