FEB 22 — Back in the late 90s there was such a slew of violent, gory and morally in-your-face (but not necessarily horror) films coming from Japan and South Korea that there was even a marketing label attached to them so the distributors could easily sell the films. These films were called Asia Extreme Cinema, thanks to the brilliant branding effort by UK label Tartan Films who started a sort of sub-label for Asian films which they called Tartan Asia Extreme.

Famous directors like Takashi Miike, Hideo Nakata, Park Chan Wook and Kim Jee Woon all made their names with these films and have films released under the Tartan Asia Extreme banner like Miike’s Audition and Dead or Alive trilogy, Nakata’s Ringu and Dark Water, Park’s Vengeance trilogy and his masterpiece Old Boy and Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life.

It was a brilliant case of “identifying the next big thing ahead of your competitor and becoming the early dominant provider”, as the label’s founder and owner Hamish McAlpine succinctly once put it during an interview. It started off as a cult phenomenon but soon made its way into mainstream consciousness, at least enough to have Hollywood come a-calling and producing remakes of titles like The Ring, Dark Water, Infernal Affairs, Bangkok Dangerous, The Eye, A Tale of Two Sisters and most recently Old Boy.

Being a keen observer of the South-East Asian film industry, and looking with envy at the kind of film exports that our neighbours have managed to achieve, I’ve always said that we need more genre films to be made here in order to have any chance of exporting our films to a wider international audience.

Instead we keep on getting bombarded with high-budget “prestige” productions, usually historical films that are neither here nor there. And these are supposedly our best hope of reaching international shores with our films, so these films receive all sorts of funding and budgetary help from the government. Yet still we’re not even a blip in the international film scene.

In contrast a fairly healthy number of people know who Tony Jaa is, and would probably have seen Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong. They may have even seen sub-par Thai action flicks like Chocolate or Bangkok Knockout, because these still get exported out of Thailand.

I’ve already written in the past about Indonesian rising star Timo Tjahjanto, who made his name as one-half of The Mo Brothers directing team with their debut film Rumah Dara which was a slasher film but executed with such a wonderful level of nastiness that it became a small sensation amongst gorehounds the world over. He’s since been involved in not one, but two high profile horror anthology films, one of which is The ABCs of Death and the other being the excellent V/H/S/2, in which he co-directed a segment with Gareth Huw Evans, of The Raid fame.

And this year’s Sundance Film Festival saw the premiere of not only The Raid 2: Berandal but also The Mo Brothers’ highly anticipated second film, Killers. It’s just my luck that Killers opens in cinemas in Indonesia right smack in the middle of my holiday there, so of course I didn’t waste any time in rushing to the cinema to see it. And all I can say is, after the splatteriffic bloodbath of Rumah Dara, the ultra-violence of The Raid, the mindf**k of Timo’s segment in The ABCs of Death and the breathless everything-goes horror of his segment in V/H/S/2, it’s hard to see how he can top it all off, but Killers did just that and more.

At first playing like your standard torture-porn film (which may bring to mind Joko Anwar’s excellent Pintu Terlarang at times) Killers transcends its chosen genre as it descends into the psyche of two killers, one in Japan and one in Indonesia and stares mercilessly into the darkness that is their minds that it becomes a truly uncomfortable viewing experience. And at 140 minutes, it will test the willpower and stomach of a lot of viewers, as there are already reports from Sundance of audiences walking out of the film because of its uncomfortable subject matter.

In fact, it reminds me of the high points of the Asia Extreme Cinema films, only this goes even further by not making any concessions at all to the audience. There’s plenty of violence and depraved behaviour, but not of the kind that gives the audience pleasure. It’s like the more morally suspect end of Takashi Miike’s films, but with the kind of mise en scene and craftsmanship that will make Park Chan Wook proud.

Produced with money from Japanese studio Nikkatsu, and a host of other production companies, Killers looks very likely to travel the world and become the talk of the fanboy scene. With The Raid 2: Berandal also reportedly taking its ultra-violence to exciting new levels, is this the rumbling beginnings of Indonesia Extreme Cinema? I won’t say no to that!

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.