Friday the 13th, released on this day in 1980, spawned a handful of sequels and countless ripoffs. But did you know that in 1981, one year after its release, it got an Indonesian remake?!
In the wake of its box office success back in 1980, it seemed like every horror movie wanted to be Friday the 13th. Sure, films like Black Christmas and Halloween deserve a whole lot of credit for kick-starting the slasher movement, but it wasn’t until director Sean Cunningham and makeup effects master Tom Savini added a whole lot of gore to the mix that the slasher film finally became what it was perhaps always destined to be. Countless slashers that came along in the early ’80s tried their best to capture that magic, but none tried harder than Srigala.
Released in ’81, the Sisworo Gautama Putra-directed Indonesian film was a Friday the 13th ripoff in every sense of the term, lifting entire scenes and even specific shots from Sean Cunningham’s seminal classic. I watched a low quality version of the film without any subtitles many years back so it was kind of hard to pick up exactly what was going on, but here’s what I gathered.
Srigala is about a hidden treasure that lies at the bottom of the Indonesian equivalent of Crystal Lake, which a few treasure hunters are in hot pursuit of. At the same time, a group of young friends are vacationing on the lake, and the two groups soon find themselves face to face with an evil force that doesn’t exactly want them there. The threat, you ask? An older woman, of course!
It seems that those aforementioned treasure hunters unearthed a treasure chest with a dead body in it (the Indonesian equivalent of Jason Voorhees), and the woman who knocks off the horny young teens one by one, I can only assume, is the mother. Once the killing begins, almost everything on display in Srigala is lifted wholesale from Friday the 13th, right down to the kills: one girl goes off on her own and is struck in the head with an axe, while one of the dudes is pinned to a wall with a sharp weapon. There’s even a final battle that sees the final girl kill the woman.
And yes, in case you were wondering, the final girl heads out onto the lake after surviving the hellish ordeal. And yes, she has a nightmare wherein a monster pulls her into the water.
As far as I’m aware, Jason’s Indonesian doppelganger never returned for Srigala 2.
You can watch the Srigala trailer and final battle below!
