Census Bloodbath: I Think You're Projecting

Note: This Taiwanese movie was only available to me without subtitles, so take my review with a grain of salt.

Year:
1983
Director:
Darve Lau
Cast:
Feng Shih, Wai-Ying Li, Ming Tien
Run Time:
1 hour 14 minutes

Plot: Soul Killer (originally Cui hua kuang mo/心之魔), which appears to be an unauthorized remake of 1975's Psychic Killer, follows an ex-convict with supernatural powers who uses astral projection to violently revenge himself upon various people. Meanwhile, his female doctor works with the cops and a man styled exactly like Halloween's Dr. Loomis to try and stop him (mostly by watching him through a telescope).

Analysis: Honestly, Soul Killer should be a lot more fun than it is. When it's getting up to supernatural hijinks, it's pretty engaging, at least. Just like Hell Has No Boundary, which is another East Asian supernatural slasher of its vintage that I just watched, the kill sequences have multiple layers that give them an almost epic quality. In addition to the actual murders, we also get flashes of the killer in these sequences, either in astral form or invisibly manipulating objects. I mean, how am I not supposed to enjoy seeing shoes clomp around on their own?

However, with so much being thrown at the screen, it's not always possible to tell exactly what's happening at any given moment in a kill scene. So they're compromised somewhat. Meanwhile, everything else that happens in the movie is pretty damn dull. The doctor and her crack team of telescope-watchers seem distressed by the proceedings, but all they do for about 70 minutes is sit around discussing how very distressed they are.

This is going to be one of my shortest reviews yet, because there's really nothing to this movie. Like... I guess I enjoy that it has this clangy electric guitar soundtrack that feels more like it belongs in an action movie. That's unique. But it's a narratively bland, visually bland affair (except for a ritual sequence that is drenched in cherry red and cotton candy blue, but has absolutely nothing to do with anything else that's going on in the movie). While I didn't have a bad time watching Soul Killer, it's hard to recommend that anybody go through the vast amount of effort it takes to acquire a copy.

Killer: Soul Killer

Final Girl: Doctor

Best Kill: I'm always partial to a good phone cord strangling, but the best one almost certainly has to be the part where they cremate the Soul Killer while he's astrally projecting, thus destroying his "dead" body. Now that's a nasty trick!

Sign of the Times: One of the victims has a pre-redesign Mickey Mouse plushie.

Scariest Moment: The Soul Killer returns to his apartment after being released from prison, and everything is covered in cobwebs and grime. Gross!

Weirdest Moment: During a particularly intense scene, the doctor has her glasses hanging around her chin the entire time.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 9

1. Mom dies from being beaten in a flashback dream.
2. Convict falls off a cliff.
3. Man has two knives telekinetically thrown into his chest.
4. Woman is telekinetically strangled with a phone cord.
5. Bathroom Man is beaten with a length of pipe.
6. Bathroom Man #2 jumps (or is thrown?) out of the window.
7. Car Guy is run off the road and his vehicle explodes.
8. Cell Guy is telekinetically lifted into the air and slammed to the ground.
9. Soul Killer is cremated to death.

TL;DR: Soul Killer is a mostly unremarkable supernatural slasher movie despite a few fun kills.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: No, Madam

Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Cantonese, so take my review with a grain of salt.

Year:
1982
Director:
Kuen Yeung
Cast:
Leanne Lau, Derek Tung-Sing Yee, Yueh Hua

Run Time:
1 hour 31 minutes

Plot: Hell Has No Boundary (originally Mo jie/魔界) follows policewoman May Wong Lai-Fun (Leanne Lau), who is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a murdered little girl while on a camping trip. Her new murderous rage, naturally, makes her a better cop, but her boyfriend grows suspicious about the bodies that keep piling up around her as she rises up the ranks.

Analysis: Hell Has No Boundary is an unusually focused Hong Kong slasher, and by that I mean it combines three separate genres rather than 18. What we're looking at here is a slasher film mashed up with a possession film (those two subgenres certainly weren't unfamiliar with one another, even as early as 1982), with a light sprinkling of police procedural on top. It's all fairly straightforward, which allows it to channel early-80s Hong Kong's tendency toward excess directly into the kills and overall horror movie mayhem.

This is a pretty gnarly horror movie, with an imaginative streak a mile wide. The kills, while cheaply rendered and sometimes a little confusing, tend to take place in satisfying multi-stage scare sequences packed with bizarre imagery. By the time act 3 hits, the movie fully immerses its characters into a post-Exorcist, pre-Elm Street nightmare freakout realm that is drenched in bright green lighting and full of well-staged moments where props and environments shift without warning. It's a good time!

The way that the storyline plays out didn't quite rub me the right way all the time, because the possession's tendency to infect others made some of the plot feel too diffuse. However, that doesn't really matter. This is a movie that entirely takes place within the culture and ideology of non-Christian religion (I think Buddhism, given the presence of a swastika in one scene, but I'm no expert), and that makes for an exciting twist on a subgenre that had already been entirely played out less than a decade after the debut of The Exorcist.

Killer: Possessed May Wong Lai-Fun (Leanne Lau)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: May's horny new boss really gets it good. He is ultimately killed by being telekinetically wrapped up with toilet paper (I assume he's smothered?), but first he gets pinched by a crab in his bathtub, an event that I believe is implied to have severed his penis.

Sign of the Times: The movie's opening scene features May doing a Rubik's cube while her boyfriend drives her to the campsite, where they then relax with some delicious 1980s Coke and Sprite cans.

Scariest Moment: As the cops approach the site of a domestic disturbance, a knife protrudes through the door right in front of one of their faces.

Weirdest Moment: May vomits into the toilet, then uses a cup to pour the chunky toilet water over her head and then drink it.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 14; not including May's boyfriend's shadow self, who ultimately perishes when he makes the ultimate sacrifice.

1. Domestic Disturbance Man is shot.
2. Office Mean Girl #1 and
3. Office Mean Girl #2 fall down an elevator shaft.
4. Bird dies from exposure to evil energy.
5. Scammy Psychic falls down the stairs.
6. Prayer Lady has a knife telekinetically thrown through her throat.
7. New Boss is smothered by being toilet paper.
8. Flashback Girl is smothered with a pillow.
9. Naked Refugee is slashed with a sword.
10. Dagger Friend is shot by the cops.
11. May has a ceremonial dagger thrown into her and is burned alive.
12. Nurse is garroted in the shower.
13. May's Killer is decapitated with a cleaver.
14. May's Boyfriend stabs himself in the stomach.

TL;DR: Hell Has No Boundary is a pretty neat supernatural slasher import.

Rating: 7/10

Census Bloodbath: Sharp Objects

Note: Technically, this Dutch-language movie came with subtitles. However, the subtitles were in French. Weirdly, this did help quite a bit, despite my incredibly limited French. But still, take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1982
Director:
Guy Lee Thys
Cast:
Leslie de Gruyter, Rosemarie Bergmans, Christian Baggen
Run Time:
1 hour 14 minutes

Plot: In The Pencil Murders (originally De potloodmoorden), inspector Rick Van Houtte (Leslie de Gruyter), along with his photographer friend Leslie Werkers (Christian Baggen) is trying to track down a serial killer who murders people by shoving pencils into their noses. His work leads him to neglect his beautiful wife, Marilène (Rosemarie Bergmans), who isn't too happy about that.

Analysis: The Pencil Murders is unique in multiple ways. The first is obviously the killer's M.O. Jason Voorhees found a glittering multitude of ways to dispatch his victims, but he never quite reached the point of shoving pencils into people's noses. The other major way is that it's a Belgian giallo movie. While Belgium will pop up in Census Bloodbath from time to time with titles like The Antwerp Killer and Lucker the Necrophagus, they really didn't hop on the slasher train all that often. 

