aka Balinese Mystic
aka Mistik
aka Leák

Director: Jalil Jackson

Cast: W.D. Mochtar, Yos Santo, Ilona Agathe Bastian, Sofia W.D.

Mondo Macabro / Color / NTSC R1 / Unrated / Anamorphic Widescreen (2.35:1) / Dolby Digital Stereo / English / 86 mins / PURCHASE

Catherine, an American interested in the black arts, travels to Bali to study Leyak (pronounced like “leak”), the most powerful of the black magics. There she meets Mahendra who is to be her guide to meet the Leyak Queen. He warns her of the dangers and how powerful the magic is but she insists on learning.

They then go to meet the Queen and after some coaxing (mostly bottles of fresh blood), she agrees to train the young Jedi…um, apprentice. In a very short amount of time Cathy has acquired bizarre powers (shape-shifting into a pig for one) and she and Mahendra have fallen in love. As their love grows, so do her powers and he begins to worry and take precautions on how to help her. So with the help of Machesse, a local “good” priest, they begin to fight for the life of his lover.

OK, that’s the plot overview, but that is all secondary to the most important part of this movie; the fucking weirdness. “Weird” is really too pedestrian of a word to describe it, but I’m too fucking lazy to go to thesaurus.com. The Queen takes Cathy’s head (complete with hanging entrails) on murderous vampiric flights for blood to make herself more powerful. One of them to suck a baby right out of the mother’s stomach through her pussy! There are scenes of grotesque metamorphosis into animals, and much more for your unbelieving eyes to feast on. It’s just so wonderfully weird.

What makes it more weird is the effects and atrocious dubbing. They use the blue screen to the most ludicrous degrees. They don’t even care if it looks silly and neither do I. I just know it works on so many other-worldly levels. And when the final battle begins, the lightning effects from the hands and fingertips are hilarious. The voices used for the dubbing couldn’t have been more American sounding and coming from these obviously Indonesian people, it was awesomely bad.

The only drawback of the whole thing was the infernal cackling of the Queen. They even explain that it’s part of the magic. But it’s through the whole movie and for minutes at a time. OI! But if you are a lover of weird, weird, WEIRD cinema, you have to pick this up. It will blow your mind.