Kuala Lumpur genre outfit Abnormal Studios has taken on worldwide international sales for “Ali & Ben’s Spicy Meats,” a Malaysian cannibal black comedy-horror from sibling filmmakers Iskander and Feisal Azizuddin.
The company plans to launch the title at the Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM) in Busan this October.
The ninth independent feature from the pair – working under their Feisk Productions banner – centers on two down-on-their-luck friends who accidentally hit upon a winning spicy beef jerky recipe – one with a distinctly human ingredient – and find their fortunes, and their moral compasses, spinning wildly out of control as the business takes off.
Amir Nafis, one of Malaysia’s better-known screen actors, leads the cast alongside Syazani Zikry and Bella Imani. Original hand-drawn illustrations by Gladys Lee and Qistina Ishak feature throughout as visual storytelling elements.
Co-director Feisal Azizuddin said: “I wanted to tell a story that explores how desperation warps ordinary people, and how ambition often wears a friendly face, and that we are another person’s dish in this complex, twisted society we live in.”
The film takes cannibalism – rarely broached in Malaysian popular cinema – as both literal premise and social metaphor, training its lens on characters pushed to extremes by poverty and ambition. Where mainstream local filmmaking tends toward restraint, this picture pursues the opposite: explicit violence, sexuality and dark humor treated as formal choices rather than shock tactics, marking out a more transgressive current within contemporary Malaysian independent film.
The Azizuddin Brothers have spent the better part of a decade making work that sidesteps genre convention and mainstream expectation. Earlier features include the multi-character drama “Angkat,” the psychological thriller “Tafakur,” the period-inflected “This Land of Mine” and the horror entry “Kabus.” “Angkat” screened at the 2024 Blue Chair Film Festival in Luang Prabang, Laos, where it received its world premiere. More recently, Feisk Productions cleared its crowdfunding target for “False Summits,” a documentary about a Malaysian mountaineer who died attempting Gunung Tahan, the tallest summit on the Malay Peninsula.
Abnormal Studios, a Westec Media Limited subsidiary, brings roughly 100 titles a year to market across Southeast Asia as well as Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Mongolia and Nepal. Among its recent commercial successes are “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” and “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.”
ACFM runs alongside the Busan International Film Festival.