If this is the best they can do, it makes sense why they never really bothered. While The Pencil Murders isn't quite a bad movie, it is an austere and boring one. Weirdly, as far as I could tell, the tone of this movie is entirely serious in spite of its over-the-top premise. Unfortunately, it does not pay to be serious about making a cop-forward slasher, because those tend to land among the worst of the subgenre. After all, hard-boiled investigations fly in the face of what slasher movies are supposed to be about (boobs and blood).

The cop stuff here is particularly uninteresting, which is a bummer, because the slasher stuff is even worse. Despite the fact that the pencil kill concept is intriguing, the whole thing is ruined by a parsimoniously small body count and an unfortunate habit of staging kills offscreen. We do get a look at all of the bodies post-murder, but the onscreen gore isn't well-executed enough that you can parse much of the imagery, in spite of being explicitly told what the killer has done.

The Pencil Murders is also entirely bland as an aesthetic object. There are nighttime scenes that attempt to have some measure of style (a splash of color here, a silhouette there), but they're too dark to accomplish any goal beyond just throwing a bunch of mud onscreen. But bland is still better than bad, so if I had to rewatch a Belgian slasher movie, I'd pick this over The Antwerp Killer. Really though, I'd just as soon watch paint drying, so that's hardly high praise.

Killer: Leslie Werkers (Christian Baggen)

Final Girl: Rick Van Houtte (Leslie de Gruyter)

Best Kill: Unfortunately, the best death is the one doled out to one of the Black men who is unjustly accused of being the killer. The fact that the only prolonged, onscreen death belongs to a Black character is... not great. But it's a pretty chilling scene, involving him being drowned in the bath as the killer attempts to get the pencil close enough to his face to jam it in.

Sign of the Times: Goldfinger is name-dropped and there's an Onibaba poster in the background. Both of these things are signs of entirely different times than the 1980s, but they're all I got.

Scariest Moment: The killer sneaks into a woman's home and steals a pencil from her kid's arts & crafts table.

Weirdest Moment: Marilène's young lover appears to have a gnarly sunburn during their sex scene.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 4

1. Fashion Model is pencil-murdered.
2. Young Mother is pencil-murdered.
3. Black Suspect is pencil-murdered.
4. Leslie Werkers is shot by Rick.

TL;DR: The Pencil Murders wastes a great M.O. on a bland giallo riff.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Stop Messin' Round With Your Tricks

Year:
1981
Director:
Liliek Sudjio
Cast:
Suzzanna, W.D. Mochtar, Alan Nuary
Run Time:
1 hour 30 minutes

Plot: The Queen of Black Magic (originally Ratu ilmu hitam) follows what happens when villager Murni (Indonesian scream queen Suzzanna) is seduced by the playboy Kohar (Alan Nuary) and later dumped for Baedah (Siska Widowati of Srigala), the daughter of the village's headman. After Kohar and Baedah's wedding is magically ruined, Kohar accuses Murni of using black magic, provoking the other villagers into throwing her off a cliff.

However, she is rescued by hermit Gendon (W.D. Mochtar), who trains her in the very dark arts that she was accused of practicing. Later, she returns to the village to extract bloody, magical revenge. This happens around the same time that the santri Permana Sidik arrives in town, preaching to the villagers about how the power of Muslim piety can keep dark magic at bay.

Analysis: I debated for a long time about whether to include The Queen of Black Magic in Census Bloodbath at all. It is divided into three distinct half-hour chunks, and the middle third is really the only one that resembles a slasher movie at all. Eventually, I decided to write it up, for two reasons.

One: Like many regional slashers, the formula is inherently viewed through a different storytelling lens. While Queen of Magic blends melodrama and folk horror into the slasher formula, it's not really further afield from the subgenre than Hong Kong's kung fu slashers or India's musical slashers.

Two: I really liked the movie, and I wanted to write about it, so screw it.

