Kala malam bulan mengambang (When the Full Moon Rises) ...

Rosyam Nor, Umie Aida, Avaa Vanja

Filmmaker Mamat Khalid pays homage to Malaysian genre cinema of the 1950s and 60s while adding a few eccentric touches of his own in this supernatural horror-comedy, set in 1956, shortly before Malays... read more ia was declared an independent state. Saleh (Rosyam Noor) is a newspaper reporter whose career is in the balance as his editors suspect that the strange stories he routinely digs up may be the product of his imagination rather than fact. However, Saleh finds he's on the trail of another improbably scoop when he travels to a small town in the country where there have been reports of ghosts, and he happens upon a skeleton that's holding a knife. As Saleh tries to verify the stories of angry spirits, he crosses paths with a mysterious nightclub singer (Avaa Vanja), an elderly academic with some strange ideas (Kuswadinata) and a simple local girl who knows more than one might expect (Umie Aida). As the night wears on, Saleh discovers that the skeleton's knife has become hot to the touch, and that a gang of communist agents and a mob of dwarf gangsters are somehow linked to the story of the walking dead. Kala Malam Bulan Mengambang (aka When The Full Moon Rises) received its North American premiere at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi