Rhoma Irama: Satria Bergitar

I’ve blogged about Rhoma Irama before.  Like many in the entertainment industry, he’s one of those people who has never allowed a lack of talent and ability to stop him from becoming a success.

Satria Bergitar is too dreadful to watch in its entirity.  There is far too much talking and pantomime acting.  In this film Rhoma plays himself (as always), this time in his incarnation as medieval knight who has gone undercover as a wandering minstrel to infiltrate the Evil King’s court.  His cunning disguise is a moustache (!)

This clip begins with Rhoma doing a song while holding something which is supposed to be a guitar (he makes guitar-playing actions with it).  The special thing about this guitar is there are no strings!  He is accompanied by some of the least enthusiastic dancers you are ever likely to see.  The song drags on and several times seems to be about to come to an abrupt stop, but then continues.  Eventually the song comes to an abrupt stop and a baddie takes away his strange guitar-thing, apparently to stop him from singing any more terrible songs.

Next is a bizarre scene where the Bad King tries to seduce the Good King’s daughter but she puts his eye out with a knife.  I don’t think he was expecting that move.  Anyhow, he seems to be a very forgiving kind of guy, or else he’s the sort to make the best of adversity because instead of having her torn to pieces by wolves, in the next scene he’s had a splendid eye patch made for his now useless eye socket and he’s getting ready to marry the eye-gouging harridan.  This guy has commendable persistence.  Their entry into the throne room is heralded by a lady wearing clown make-up.

The clip ends with Rhoma performing another song.  He has managed to get his hands on another weird fake guitar, again with no strings, and has a back-up group which carries an assortment of other weird and unplayable instruments.  The choreography for this song consists of putting one foot in and one foot out and prancing around in a circle singing ‘woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo’.  Once you’ve seen this you will never forget it.  Even the actors who are supposed to find this performance entertaining seem to be falling asleep.  Maybe it’s a magic guitar that has a soporific effect on the enemy?

In the clip which follows, Rhoma is betrayed by the Good King’s son, who tears off Rhoma’s disguise.  Everyone expresses shock that they didn’t realise that the guy with the moustache who looked exactly like Rhoma is actually – drumroll - Rhoma!  There’s a duel and the Good King’s son wins it fairly, but just as he’s about to give Rhoma the coup-de-grace, his own father stabs him in the back!  What sort of ‘Good King’ stabs anyone in the back, let alone his own son?  Well, I was certainly surprised by that.  We also discover that the guitar also has an in-built shotgun which the Bad King’s wife uses to good effect and then stops using.

After that, the film reverts to a boring talkfest and drags on to an eventual end.  At least, I hope it ends – I’ve never watched it to it’s conclusion, I value my time slightly higher than that.  At least this little part of the film is worth watching, at least for its weirdness.  Considering the look of the film, I initially thought it was quite old, but in fact it’s much more recent than it looks - mid 1980’s.

You may be surprised to learn that Rhoma has not stopped making films.  Well, he did stop for a long time, but he’s just made another one in which he again plays himself – Dawai 2 Asmara.  It seems to have been made to promote Rhoma’s son, Rhido Rhoma.  Apart from an ‘eternal triangle’ love story, the plot is supposed to be about the old man encouraging his son to develop an updated form of dangdut to make it relevant to today’s audience.  From the clip it looks like they’ve just tried to include some Bollywood elements.  Rhido performs a cover version of his old man’s best selling song, Dawai Asmara:

But you can see it’s not a patch on the original, whatever you think of the original: