Look but Don’t Touch

We don’t often veer outside of American cinema on this website. It’s not that I have any particular hate for foreign films, but there’s simply so much released by Hollywood alone, and all the indie studios around as well, that just keeping up with American cinema is hard enough. If I had to track everything on my own, that would simply be too much. Even as it is, plenty of films fall through the cracks because I only have so many hours in the day and so many interests I’m trying to keep up with. Something has to give, and that means that the wider world of cinema doesn’t get as much coverage as I might otherwise like.

Still, occasionally a film crosses my radar that I just have to take a look at. Thanks to the creator of The Bad Movie Bible, Rob Hill, and his video on “Borrowing Blockbusters: Barbarian Movies and Conansploitation”, one particular gem stood out. Not because it’s good, mind you, but because it’s so ludicrous and over-the-top that you just have to stop and take a look. The film in question is The Devil’s Sword (original title Golok Setan), released in 1983, and it’s an Indonesian film that absolutely gives no fucks. While it tries to follow the basic hero’s journey formula, with a barbarian hero given a quest to rid the world of a specific evil, the film can’t help but wander down various narrative diversions, going absolutely bug-nuts crazy any time it wants, all with the goal of just committing as much action to the screen, no matter how much sense it actually makes. You gotta love a film like that.

Bear in mind this isn’t a good film by any stretch of the imagination. As much glee as it has with its action set-pieces, The Devil’s Sword still struggles in places. It has the same narrative pacing issues that so many other barbarian films of the era struggled with (see also Red Sonja, Barbarian Queen, and The Beastmaster), but it also suffers from the basic ineptness that any low-budget, independent movie tends to have. In short, this is a film that you watch for all the crazy things that can happen but you have to know, going in, that at a certain point the narrative will run out of steam and the movie will crawl to its finale. It goes with the territory.

Mandala (Barry Prima) is a great warrior, trained by a master with the power to fight for all that is good and right. The master also trained Banyujaga (Advent Bangun), but he turned from good, embracing evil. Joining with the evil Crocodile Queen (Gudhi Sintara), Banyujaga handles her dirty business, doing whatever misdeeds she requires. When she decides that she doesn’t have enough men in her harem and that one town has been lax in the sacrifices they give to her, the Crocodile Queen sends Banyujaga to collect one man, the fiance of the village's princess (Enny Christina), and bring him back to the queen. The princess, obviously, fights back.

During the battle, Mandala comes to the town and sees what Banyujaga is up to. He intervenes but is unable to stop the kidnapping. Still, he promises to the princess that he will get the man back and avenge this injustice. The princess convinces Mandala to let her come with, but before they can save her man they have to make a stop and collect a very powerful treasure that Banyujaga and the Crocodile Queen want: the Devil’s Sword, a powerful weapon forged from a meteor, which can only be wielded by one who is worthy. With the sword they might just be able to stop this evil once and for all.

Whether you enjoy The Devil’s Sword or not really comes down to if you’re watching this movie for the action or for the story. If you’re here for the action then the film delivers. There’s plenty of great moments, especially early on. The fight between Banyujaga and the princess is great with him flying in on a literal rock (a trick he never does again, for some reason) and her summoning a great wind storm with a parasol (which she also never does again, weirdly). There’s a later battle between Banyujaga and three other, evil warriors, as they all compete to gain the Devil’s Sword, and it has some fantastically dumb moments. And any time Mandala goes up against crocodile warriors (dudes wearing fake crocodile heads) is a good time.

Admittedly not all the action is as good as these moments. There are a few sequences where Mandala or the princess are surrounded by dudes and everyone dances around while one warrior or another takes their turn. These fights aren’t engaging in the way other battles can be, and the pacing for them is really slow. These moments also highlight that none of the actors are great fighters, and when the film tries to be a more traditional martial arts film, instead of a bug-nuts instance fantasy thrill ride, it tends to fall apart.

But it’s in the story where the film really falters. The crazy moments are great, but at a certain point the film knows it has to commit to finishing its tale, and that’s when we all realize there’s barely any tale here to tell. The heroes go to the evil queen, she speechifies for a bit, and then the heroes defeat her. The whole last act takes place at her palace and it’s a real slog because the story is all but over at this point but the film feels the need to stretch it all out for twenty minutes. In, out, done; that’s all we need, but that’s not how the film handles it and it’s worse for it.

It also struggles to make the main hero relevant. Mandala is a perfect hero, good and powerful and he never makes mistakes. This isn’t someone that we can care about as he goes on his journey because, narratively, he’s already done. There’s nowhere else he can go, he just has to be a hero again and again. The princess would be more interesting since she has something to fight for. That should give her stakes, if the film invested in her, but it doesn’t. Instead she lingers on the sidelines often, only stepping in to fight when Mandala needs a break. The film doesn’t actually need Mandala as the princess would be fine on her own fighting the bad guys and avenging her man, but the film needs a male hero, apparently, so that’s what we get. Mr. Bland Goody Two-shoes instead of the awesome female hero.

The film strains against this, constantly undercutting its own hero’s quest because it doesn’t know what to do with it. It sets up a bunch of villains and then, instead of taking the obvious path of having him fight them one by one, they kill each other off while Mandala is fucking off elsewhere. Banyujaga can’t get the sword because he’s not worthy, so Mandala has to be the one to go and get it from its super secure, safe hiding place, even though this is clearly a terrible idea. Hell, even in the last act, when the hero should be fighting the villain, he gets distracted and becomes useless right when the film needs him most.

This is honestly a case where the story could have played out exactly the same without its main hero, and nothing much would have changed. Villains kill each other, no one gets the sword, princess defeats queen. It’s like Indiana JonesTapping into the classic serial adventures of the 1940s, this franchise has gone on to spawn five films, multiple video games, a TV series, and so many novels and books. in Raiders of the Lost Ark; everything would resolve itself the same way whether Indy was there or not. That’s a terrible place to find your hero, especially in a film this inept and poorly made. You need the hero to have vitality, investment, reason to be there. Mandala does not.

In the end The Devil’s Sword falters under the weight of having to justify its own existence. When it turns to its story the film gets stilted and boring, lacking the verve it needs to thrive. It’s in its crazy fight sequences that the film shines, which makes you wish the film could have been just that. An endless series of Mandana going after villains and killing them in crazy ways. Or, hell, ditch the hero and let the princess take the lead because she’s far more interesting. Regardless, less story and more action would have saved this film. It’s still worth watching for its crazy moments, but I have no doubt that you’ll end up fast forwarding through the rest of it just to get to the next nutso moment of the film.