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Released by: Mondo Macabro
Released on: March 12th, 2025.
Director: Sisworo Gautama Putra
Cast: Suzanna, Advent Bongun, George Rudy, Nina Anwar
Year: 1986
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The Hungry Snake Woman – Movie Review:
From director Sisworo Gautama Putra, the man who gave us The Warrior, comes The Hungry Snake Woman, made in 1986. When the movie begins, a lone man and his rifle observes a gaggle of scantily clad women running about after getting separated from his assistant, Suzy (Indonesian horror icon Suzzanna). When they head into a cave, he follows and inside he comes face to face with The Snake Queen (Suzanna again) when an earthquake wakes her up and allows her to emerge, in a floating gold throne, from a big hole in a rock wall. Then her head melts, revealing a snake inside!
From here, we meet a man named Burhan (Advent Bangun) who is, for all intents and purposes, an asshole. He’s really into money and wants nothing more than to be rich and famous and is so frustrated with his lot in life that he stabs his poor wife, Carlita (Anwar), through the hand with a screwdriver before sexually assaulting her. Again, Burhan is an asshole, full stop. Anyway, Carlita gets away from him and goes to the cops who chase him into the woods where he runs into a different snake woman named Nyi Lajang who, along with her dwarf husband Ki Lajang, lead him back to the main Snake Queen who came out of the wall earlier in the movie. He makes a deal with her to become rich and famous and then she turns him into…. a vampire (complete with plastic Halloween costume fangs and a Dracula outfit)!
From here, vampire Burhan, still very much an asshole, starts running about sucking the blood from the necks of local ladies, but he can’t handle it. Luckily for him, Nyi Lajang offers to help him return to his non-vampire self – all he has to do is have sex with the Snake Queen and stab her with a silver pin, after which she’ll turn back into a regular snake and Burhan can go back to his earlier life. Of course, it doesn’t go as planned…
Pretty much bonkers from start to finish, The Hungry Snake Woman offers up the perfect mix of black magic lunacy, crazy optical effects, flying vehicles and thrones, snakes, gore, sex and scenery chewing performances. Subtlety was clearly never a factor in the making of this film, with all of the cast members overdoing it in pretty much every scene, and the horror and fantasy elements thrown in pretty randomly for good measure. The effects are charming and strange, and the story is all over the place, but somehow it all just works. If nothing else, the film is paced well and never boring!
The Hungry Snake Woman – Blu-ray Review:
Mondo Macabro presents The Hungry Snake Woman on a region free 25GB disc in an AVC encoded 1080 high-definition presentation framed in its original 2.35.1 aspect ratio taken from a new high definition 2k remaster of the original 35mm negative. Picture quality here is quite good. There’s a bit of damage here and there but the vast majority of the presentation is clean and very colorful, boasting excellent color reproduction, accurate looking skin tones and nice, deep black levels. There are no problems with any compression artifacts or edge enhancement and the presentation always looks like proper film, preserving grain and showing impressive detail in pretty much every shot.
English and Indonesian language options are supplied for the film in 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Mono with optional subtitles available in English only (which translate the Indonesian track). Both tracks sound quite clean and are properly balanced, even if a bit of sibilance creeps in here and there. The English dub might sound a little more depth to it but it’s way goofier (not necessarily a bad thing). Either track will get the job done without any issues worth noting.
There are no extra features on the disc.
The Hungry Snake Woman – The Final Word:
The Hungry Snake Woman is completely bonkers from start to finish and the whole thing is just wildly entertaining. While it would have been nice to get some extra features here, maybe a commentary going over some of the cultural significance or certain parts of the movie, the presentation here is a strong one and the movie looks and sounds very good. Highly recommended for whose with a taste for the crazier side of international genre cinema.