Let's start by discussing the slasher bit, because that's why we're here, after all. Murni doles out a litany of some of the most creative and delightful supernatural slasher deaths you'll ever see, from the relative simplicity of hanging a man with a floating scarf on up to the gonzo grotesqueness of using voodoo dolls to straight-up explode people, making their veins bulge, giving them giant boils that expand and pop in bloody geysers, and so on.

The effects that bring all this to life are genuinely great, too. Whether the filmmakers are using magician tricks like making people and objects float or delivering gooey post-Savini gore, almost everything that they deliver onscreen is not only convincing, but often beautiful. In its own special way. 

Honestly, the filmmaking is very accomplished in general. For one thing, there is a breathtakingly gorgeous setpiece where Murni performs a black magic ritual on a clifftop in front of an exaggeratedly huge moon. But in the less phantasmagoric sequences, there is still a sense that the camera is being placed deliberately in a way that elevates the story.

Plus, the images are crisp and lovely, with an appealing color palette. Trust me when I say that you can never assume you're going to get this kind of thing from a 1980s slasher movie. Only a fool would be that optimistic after sitting through Sledgehammer.

The first and third acts can't really compare to the second, but the film's strengths do carry over into both of those sectors. They look great, and the overcooked melodrama plot that comes to the fore in those sequences is perfectly spiced (I won't go into detail, but I will say that my runner-up line for Champion Dialogue was "You're my brother and my lover.").

I can't say that I was overly thrilled when the plot turned to plodding religious moralizing (turns out it's just as boring in movies about Islam as it is in movies about Christianity), but for the most part the movie operates Exorcist-style, with the religious elements playing well with the horror elements.

Plus, Suzzanna lives up to her status as an Indonesian horror icon here. Her character is the anchor of all three segments, but she has a completely different set of feelings, motivations, and intentions in each one. It's a complicated role, and without her consistent characterization holding the story and the tone together, the movie would have instantly fallen apart. You need to be sympathetic to her throughout, but also disgusted by her choices enough that you're just the right amount of wrecked by the inevitable redeeming self-sacrifice that is the only possible way to be a violent woman in a religious film.

So, yeah. I quite liked The Queen of Black Magic. Spoiler alert, I'm ultimately going to give it a 7/10. But I was seriously considering an 8/10. My heart just wasn't in it. I think it's a hidden gem (at least in the English-speaking world), but maybe not a "rush out and see it right now" kind of way.

Killer: Murni (Suzzanna)

Final Girl: N/A, though plenty of characters survive

Best Kill: Even the worst kills in this movie are pretty great, but the best is probably Kohar's. It would have to be, right? Murni's revenge is prolonged and painful: After being smashed in the face with a magic egg, Kohar begins spontaneously bleeding. He is eventually is driven into an addled frenzy and tears off his own head in the village square!!

Sign of the Times: Although I don't exactly have a strong understanding of contemporary Indonesian gender politics, I imagine that this movie would have been a little more "good for her" if it was made in 2026.

Scariest Moment: During her wedding, Baedah has a vision of Kohar as a hopping skeleton and his groomsmen as rotting zombies.

Weirdest Moment: Mere seconds after taking Murni's virginity, Kohar is chomping on an ear of corn.

Champion Dialogue: “Kohar might die stupid, Sir."

Body Count: 10

1. Kamdi is repeatedly pounded into the ground by an invisible force.
2. Pungut is attacked by a swarm of bees.
3. Villager is voodoo-sploded.
4. Saijah dies offscreen.
5. Field Worker is drowned in a marsh.
6. Goatherd is telekinetically hanged with a scarf.
7. Kohar rips off his own head.
8. Villager #2 is magically lit on fire.
9. Gendon is voodoo-sploded.
10. Murni dies from expending too much power while already wounded.

TL;DR: The Queen of Black Magic is a technically accomplished, engrossing supernatural horror movie.

Rating: 7/10