Dangerous Seductress

  

Dangerous Seductress

1995

Director- H. Tjut Djalil

Cast- Kristin Anin, Tonya Lawson, Amy Weber, Joseph Cassano, John Warom

From Indonesia 

            

    The movie opens with a frenetic, violent chase. Police are in hot pursuit of jewel thieves. The chase ends with a crash and blood spilling on the ground. From that ground rises a succubus, the Queen of Darkness (Amy Weber). The problem is, only her head is formed. Her body is still rotted flesh and bones. She learns real quick how to solve that when a poor dog tries to gnaw on her leg bone and she lops its head off.  She absorbs its blood and this restores most of her body. However, she can’t go out looking for more because some kind of earth spirits have her pinned in place.

        

   Meanwhile, across some continents, beautiful blonde Susan (Playboy model Tonya Lawson, billed as Tonya Offer here) is finding out what a jerk her boyfriend is. Not only is he late coming home for their anniversary, he then beats her and rapes her! This has apparently happened before but she decides enough is enough and hauls ass.

            

     Susan’s older sister Linda (Kristin Anin) is also a beautiful blonde (good genes in the family I guess) who is working as a model in Indonesia. Big sister lets little sis crash at her pad while she goes off to some exotic locale for a photoshoot.  As it just so happens, Linda has a grimoire of Indonesian black magic because someone gave it to her for her birthday (because ,you know, that’s what you give people right?). She has left it lying around and Susan, not having any copies of TV guide, decides to give it a whirl. Not only is she able to read it but she summons the spirit of the Queen of Darkness, who appears in Susan’s mirror. The Queen promises her beauty and power if Susan will just let her use her body. Susan agrees and then goes out to do the Queen’s bidding.

    Susan walks the streets and haunts the nightclubs picking up guys, seducing them, killing them, and draining them of their blood. She then reports back to the mirror where she slits her own throat so that the mirror can absorb the blood for the Queen (that’s a pretty original idea, I have to admit). Things hit the fan when big sister returns home from her work trip.

            

    I have seen the film listed with the title Evil Queen, with a date of 1992, but its most commonly listed as Dangerous Seductress with a date of 1995, so that’s how I have it listed here.  Just watching the film, it’s hard to tie it to any particular era. It has a 70’s disco opening theme, the whole thing in general seems like an 80s B film, but the fashions are definitely 90s. All of the Caucasian expats filling up the background look so 90s you can almost smell the Drakkar dripping off of them.

   

   

 The director is Indonesian, and despite its American leading ladies and English dialogue, the film is very Asian and reminds me of the genre films being made in Hong Kong at the time. The beginning, especially, reminds me of the HK  movies of that decade, not because of its quality certainly, but the wild originality. The production values are low but the creativity is high where as in America things trended in the opposite direction. That pretty much summed up the difference between Eastern and Western cinema at that time.

            

     The film has something for everyone; shoots outs, vampirism, folk magic, underground spirits, a floating head, a dismembered  finger walking around. The one thing it doesn’t have is any nudity! A whole film about a succubus, staring a beautiful Playboy model, and there is no nudity? Tonya Lawson was in so many skimpy outfits, you think they could have tossed us a complimentary nipple, but no. This was typical though of Asian cinema at the time and to a much lesser extent even today. In the 90s, the Japanese might have been pervs making cartoons about school girls being raped by alien octopuses, but they shied away from explicit sex in their live action films. Even today there is a general taboo about showing genitalia. There are 2 scenes, one with the Evil Queen and one with Tonya, where the actresses are nude, but they’ve covered over the naughty bits with special effects to make it look like their nipples are glowing energy balls (!?!?). You can find uncensored stills on the interweb, but what print those are from, I don’t know. Well, in any case I’m sure that glowing energy nipples is somebody’s fetish.

            

     To put it straight, most people will not like this movie. Its low budget and cheesey. But if you want something different, or are old enough to remember getting bootlegged VHS copies of laserdiscs from Asia, then you may find something you like here.