Abominable Advent Calendar Day 5: Mystics in Bali (1981)

Crapsterpiece Category: AnythingSploitation, WTF Were You Thinking?

Heads Up: Body horror, blood, vomit, disembodied flying head, vaginal blood sucking

During the New Order Era of Indonesian President Suharto, from 1966 to 1998, rules relaxed on exploitation cinema. This led to creative and over-the-top genre films that expressed a love of the craft on a low budget, were full of violence, gore, and sexual innuendo, and often had occult or folkloric themes to avoid the taboo topic of politics.

Mystics in Bali, released in 1981, is legendary in cult circles for good reasons. One is that although it has nothing like a Western narrative structure, it was an attempt to reach out to the West by including a lot of special effects and eschewing Eastern movie tropes, such as including several genres and musical numbers. But the primary reason it has a cult following is that it’s off-the-rails bonkers.

Cathy, an American or Australian, depending on which dub you have, comes to Bali to learn Leák black magic for a book she’s writing, after already having learned Voodoo. Learning Voodoo takes a lifetime, and if you knew Voodoo you’d know better than to mess with the Leák, but that is the least of the logical problems with this story. Cathy’s boyfriend Mehendra manages somehow to get her a meeting with a Leák witch. The witch agrees to take her on after she and Mehendra bring her an offering of jewels and blood, which she sucks up with an incredibly long tongue from a nearby bush.

As Cathy’s studies progress, she learns spells such as transforming into animals and a fireball—the pig and snake transformations are particularly grisly—but she begins to wake up not knowing where she’s been. Mehendra starts to worry that she’s in over her head.

After several lessons, the Leák witch makes Cathy into a penanggalan, an Indonesian vampire creature consisting of just a head and entrails that sucks the blood of pregnant women. The witch wants Cathy to get the blood of three women for her so she can level up in some Leák way that isn’t explained.

In a famous scene, Cathy’s head leaves her body and flies off with lungs, heart, intestines, and liver trailing behind, enters a pregnant woman’s bedroom, and sucks the woman’s blood and the baby out of her body via her vagina. As if that wasn’t freaky enough, it leads to some more WTF moments, such as when Mehendra’s uncle, a holy man, places skewers in Cathy’s neck so the head can’t return to her body, resulting in a hilarious scene where fanged Cathy tries to remove them with her teeth.

Mystics is loaded with goofy and gross special effects, there are plot holes a penanlaggan could fly through, the acting is ghastly and the dubbing is worse, and generally it makes no sense. But it’s so much fun you just won’t care.