Three Films Make A Posthouse

The Eternal Daughter (2022): I generally tend to avoid the style of arthouse movies concerning the horrible suffering of posh people from some Freudian bullshit or other or moaning about the oh so terrible emptiness of their lives Joanna Hogg deals in, but when a film is supposed to conjure up the shadow of the 70s Ghost Stories for Christmas, I can’t really resist. And yes, there are some inspired moody shots of the kind Lawrence Gordon Clark dealt in to be found here, and those are certainly artfully done. But there’s also the fact this thing purporting to be a ghost story about grief often seems more like one about a rich person suffering from a bad experience with the hotel staff, which, personally, mostly makes me grief the lack of a guillotine in the hotel’s backroom.

At least Tilda Swinton must have been happy, for she gets to play one of those double roles she clearly relishes.

Summer of Demon (1981): While I’m complaining about ghost stories that don’t build an emotional connection to me as audience, Yukio Ninagawa’s version of Yotsuya Kaidan manages the unthinkable, namely, to make me feel nothing about the tale of Oiwa’s ghost. Coming from a successful career as a director of plays – apparently particularly Shakespeare – Ninagawa overcompensates for his inexperience in screen direction with a lot of distracting, busy camerawork that typically adds nothing to a scene and a lack of focus on the core of the story he’s telling. Kenichi Hagiwara makes a flat Iemon, and Keiko Takahashi’s Oiwa isn’t interesting alive or as a ghost here.

It doesn’t help Ninagawa’s case that I have seen Tai Kato’s much superior version just some months ago, and so have ample comparison points to the detriment of this one.

Posthouse (2025): Thus, the best of this entry’s bunch of movies is Nikolas Red’s tale of an (actually real) lost Pinoy silent horror movie, bad family business, and the danger of obsessing about art. You do need to have some patience with this one, though: the acting is never quite sharp enough for the complex emotions the script suggests, the visual side has a rather cheap, digital look, and the fake silent movie pieces are creepy but never convince as what they are supposed to be.

Still, there’s something genuine, serious and interesting about this one that makes it well worthy of some attention and some thought.

Death Force (1978)

aka Vengeance is Mine

aka Fighting Mad

aka The Force

Doug Russell (James Iglehart) and his war buddies Morelli (Carmen Argenziano) and McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy) are planning on using their return trip from Vietnam via Manila to at least get something out of the war for themselves with a bit of drug smuggling.

Doug, a usually very straight guy, really only wants to do this one time and then get back to his girlfriend Maria (Jayne Kennedy) and their little son. His partners, on the other hand, are in the drug business for the long run. Because they are not just pushers but also assholes (and because McGee has the hots for Maria and has no moral compunctions against anything, ever), they decide to just murder Doug. Knifing him and throwing him into the ocean doesn’t kill our hero, however. Thanks to a twist of fate/the script gods, he washes up wounded on a small island only populated by two Japanese soldiers who have been purposefully stranded here since the end of the war. Unlike your typical Japanese army throwbacks of the movies, these two are very well aware the war is ended, but still continue defending their island against whoever goes there.

Doug, however, they help and want to keep. They are rather old by now, after all, and a young, strong helper like the American would be rather useful. After various cultural misunderstandings – turns out goading guys like these with tales of and Americanised Japan does not lead to joy and happiness and Americans of Colour don’t really hold much with slavery – the officer type of the two Japanese (played by Filipino actors, obviously) takes a bit of a shine to Doug and teaches him a weird B-movie version of the code of the Samurai, as well as some awesome sword fighting techniques.

While this is going on, we regularly pop in with Morelli and McGee, who work their way up the ladder of Los Angeles crime one burned down house and murder at a time. McGee also attempts to put his very special kind of moves on Maria, but she knows a slime ball when she sees one and repeatedly rebuffs him. Because he’s just that kind of guy, he then stealthily torpedoes her career as a singer, to somehow get her into his bed by virtue of economical pressure. Maria still doesn’t bite, and McGee becomes increasingly more of a physical danger to her.

Fortunately, Doug does eventually make his way back home and goes on a bit of vengeance rampage with his newfound sword fighting prowess.

I am as often down on the movies of Filipino low budget maestro Cirio H. Santiago as I am up. His blaxploitation (and Japaneseholdoutsploitation, and so on) epic – nearly two hours long in the complete “director’s” cut I watched – Death Force however is nothing anyone who likes 70s exploitation fare could possibly sneeze at. Sure, the movie’s structure is a bit rough, and its running time perhaps a bit too epic for its own good, yet it is also stuffed full of awesome elements that come together to form a very special kind of crazy. Santiago certainly doesn’t stint on exploitational values for a second: when you’re not watching McGee and Morelli making their violent career, you get scenes of Doug getting taught a highly dubious version of already highly dubious warrior philosophy by an actor (Jo Mari Avellana?) who puts his all into being fake-Japanese in a way that transcends the offensive so effectively, it turns beautiful.

