80 years ago, demon lord Drakulat Van
Listerooy (Awie) was defeated by a bunch of courageous villagers, and he and
his demons were entombed somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Now, a
bunch of kids accidently free Drakulat and his devil's spawn, and soon
enough they try to take over Kuala Lumpur in search of the chosen one,
lovely Delyla, whom they need to free the all-powerful Lord Sharon. Switch
to two ordinary exterminators, Poh Jee (Radhi OAG) and his uncle, who seem
to lead a life as uneventful as can be. Poh Jee has just fallen in love
with Delyla, but she pretends to not even notice him. When Uncle learns
about the return of Drakulat though, he tells Poh Jee he's actually a
ghostfighter in disguise, and before you know it, he tries to go after
Drakulat on his own ... and loses his life doing so. Poh Jee finds a
video on which his uncle tells him he's the chosen one to defeat Drakulat (you can tell it by
a bristhmark of course) and he is to assemble a group of ghost fighters
(or antoo fighters, if you may) to go after Drakulat and save
Delyla before she can be sacrificed to Lord Sharon. Quickly, a quintet
of antoo fighters is assembled, and after some training at a rasta
farii's, who also gives them all kinds of cool gadgets and weapons, they
go after Drakulat and his devil's spawn ... and of course save Delyla,
Kuala Lumpur and the world in the end ... An attempt to blend
horror and comedy by way of spoofing the superhero genre and taking
deliberate cues from the Ghostbusters-movies, Antoo
Fighter, despite some cool (if by no means perfect) special effects
and some quite funny sight gags, comes across as amazingly bloodless.
Partly to blame is lead Radhi OAG, who tries way too hard to ham it up
while not being particularly funny, plus there's loads of badly executed
slapstick that wouldn't even have been funny if it was done better.
However, the main fault of the film is its script, which takes like
forever to set up an amazingly simple story (boy assembles team and
becomes a hero to save the girl he loves), and then presents its audience
with a finale that simply fails to pack a punch. On the plus side,
Awie's hammy performance as baddie Drakulat Van
Listerooy (what a great name by the way) is flawless and hilarious.
Too bad he couldn't have been in a better movie ...
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