The 1981 Indonesian movie Srigala is by no means known by the masses, but those in the loop about vintage and obscure Southeast Asian horror are aware of its existence for one reason. The director of the original Satan’s Slaves, once a steady provider of Indonesia’s homegrown horrors, joined the legion of eager filmmakers who set out to make their own slasher after watching the first Friday the 13th. However, Sisworo Gautama Putra did more than just borrow a concept — he lifted an entire ending.
Before Srigala (or “Wolf” in English) gets on with some of the most blatant copycatting in horror, Putra delivers a different movie for the first fifty minutes. The opening kill shows an unsuspecting scuba diver being gutted by an unseen assailant once he comes up to examine the small trinket he plucked from a large lake. Later, three fortune hunters arrive at the same doomed location, searching for treasure on the lake bottom.
Caroko (S. Parya) and his two assistants, Tom and Johan (Barry Prima, Rudy Salam), receive unexpected company at Situ Angsana; Nina, Hesty and Pono (Lydia Kandou, Siska Widowati, Dorman Borisman) have all come to camp in the nearby forest. Not wanting these strangers to interfere with their mission, Caroko tries to scare the three away with tales of demons and ghosts. The women, however, opt to stay after catching an eyeful of Tom and Johan.
Srigala doesn’t have much in the way of horror during these first two acts. The two groups have a stalker on their hands, yes, but no real harm comes to the main characters until later. The only tangible threat shown early on is the antagonist menacing the treasure hunters with a speedboat. A lengthy and rather intense chase on the lake results in an instant explosion once the villain’s vessel touches dry land. Weirdly, though, the characters go on as if the boat incident never even happened.
The following scene feels like the director needed to pad the runtime. At the others’ campsite, the women exchange blows after Nina suggests to Hesty that she shouldn’t be so trustful of Johan. Maybe Putra thought his movie was getting too serious at this point. Otherwise, why would he insert this random catfight? Nina and Hesty turn out to be well-versed in the martial arts, seeing as they kick, punch and strike one another with moves straight out of a classic Hong Kong actioner. Pono continues to be the movie’s comic relief when he uses his crotch to stop the violence. This whole moment is as ridiculous as it is unnecessary, but it also provides the biggest guffaw in Srigala.
Friday the 13th isn’t the only horror movie from the Western hemisphere to inspire Srigala; another of Nina’s scenes owes itself to ‘70s Italian horror. As Nina struggles to fall asleep during a thunderstorm, several zombies rise from the nearby lake. This is, of course, after the hunters previously mistook a coffin, one packed with a rotting corpse, for sunken treasure. Well, these lurching zombies head straight for Nina’s campsite, where they proceed to menace her in the rain-drenched forest. This all turns out to be a nightmare, blurring the movie’s line between reality and fantasy even further. As for the movie’s Italian inspirations, the undead may just be men whose faces were smeared in green goo, but they were likely fashioned (albeit poorly) after Lucio Fulci’s brand of zombies. Meanwhile, the tent scenes bathed in red lighting and the sinister weather had to have been influenced by Dario Argento’s Suspiria.
The time eventually comes for the movie to live up to its legacy. The disguised driver from the speedboat chase begins to bump off the core characters before there’s only one person left standing. And since Putra all but copied the denouement from Victor Miller’s script, the fact that the killer is a woman shouldn’t be surprising. Yet how she figures into the story is the one glaring difference between her and Pamela Voorhees. While Mrs. Voorhees was avenging her drowned son in Friday the 13th, the murderer here was acting out of greed and pure self-interest.
It’s fascinating how far Putra went to replicate the iconic conclusion of Friday the 13th. Apart from a few significant changes — most of all, there’s no cathartic beheading to speak of — the filmmaker simulated Mrs. Voorhees’ massacre as much as possible. Does he pull it off? Almost. As for the legendary boat scene, Srigala can’t withstand the urge to do its own jump-scare. Dream sequence or not, though, it makes little narrative sense for a zombie to suddenly pop out of the lake at the end. But for the sake of a cheap thrill? Sure, why not.
If not for its flagrant scene theft, Srigala would have, in all likelihood, been forgotten or left undiscovered outside of its homeland. Anyone expecting a Friday the 13th remake will be disappointed, seeing as the “creative” poaching is tucked away in the movie’s back end. It’s the original parts before then that drag the whole picture down. Nevertheless, the appeal of something as strange as Srigala is hard to resist.
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