I also found myself pleasantly surprised by the sequences concerning Maria’s suffering that take on an appropriately Catholic quality and allow her to show a strength of character you don’t usually get from The Girl in this kind of affair. That Kennedy’s portrayal of McGee is quite so perfectly vile – even Morelli seems put out by some of his behaviour - does enhance that aspect even more, for standing up to this jerk takes quite a bit of personality. All of this also provides the hope for a reunion between Maria and Doug with a certain degree of emotional heft, so much so I found myself mentally cheering at the sappy family reunion montage Santiago of course is not ashamed to provide. And good for him.

The film’s action starts out competent and relatively straightforward and increases in intensity and general weirdness once Doug hits Los Angeles, cutting his way through the gang of his former friends, Iglehart always making as good an impression in his fight scenes as he does in the rest of the film. Particularly the final battle is a bit of a paradise for the friend of decapitation, as well, so our timeless lack of good taste is well provided for as well.

Finally, there’s a “what the fuck” to end all “what the fuck” endings that left even me speechless for once.

Add all of this up, and Death Force turns out to be one of Santiago’s masterpieces.

The Twilight People (1972)

Great white diver (and hunter, one presumes) Matt Farrell (John Ashley) is kidnapped and brought to the private island of one Dr Gordon (Charles Macaulay), mad scientist. Gordon dwells on the island with his daughter Neva (Pat Woodell) and a small security detachment led by Steinman (Jan Merlin), a really unpleasant kind of guy – quite obviously meant to be a Nazi - Farrell will lock horns with repeatedly.

Gordon needs Farrell as another specimen for his mad science plan of creating an improved human race able to survive the harshness of the catastrophic future the good doctor is convinced is coming. Apparently, you do that by turning people into animal persons. Gordon has quite the menagerie of those by now, but is unhappy with the anipeoples’ tendencies to develop highly animalistic behavioural patterns and to flee further experimentation whenever the opportunity arises. Which is rather often, for Steinman may be brutal, but he’s not actually good at jobs more complex than simply gunning someone down.

Neva isn’t happy at all with her dad’s work – there’s also some shady business about her mother hinted at – and when she hits it off with Farrell, she decides to help him and the already transformed anipeople to stage an escape.

Even though I love the man’s project of making Filipino movies as exploitation fare for the international market to bits, I’m often not terribly happy with the actual films Eddie Romero directed. I have no problems with a certain sloppiness in the filmmaking that does tend to come with the territory doing things on the fly and on the cheap, but many of Romero’s films have a tendency to drag their feet for large parts of their running time I don’t enjoy.

Not so in the case of The Twilight People, a clear attempt at adapting H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr Moreau” while carefully excising every single thought, philosophical idea or moment of intellectual depth the original novel had, and adding a smidgen of The Most Dangerous Game. Romero and co-writer Jerome Small do this curiously well, so that this piece of Wells without a brain is nearly perversely great at what it does.

What it does is mainly present us with the misadventures of the animal people, a group of actors (Pam Grier!, Ken Metcalfe, Tony Gosalvez, Kim Ramos and Mona Morena) fitted out in ridiculous but also wonderfully grotesque make-up jobs, doing some improbably strange animal impressions that by all rights should be patently ridiculous in their earnest intensity but do in practice turn out to be pretty wonderful as well as somewhat creepy.

Best in show isn’t even Pam Grier, who can Panther Woman as well as anyone, or Ken Metcalfe, who is one weird antelope, but Tony Gosalvez. His portrayal of the, well, Bat Man (looking a lot more like Man Bat, actually) is so gleefully over the top, I can’t imagine anyone watching it not just feeling at least a smidgen of pure childish joy. The scenes where he learns to fly on his ramshackle wings, screeches joyfully and begins biting out the throats of bad guys clearly too flabbergasted to hit him with their guns, are absolute pearls of the funny and the grotesque. It’s no wonder he gets to fly off into the sunset at the end of the film, whereas the other anipeople die tragically.

The Twilight People’s more verbal actors don’t fare as well as the film’s true heroes: Ashley is the blandest, least lively manly man imaginable, Woodell is just kinda there, and Macauley only occasionally hits the proper note of ranting and raving. Only Merlin with his Nazi impression seems to get the kind of film he is in, and acts accordingly. The Filipino side actors are all pretty great, of course, as they always are.

Fortunately, Romero is pretty clear about which side his bread is buttered on, and only cares about the characters without special effects makeup as much as he needs to keep the plot rolling. So there’s rather a lot more rollicking monster movie nonsense and running through the jungle to enjoy in The Twilight People than scenes of John Ashley looking wooden.

Shake, Rattle & Roll X (2008)

Apparently, this was the commercially most successful entry into the long-running Filipino horror anthology series. It’s also far from the best of the movies in the series I’ve managed to see, so go figure. Which doesn’t necessarily make this a film not worth one’s time, though. But let’s go through the segments one by one to explain, as usual.

The first episode, “Emergency”, as directed by Michael Tuviera is the long and surprisingly tedious tale of a hospital that comes under siege by a bunch of angry aswangs following an unfortunate aswang baby death. Which should be good, cheap fun, at least on paper, but in practice turns tedious thanks to a script full of needless distractions that tries badly to pump a twenty minute chiller up to forty. So expect many a scene of soap operatics concerning the relationship problems between an ambulance driver and a female doctor, as well as two separate comic relief guys – one of them a mildly offensive gay man. Even the aswangs tend to go on a bit before getting to the human killing business.

Tuviera’s direction isn’t terrible helpful either, with little sense for the rhythms of suspense and even less ability to distract from the pretty terrible CGI all three segments suffer under.

On the positive side, with this, the worst part of the film at hand is already over. From now on, things do at the very least keep to the somewhat entertaining side of the tracks.

Case in point is Topel Lee’s “Class Picture”. A group of students are staying over the weekend – and over night - at their university’s main building to prepare an exhibition. Alas, their first night is haunted by the spirit of a crazy murderous nun seeking a replacement for the three kids she tortured to death before she killed herself. The script isn’t exactly anything to write home about, as it mostly uses well-worn clichés, a lot of running through corridors, and exactly the sort of scares you’d expect, but it is effectively enough structured and paced. Lee’s direction is working on a comparable level. He’s not doing anything fancy – apart from using enough handheld camera one might suggest a love affair with it – but he gets a decent little horror short together, which is all I ever ask from any segment of any horror anthology.

Michael Tuviera returns for the third, final and longest segment, “Nieves, the Engkanto Slayer”, which isn’t quite as close to the adventures of a certain vampire slayer as the title would make one suspect, but is certainly the most fun part of the movie. That is, if you get through the first five minutes or so which are a pure dose of the sort of very broad humour that simply translates badly into different languages.

Country gal Nieves (Marian Rivera in a pretty unforgettable performance) is sassy, shouty, and very much in love with her husband Adonis (Pekto), who, in one of the segment’s better jokes, doesn’t actually look like one. Nonetheless, various nature spirits think Adonis is the hottest thing since sliced bread, too, so Nieves has learned all the ways of driving the buggers away: spells, rituals, potions and knife fighting are all part of her repertoire. Which of course also turns her into the local trouble-shooter for supernatural trouble. One night, when she returns from her unpaid spirit fighting work, she finds her home empty, and just manages to witness how Adonis is literally swallowed by the ground. Well, a large CGI face in the ground, to be precise.

Afterwards, she retreats into herself, stops hunting the supernatural and grumps very prettily. That is, until the city family of young Junie (Robert Villar) moves to town and really big trouble begins to stir.

Tonally, “Nieves” is all over the place. Humour, sentimentality and mild folklore based horror don’t always mix as effectively as I would have wished, but there’s real charm and cleverness in the way it uses urban fantasy tropes with Filipino folk traditions and creatures. Even the bad special effects – practical and digital – add to the charm instead of distracting from it here; they feel in good fun and perfectly in keeping with the cartoonish humour, rather like a shared joke. It’s not really the sort of thing I looked for going into the movie, but offered with so bright a smile, I’m certainly taking the film’s offer.

Stryker (1983)

The apocalypse has come and gone, and the survivor fashion goes for leather, hot pants and big hair. Dune buggies are back en vogue, as usual. Large parts of wherever this film is set are dominated by the evil pocket empire of evil Kardis (Mike Lane). It’s one of those warrior and slave castes affairs Spartan fans fantasize about, controlled by Kardis’s rationing out of whatever water his “warriors” can steal.

But water is very scarce indeed. Things become heated indeed when Kardis learns of a hidden spring of fresh water under the control of a people with a decided number of warrior women, though not exactly the numbers or the arms to fight off a guy who even manages to field (and fuel) three tanks. Ironically, Delha (Andria Savio), the woman whose actions inform Kardis of the existence of the water, was trying to make a pact with the nicer, gentler warlord in the area, one Trun (Ken Metcalfe), exactly to protect her people – whom she didn’t ask about any of this – from Kardis.

Eventually, Kardis’s arch enemy Stryker (Steve Sandor), a former leading man in Trun’s group turned embittered wanderer of the wasteland by the death of his wife or girlfriend by Kardis’s hands (one of which Stryker later managed to hack off), will get in the bad guy’s way and grumpily do some good.

As long-time imaginary readers of this blog know, I’m not too fond of most of the films of Filipino exploitation king Cirio H. Santiago. They rather tend to drag for my tastes, and Santiago’s treatment of the more exploitative elements tends to the unpleasant.

So colour me surprised when I actually enjoyed myself with this Mad Max-alike quite a bit. Obviously, I could have survived rather well without the sexual violence in form of an aborted-by-Stryker-hulking-out rape scene, but the rest of the film is actually rather neat, and the film is certainly one of Santiago’s better ones.

It moves somewhat sprightly, even, or rather, it fills its, ahem, minimalist plot with more than enough cool stuff and fun incident to turn into a very enjoyable genre entry. There’s hardly a minute going by without some cheep yet cheerful action bit, filmed with experienced eye and hand, or an atmospheric shot of the same three sand dunes.

In a surprise turn, there are even some clever touches to the writing. Stryker (the film, not the man) shows an unexpected interest in the politics of its post-apocalypse, actually building a working idea of how Kardis’s evil empire works, how Trun’s differs from that in theory, and how that theory might look rather less exciting in practice. These aren’t realistic political bodies in any way, shape, or form, of course, but as metaphorical stand-ins for certain great powers from the viewpoint of a filmmaker coming from the sort of place these powers really rather like to misuse for their own agendas, they’re surprisingly effective.

Not surprising in this context, Santiago and/or writers Howard R. Cohen and Leonard Hermes  have some actually plausible ideas on how difficult it would be for a small power with some valuable resources to find a more powerful ally that would actually not rob them of their independence. Admittedly, the film does wave this away with a pretty classic hand of god moment in the end, but this is not really the sort of subtext you typically find in Santiago’s filmography – as far as I’ve dug into it, obviously, so I may very well be missing something here - and it’s actually organically integrated with all the beautiful nonsense of leather-clad people killing each other in the dust.

If there’s one thing that isn’t quite up to my standards – low as they may be - in cheap post-apocalypse flicks about Stryker, it is the film’s general lack of the sort of crazy stuff most other films of the genre are full of. Sure, there are the usual genre standards of silliness when it comes to fashion, but otherwise, the craziest element of the film is the unexplained tribe of little people (I hope that’s still the non-offensive term, otherwise please someone correct me) wearing cut-rate jawa robes who will eventually fight on the side of our heroes. And that’s obviously not particularly crazy for this sort of thing.

But that’s a minor complaint in a genuinely entertaining and surprisingly clever movie.

Daughters of Satan (1972)

While poking around in the antiquities shop of one Mr Ching (Vic Diaz), whom we already know as a Satanist thanks to a prologue that’s supposed to get a bit of the mandatory sleaze and nudity in early, art expert and writer James Robertson (Tom Selleck, already looking exactly like Tom Selleck in the 80s) stumbles upon a curious painting of a witch burning that took place in Manila in the 1590s. “Curious”, because the middle witch looks exactly (or really, kinda-sorta if you’re not a character in the movie), like James’s wife Chris (Barra Grant). So obviously, James buys it, hoping that Chris is going to get a kick out of it, one supposes.

However, she’s not at all pleased with the thing, showing revulsion and a strange sense of dread when laying eyes on it. With the painting come strange occurrences: voices calling Chris’s name on the wind at night; the appearance of a big dog named Nikodemus that takes to Chris totally but wants to murder James; and a housekeeper (Paraluman) answering an ad nobody put in the paper, bullying her way into the house. And why, doesn’t she look exactly like another of the witches on the painting!

Pressured by the housekeeper and a secret Satanic witch cult, Chris falls increasingly under the spell of the painting and her older witch self, and soon, she finds herself pressed to kill James. He, for his part, begins to realize some of what’s going on, but most of his counteractions seem ill-advised, awkward and doomed to failure.

Daughters of Satan is yet another of the incalculable number of US/Filipino co-productions shot with predominantly local crews in the Philippines. It is directed by Hollingsworth Morse, who was mostly a TV director apparently specialized in family and children’s TV (there’s a lot of “Lassie” on his CV). Morse never feels terribly comfortable doing horror stuff, so quite a few theoretically cool and spooky little moments here are sabotaged by awkward or simply bland direction. I’d also bet the two Satanic witch get-togethers were filmed by somebody else, because they are not just a bit on the tasteless side and sleazy, but are also much more ruthless and effective than the rest of a film that otherwise can’t even make a proper 70s downer ending feel impactful.

Some of the film’s problems, however, are less Morse’s fault than that of a script that has ideas for a handful of pretty cool moments of supernatural menace but can’t make its characters interesting. James is as bland as every Selleck character, but Chris is written as such a spineless wet blanket it’s difficult to actually see the fight between her and the outside influence that’s supposed to be going on here and not just her spinelessly wavering towards the opinion of the person she spoke with last. It’s, alas, not atypical for a female character in a 70s horror movie, but in a film that should be all about her internal struggle, this sort of thing is particularly destructive. It doesn’t help that Grant’s performance mostly consists of her making bug eyes as Chris’s main emotional reaction to everything.


Still, the film isn’t completely without its charms: the Philippines always make for a good looking backdrop, and there are at least a couple of scenes (the vision that happens to Chris’s psychiatrist before his death comes to mind) where the basic idea of a scene beats the bland execution.

Shake, Rattle & Roll XV (2014)

This to date final, and – as the Internet tells me – most expensive entry into the long-running Filipino horror anthology series presents three tales of horror. This time around, the three segments are vaguely connected by a side character, one Iggy (John Lapus), who will look increasingly worse for wear.

The first segment, “Ahas”, concerns the rather curious things going on in a shopping mall on the cusp of its 25th anniversary. There are rumours about one of the owner’s twin daughters (both played by Erich Gonzales), the now dead Sarah, having been a snake lady. As it turns out, the rumours are all too true. You see, the owner has made a pact with evil forces, and Sarah was some kind of demonic good luck charm. Sarah’s not dead either, but has been kept by her parents in the dungeons below the mall (every mall has those), fed at first with animals but then on a regular diet of shop lifters and rude customers sent down via a fitting room that’s also a secret elevators downwards, growing in size as the mall grew in success. Sarah’s not just a man-eating snake lady, she also seems to have multiple, well, two, personalities, both of which are crazy. She’s also fallen in love from afar with her sister’s boyfriend, one Troy (JC de Vera), so things are bound to become problematic soon enough.

