If you ever have to see one Indonesian movie in your life, THE WARRIOR would be a pretty good example of the genre as a whole. Packed with insane martial arts and action, tons of gore, sprinklings of sex and sadism and a period-set plot, THE WARRIOR (based on a popular Indonesian comic book) is a real crowd-pleaser of a film which helped to catapult star Barry Prima to fame. Two sequels followed offering up much the same mix of horror and action but THE WARRIOR is the first, and a film that has to be seen to be believed. The notoriously stroppy Prima, an European-looking leading man, makes the role his own and invests it with dynamism and heroism, if not charisma.
The plot isn't really what's at stake here, consisting of typical good guys vs. bad guys stuff with an outcome you can easily predict. It's what happens along the way that holds the attention. The film opens with Prima, a slave, escaping from his Dutch captors and leading the villagers into a revolt. A psychopathic, brutal, almost indestructible bounty hunter arrives on the scene, stunning the Dutch with his bull-fighting and fire-breathing activities (!). They send him on a mission to kill Prima, but he ends impaled through the mouth with a spear instead. The Dutch then turn to darker methods to capture Prima, employing a voodoo priest to bring the decapitated body of an evil wizard back to life.
What follows is the film's most macabre moment - the coffin rises from the earth and out of it the headless corpse. The wizard's head then also returns to life and levitates back on to the body. Seeking Prima out, the wizard fights Prima with powerful invisible magic and the warrior is captured and thrown in a Dutch prison, where he is crucified to a wall just like in a certain scene in THE BEYOND and with no less gore. To make matters worse, his eyes are gouged out by metal rods leaving him gored and in agony. Prima calls down the power of his god to give him strength and after painfully pulling the nails from his hands, he tears down the wall and leads a prison revolt.
The real highlight of the movie is Prima's battle with the reanimated wizard. First he cuts off an arm, then a leg, and then the head of the zombie wizard, resulting in blood spurts all other the place. Incredibly the wizard is able to reattach his severed limbs with surprisingly good special effects work, until he is finally chopped in half in the air and his two halves impaled on swords like kebabs. A fantastic (in both senses of the word) battle, imaginative and excellently realised, what more could you wish for? Well there is more; we have scenes of deadly LEAVES killing people (where else would you see THAT?), people levitating and flying in the air like in a Hong Kong film, plenty of gore, violence, torture, blood, and general brutality, some comic relief and romance for those who like that kind of thing. THE WARRIOR: an Indonesian epic which remains unforgettable to those lucky enough to have seen it.
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