A group of friends visits their old orphanage where they grew up. They are looking forward to meeting the old man who took care of them. But then strange things start to happen, and it turns out that there is someone from the past who is seeking revenge. Who is this person, and what happened in the past?
The Queen of Black Magic is a remake of an Indonesian movie from 1981 that I have watched. There are some similarities here, but in the end, they also feel completely different.
I’m a big fan of the Mo brothers, and it’s Kimo Stamboel who has directed the movie. So that’s a big plus.
But I think the movie was mediocre. The problem is that it’s not scary, and it doesn’t have many memorable scenes that will make you turn your head away from the screen.
I saw an early danger signal when the movie focuses too much on computer-animated millipedes. It’s never a good sign because it was not disgusting when you know that these are computer-animated millipedes. Let the actors swallow some real millipedes! That’s disgusting!
It’s just one scene here that was a little scary and clever, and that’s when the young boy watches an old videotape. In this scene you expect the movie to imitate the Japanese movie Ring. That scene worked well, and it felt a little smart considering the twist it offered. But this is the only scary scene in the whole movie.
The story is very generic and almost empty. I have seen this many times before. The movie has so many characters, and it uses 40 minutes to introduce the characters. It burns so slowly.
And then the fun begins, but there is nothing here that impressed me. The only thing I think was interesting and fun is when the antagonist tells our victims that maybe hell doesn’t exist, so the antagonist is creating hell on earth to be safe so that those who have done something wrong in the past will suffer. The sequence we then see is a fun sequence I liked. Burn in hell! BURN IN HELL!
But this is a generic horror movie that tries to be very dark and dirty. It focuses on graphic violence. But I was not impressed with the gore. It gets too tame, and towards the end, it felt like I watched an Evil Dead tribute again. And that’s not the first time any of the Mo brothers have paid tribute to the Evil Dead movies.
Unfortunately, the characters also behave like stupid movie characters who like to leave their kids behind in a spooky house, even if they had space for them in the car. One character says they have no space, which is nonsense! Why do you leave your kids behind when two women turn crazy while they are in the house? And what about the bus they find? Why in God’s name do they leave their kids behind? Why? And why does one of the friends travel to the bus all alone to see what has happened there? These are things that took me out of the movie. This was just too stupid!
The Queen of Black Magic is not scary enough, and it does not have any memorable scenes that I will remember. So this was a disappointment. The original movie has more charm, but it hasn’t withstood the test of time. I liked the first half of the original movie, but then you discover how dated the storytelling is. And it falls apart in the second half. None of these movies are masterpieces.