Directed by Dondon Santos, “Ahas” is pleasantly weird, containing a couple of perfectly sensible horror sequences, a bit of family melodrama, special effects that fluctuate between pretty wonderful and terrible in execution but are always wonderful in conception, a sneaky bit of capitalism criticism, and lots of scenes of a pretty snake lady with a humungous snake body getting up to shenanigans. What’s not to like?

Of course, the second segment, “Ulam”, directed by Jerrold Tarog does let the first one look a bit harmless. The not terribly happy couple of Henry (Dennis Trillo) and Aimee (Carla Abellana), and their little daughter Julie (Kryshee Frencheska Grengria) move from the city to a house that once belonged to Henry’s Chinese grandparents. There, they are welcomed by the old family servant Lina (Chanda Romero), who’s always happy to provide a warm meal. That’s the only plus of the place, though, for, as always happens when anyone moves to the country in horror films, strange stuff begins to happen: a deformed shadow sneaks around; the couple hear strange voices telling them to leave; and they begin to suffer from nightmares in which Henry turns into a dog man and Aimee into a lizard woman, both of whom do not like one another at all; the normal family bickering starts bordering on the violent.

What’s going on in what at first looks a bit like a traditional haunted house tale is much nastier stuff than I’m used to from Filipino horror, the protagonists paying the price for the sins of Henry’s family, being not just made to suffer but unmade as human beings for things they have no responsibility for at all, and in ways that turn the most quotidian of things deeply unpleasant.

I found myself – surprisingly enough given the sort of things I watch regularly – actually pretty upset by the segment’s final act, Tarog’s portrayal of the destruction of the couple’s basic humanity, love for each other and their daughter turns out to be very effective indeed, transcending the sometimes not terribly successful special effects easily. And while the segment doesn’t exactly end on a complete downer, it’s at least three fourths of one. Add to that a certain air of the modernized gothic to parts of the proceedings, and I found “Ulam” a very successful piece of horror indeed.

We go from the sublime to the goofy and ridiculous with the film’s final segment, “Flight 666”, directed by Perci Intalan, in which the small number of passengers on board of the titular – and not the least bit suspiciously named – flight 666 encounter the following problems: broad humour; a hijacker with a chip on his shoulder; a bomb whose red button nobody should ever press (cough); and a new-born tiyanak as portrayed by a very bad but also adorable CGI effect. The passengers are a broadly drawn bunch of clichés right out of the 2014 internet; the plotting is hasty and confused; the central monster looks patently ridiculous. However, the whole thing makes a wonderful contrast with the much more serious segment that came before, so ending on quite this goofy a note makes absolute sense for the film as a whole, suggesting there has been more thought put into the sequencing of the segments than in many an anthology movie (where no thought whatsoever seems to have been put in). It is also insanely fun, playing straight at the strangest moments and using its series of cliché airplane movie ideas – and the cute little tiyanak – to great effect. At least, if you’re willing to just go with the beautiful nonsense.


So, as a whole, this is a fine entry for the Shake, Rattle & Roll series to go out on, presenting very Filipino threats in perfectly delightful ways, at least if you ask this guy from Germany.

Three Films Make A Post: Evil Gets Rebooted

Aurora (2018): Yam Laranas’s horror film about coastal inn keeper Leana (Anne Curtis) having to cope with a terrible ship catastrophe on a reef just outside her inn, and getting drawn into a desperate attempt tot salvage the corpses the coast guard pretends aren’t there, is an interesting film in the way it mixes elements of a very serious drama about poverty and how the ship catastrophe ripples out into causing all kinds of personal catastrophes for Leana (and others) with very matter of fact, and somewhat generic South East Asian ghost movie tropes. The film’s at its best when it focuses on the former elements, given Curtis – an actress with a pretty broad range – many an opportunity to shine. The most effective horror moments are really those that concern themselves with either the physicality of death or simply the mass of the dead on Leana’s doorstep; the more typically generic parts of the film are perfectly competent, but not more.

Through Black Spruce (2018): Speaking of genre films about poverty that are at their best whenever they are not focussing on the standard genre tropes, Don McKellar’s film concerns Cree woman Annie Bird (Tanaya Beatty in a performance that’s as complicated as the character she’s playing under a veneer of straightforwardness that’s clearly armour) travelling to Toronto on the trace of her missing twin sister, and the travails of her uncle Will (Brandon Oakes) coping with nasty people at home. It’s a slow, somewhat ponderous film, much more interested in drawing a portray of its First Nation characters by watching them closely in undramatic moments, interactions that breathe the frustration of being poor, brown, pushed to the side, and accepted as a symbol and a thing rather than a person, than in hitting the standard plot beats in the standard moments. Consequently, while there’s nothing wrong with the film’s more typically thrilling scenes, they do seem to distract from its actual strengths sometimes.


