WHEN THE FULL MOON RISES (Malaysia, 2008)
Directed by: Mamat Khalid
Starring: Rosyam Nor, Umie Aida, Avaa Vanja

Malaysia has always been mad for movies. A hit film song became the country’s national anthem and for decades the Cathay and Shaw Brother studios duked it out for Malaysian audiences, unleashing musicals, jungle adventures, romances and vampire flicks by the score. Their film industry had Malay actors onscreen, Indian talent behind the camera and Chinese money paying the bills for an endless whirl of mostly black-and-white pictures that featured a monster known as The Oily Man, female vampires, twisty film noirs, adaptations of Macbeth and musicals. But thanks to the ravages of politics, time and poor film preservation almost none of them survive. (Although some important movies had a more romantic fate: when star Maria Menado married the Sultan of Pahang her vampire vehicle, PONTIANAK, the most successful movie in Malaysian history, was banned. The distraught producer took the only print and threw it in the river. It has never been seen since.)

In an effort to make Malaysian film history live again, Mamat Khalid has gone down into the lab and fired lightning into his own black-and-white, classic Malaysian film, WHEN THE FULL MOON RISES. Set in 1956, on the eve of Malaysia’s independence this is a Guy Maddin movie if Guy Maddin was Muslim and worked in a film history that was full of were-tigers, communist agents and lady vampires. The adventure begins when hard-boiled reporter Saleh (Rosyam Nor, one of Malaysia’s most respected actors) gets trapped in a remote village after his car runs over a skeleton holding a dagger. Fired from his paper for reporting stories that are too strange to be true, Saleh’s journalistic sixth sense starts twitching when he learns that the villagers live in fear of a female ghost who hunts man meat by night. Then the German-speaking Communists and the midget gangsters show up.

At first you don’t know what to think: is it serious? Is it a send-up? But soon it’s obvious that while Mamat Khalid loves Malaysian movies, he loves turning their conventions inside out even more. This is a movie that takes the horror films of the 1950’s and shows us that underneath all the terror, mystery and foggy forests full of dark shadows the only thing we have to fear...is the Hypno-Machine.