SPECIAL SILENCERS
(SERBUAN HALILINTAR)
Dir. Arizal, 1982.
Indonesia. 86 min.
In dubbed English.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 24 – 10 PM

When a greedy, power-hungry magician decides to assassinate the beloved village mayor to seize his political seat and glean his riches, he’s not content to simply dispatch a knife-wielding killer; rather, he slips the mayor one of his “Special Silencers,” a small tablet which causes an orgiastic gaggle of tree branches to burst forth from its victim’s stomach with a torrent of blood and entrails streaming from their surcles. The same treatment goes to the mayor’s brother, an out-of-town police officer en route to ensure his family’s safety, but his daughter Eva Arnaz escapes—and just happens to cross paths with Dutch-Indonesian exploitation stalwart and champion martial artist Barry Prima. He may be a simple, kind-hearted drifter—or perhaps a police spy. The pair fight off legions of assassins and silencers are dispersed like razor-bladed candy while the heroes work to uncover the identity of their puckish antagonist.

Remember the never-ending torrent of blood in the possessed hand scene of EVIL DEAD 2? In SPECIAL SILENCERS, a simple papercut is occasion enough for Arizal to turn on the waterworks, and it’s not merely the insane, Cronenbergian special effects—which seemingly anticipate The Thing and happen to have appeared within weeks of Alien—that occasion geysers of gore, but even more so the rough-and-tumble physical fights and alarmingly dangerous-looking stunts. Which is to say, this isn’t so much an “action-horror” hybrid as a brute-force action extravaganza in which gnarled tree branches periodically explode out of people’s stomachs in spectacularly violent ways.