10 to Midnight (1983): For my taste, this is one of the lesser movies featuring Charles Bronson that J. Lee Thompson churned out. But then, my tolerance for scenes of policemen whining about the horror of having to respect the law they are supposedly protecting and the usual nonsense about the insanity defence as an easy out is pretty damn low. To be fair, the film does put some effort into giving Bronson an actual human motivation for faking evidence for once. What the film’s motivation for its desperately slow middle part is, I can’t really figure out, though.

Shake, Rattle & Roll 2k5 (2005)

aka Shake, Rattle & Roll 7

The Shake, Rattle & Roll films are a long, though not continuously, running series of Filipino horror anthologies produced for the regional market and closely connected to the Manila Film Festival. Because they aren’t really meant for export, it’s not terribly easy to get ahold of all of the films in subtitled form outside of the Philippines, which is a bit of a shame. The films of the series I have seen are by no means perfect and tend to light and rather cartoonish horror but they are also usually fun and bring a unique cultural perspective to their material that is exactly the sort of thing that makes films produced for local markets often so interesting. These are generally standard horror tales, but they are standard horror tales as seen through a specifically Filipino lens, and, if the viewers are really lucky, also featuring monsters from Filipino folklore.

This seventh entry was a return to screens for the series after a break of eight years, and while it’s a sometimes scrappy and imperfect movie, its three tales are also in turns charming, weird, and actually pretty great.

Well, great’s not the word that comes to my mind for the first tale, “Poso”, directed by Uro de la Cruz. It concerns a broadly drawn fake spirit medium’s (comedian Ai-Ai de las Alas) final case at fleecing money out of the gullible through nonsense and special effects. Alas, she and her gang will soon realize that they’ve finally encountered a real ghost – and it is angry. Which, come to think of it, I’d be too if I would mostly manifest as an unconvincing puddle of moving CGI blood. But it’s not the effects alone that make this episode the mandatory dud of the film – the humour has the shrill quality of chalk on cardboard, the pacing is much too slow for a comedy, and the horror bits are not terribly effective, either.

Fortunately, to the rescue rides story number two, “Aquarium”, by Rico Maria Illarde. A married couple with slight marital problems (Ara Mina and Ogie Alcasid), their son (Paul Salas) and their comic relief live-in maid (the perhaps just a wee bit peculiarly named Wilma Doesn’t) move into a new apartment, where they find the titular aquarium, empty apart from a pretty creepy mask. Of course, the ideal way to make one’s son happy is to fill it with goldfish (and water, don’t worry, nature lovers) yet keep that darn mask inside. Not surprisingly, creepy things happen. At first, it’s just an old a bit dead looking woman popping out of nowhere from time to time to warn the wife about the aquarium being cursed (and to later deliver further helpful exposition), but soon, the cursed and also telekinetic aquarium gets water everywhere, murders a plumber and really, really doesn’t like the kid. But hey, fighting it also helps solve these slight marital problems.

Obviously, this second tale is neither the most sensible of stories nor strictly scary, unless you’re hydrophobic or are generally freaked out by aquariums or goldfish. However, it is such peculiar little tale I found myself utterly charmed by it. There’s hardly a scene going by where the aquarium isn’t up to aquatic shenanigans to all kinds of mind-bending and pretty fun effects, the old woman ghost (spoiler?) is somewhat effective, and the climax even delivers on a little latex monster action. Plus, the aquarium is apparently cursed because a father drowned his little daughter in it because “she looked like a goldfish”. It’s pleasantly bonkers, is what I’m saying, and therefor endlessly entertaining.

Shake 2k5 does end on its best tale. “Lihim ng San Joaquin” (which I believe translates into “The Secret of San Joaquin” but please don’t quote me on this) concerns a married couple (Mark Anthony Fernandez and Tanya Garcia) fleeing a crop failure and pushy parents in their home village to San Joaquin, a village way out in the sticks, in hopes of better luck there. She’s visibly in the last months of pregnancy, so I’m not sure the timing is great, but so it goes. Anyway, pregnancy and poverty turn out to be the least of the couple’s problems: their new neighbours seem more than just a little bit strange and debauched (perhaps San Joaquin is pinoy for “Dunwich”?). And what’s to say about their first encounter with the village leader (Noni Buencamino) that sees him telling them the place just had an epidemic which infected eighteen kids, but don’t they worry, they burned them? As a matter of fact, the couple’s new neighbours are Aswang, and we know how these guys and gals feel about babies (hungry).


“San Joaquin” as directed Richard Somes, is the film’s highpoint, winning me over with a tightness and focus the other two episodes lack, telling its simple tale with great assurance and an ability for building up a nice mood of wrongness with simple means. The Aswang themselves are created via traditional make-up effects and the kind of broad and theatrical acting that’s exactly right for this sort of monster. Already rather convincing as backwoods people of threatening behaviour and hygiene, the actors playing them become truly great when they let loose as monsters, and the tiny siege and chase scene that ensues between them and our heroic couple may be small but it’s also effective, making great use of the jungle, darkness, and mud.

BuyBust (2018)

The Manila police has caught a mid-level drug dealer and “convinces” him to help them arrange a drug buy with his boss, one Biggie Chen. A squad of militarized “war on drugs” police are supposed to keep the situation under control, but things go wrong from the get-go. Chen moves the buy at the last minute into a claustrophobic slum he clearly has much tighter control over than anyone has expected. Turns out the whole thing is a trap managed by a traitor inside the police force going by the original code name of “Judas”, and soon half of the police team is dead and the other half, cut off from all support, begins a desperate fight for survival. Not just against Chen’s men but also against much of an enraged local populace who hate the gangsters and the police to pretty much the same degree, thanks to nobody involved on either side giving a crap about their lives or security.

Erik Matti’s Filipino action movie BuyBust is a highly impressive effort driven by some fantastic work in front of and behind the screen and what feels like genuine anger about the Filipino War on Drugs.

As an action film, this at times feels like a horizontal play on Gareth Evans’s The Raid: Redemption. The action here isn’t quite as fast and furious as in the Indonesian-Welsh production, but that’s because Matti clearly has his own ideas about the rhythms of an action movie. While the violence certainly escalate from somewhat naturalistic into something properly outrageous with an insane body count as is action cinema’s wont, for large parts of its running time BuyBust thrives on a stop/start, quiet/loud structure whose forward drive consequently feels a bit different from the way much of action cinema works. It’s a difficult trick to play in this genre, pacing-wise, but this approach provides BuyBust with quite a bit of individuality even for those among its viewership, like me, who have seen a lot of fictional people knifed, shot, etc in a lot of different ways, providing it with a feel fresh even though it tells an old story. One could argue that the film is a bit too long, and I certainly could see it losing ten to fifteen minutes somewhere around the middle, but then, a lot of great movies could.

The film prefers its action scenes up close and personal, even in gunfights, with its characters trapped in the claustrophobic environs of the slum, then trapped again by a lot of bodies trying to kill them, or the fights taking place in small enclosed spaces and so on and so fort. This gives some of the action a peculiarly intimate feeling even when the protagonists are fighting that most anonymous of enemies, action movie henchmen. But then, thanks to this intimacy, these henchmen feel a bit more like dying, bleeding and killing people than usual in the genre, consciously providing some of the violence here with more of a bad aftertaste than one might be used to, and fitting into the film’s political anger quite well.

And make no mistake, even though this is a movie that has a lot of fun with violence, it is also one that’s utterly, bitterly pissed off about the War on Drugs, arguing that its only use is to get many people dead and a few people – both on the side of the “law” and the drug runners – very rich indeed. In this view, people like our protagonist Nina Manigan (Anne Curtis), who truly believe they are doing something to change the world, are just exactly the good footsoldiers and cannon fodder this sort of thing needs. In this regard, the film’s somewhat open ending that sees Manigan coming to an understanding of the world she’s living in and attempting to do something about it, yet then concluding before she can finish more than the most direct business (with even more violence, of course) is as far as optimism can reach.

Curtis turns out to be a wonderful physical actress, going through her action scenes with so much intensity of poise it’s not at all important she’s actually not quite as good a screen fighter as most of the rest of the cast (Brandon Vera is particularly great at pretend violence); acting, it turns out, beats being particularly good at hitting people in the face, at least in this case.


I found myself nearly as enamoured with Matti’s direction. There is a lot to love about it: be it his masterful treatment of localized sound (there’s some wonderful use of the contrast between diegetic and non-diegetic sound here), the way he uses a mix of the traditional green and red light and rain to emphasize the claustrophobia of the places the characters run through while still keeping in mind that these are actually people’s homes, the often extremely inventive changes in pacing – it doesn’t just feel good (action movies are, as you know, all about making you feel good about movement), it’s also clearly highly conceptualized and thought through.

Pwera usog (2017)

Jean (Sofia Andres) and her friends Bobby (Albie Casiño) and Val (Cherise Castro) belong to that lowest rung on the human ladder, the YouTube video prankster. Jean’s Dad really rather has higher hopes for her and wants her to go to university, but then, he’s one of those absentee widowers who spent little time with their children yet still wonder why they don’t get any respect from then. His best bet when it comes to convincing her of the dire future looming after her attempts in being an Internet personality is reading her the negative comments to her latest video.

Ironically enough, the comments do indeed nag at Jean more than just a little, and she decides to do something really interesting for her next video. The first plan is to drive to a spooky place out of Manila for it; because she’s just that kind of person, she asks her ex-boyfriend Sherwin (Joseph Marco) to drive, for nobody else in her little clique has a car or a licence.

When they arrive at what looks like the kind of ruined parking house all horror filmmakers wherever they live love, they encounter a strange homeless girl (Devon Seron). At first, Jean plans to film herself giving the young woman money to once and for all prove for all on the Internet that she’s a good person (seriously), but then she decides it’s best to first dress up as killers and hunt after her with knives and then give her money afterwards. Not surprisingly, they manage to kinda-sorta accidentally chase her off the building’s roof. The fall should have killed the girl, but she’s just gone.

Of course, the trio, as well as Sherwin who stayed in the car for most of this, ignoring quite a bit of screaming in the process, quickly find themselves hunted by a very angry spirit. A spirit with a rather more complex backstory than you would expect, also involving the past of a family of country faith healers and the kid they couldn’t save from demonic possession.

For large stretches at its beginning, Jason Paul Laxamana’s Pwera usog is a rather typical horror film from the 2010s, the sort of thing that could have been made just about anywhere, featuring pretty much the shocks you’d expect happening to character types you’ve seen very often who go through arcs which are also rather well-worn. Well, to be fair, there’s much more vomiting than typical. These parts of the film are at least competently done, though, so there’s entertainment to be derived from them, if little insight apart from “rebelling against poor rich girl problems via internet prank videos sucks”.


However, Pwera usog gains quite a bit more traction once Laxaman earths (or is that unearths in this case?) his horror more in Filipino folk beliefs and folk magic. There are, after all, not many horror films in which the magically – or in this case rather spiritually – abled defenders of its stupid young protagonists are a family of rural faith healers whose most secret weapon is a jar of dear departed grandma’s saliva. And because this is a Filipino film and not a Western one taking place in the Philippines, Laxamana uses these elements with the matter-of-factness of someone talking about things that are common parlance, like the exorcist rattling down bible verses in American movies, adding elements of the local that rob the film’s more worn international horror tropes of their genericness in the process, doubling the enjoyment of at least this jaded viewer by filtering the well-worn through a somewhat different lens that makes all the difference.

Gabi ng lagim (1960)

aka (4) Nights of Horror

There’s little known outside of the Philippines about this early local horror film. Apparently, the anthology movie of stories directed by Tommy C. Davis, Larry Santiago and Pablo Santiago initially consisted of four stories, but the first is lost to us now (apart from a bit of its credits) unless some heroic archivist drags it up some day. Given how much of Filipino cinema made before the 1980s or so is as gone as most of the films of the silent movie era here, I wouldn’t hold out hope it’ll ever surface again.

So it’s an even greater pleasure that the other three segments of the film still exist, even if it’s only in a beat up version that looks more as if it had been shot in the 1920s than four decades later. In the case of Gabi ng lagim, the bad state of the film material actually adds a bit to the first two segments’ mystique, emphasizing the visual elements already related to expressionist horror of the silent era just that decisive bit more.

Plot-wise, the first segment left to us concerns a very classically dressed vampire leaving his bride in a peaceful Filipino village to do what vampire brides are wont to do. She’s daylighting as a beautiful but reserved lodger in the house of an older farmer and his kids, but by night, she’s taking care of the parts of the population already rather overexcited by the mysterious beauty living among them. She aims to finish on the farmer’s virginal daughter, though. One hardly needs to mention there might be a teensy bit of a subtext about class in form of the city/country divide and an expression of sexual anxiety very much filtered through Catholicism going on here. It’s a fine piece of work in any case, with a spirited vampire performance, and a lot of extremely moody shots of graveyards and our vampiress prowling by night that contrasts nicely with the segment’s naturalistic portrayal of country life.

The next segment is even better, for it concerns the ghost of a murdered man taking his vengeance on the vile pimp who killed him; another man who looked on and let the murder happen is exempt on religious reasons and because he thought the victim was the actual vile pimp. That’s not how this stuff works in Daredevil!

Despite my theological confusion, I am very fond of this segment. It has the same mix of naturalism and expressionism as the first one, but it goes just a bit further with the latter, turning the nights of the ghost-haunted characters truly unreal. But let’s talk about the story’s most excellent ghost for a second. He comes in two part: part one are his hacked off arms and hand floating about, the second part is the – also floating – talkative rest of him, something that really adds a folkloric feel to a creature whose motives could come directly out of an EC comic. It also enhances the unreal aspects of the whole affair further – there’s something strangely disquieting about these floating arms, even though the special effects are primitive when looked at today.

About the final episode, the less said the better. A bunch of idiots run through a haunted house while making the kind of jokes that had me thinking fondly of Abbot and Costello; so true horror.


However, the middle segments are so strong even the last one can’t ruin anything about Gabi ng lagim as a whole.

Three Films Make A Post: Every THING needs to eat.

Seven Keys to Baldpate (1947): Lew Landers’s version of the Earl Derr Biggers (of Charlie Chan fame) novel is a pleasant little Old Dark House movie, zipping merrily along through its semi-comedic tale of a writer coming to a very special writing retreat for a bet and encountering all sorts of Old Dark House nonsense (though no gorilla, I sadly have to report). I’m pretty sure this one was already pretty lightweight 70 years ago, and if you expect hidden depths to the film you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. However, old pro Landers certainly knew how to pace a film, and even how to involve comic relief characters without it becoming annoying. He also bothered to put in enough atmospheric shots and suspenseful – if old-fashioned – little moments to make this a pleasant and fun experience to watch, even today.

2 Guns (2013): If you’d tell me there are two directors named Baltasar Kormákur working right now, the good one and the one making boring action comedies with Mark Wahlberg, I’d probably believe you. This one pairs Marky Mark with poor old Denzel Washington to go through the old buddy cop/whatever routine. The result isn’t pretty, with the leading couple lacking in chemistry, a script that seemingly tries to be the first comedy without any jokes, action scenes that are competently shot yet totally uninvolving, and a cast that seems about as invested in their characters as I found myself to be – not at all. Only Bill Paxton as evil CIA man and Edward James Olmos as Mexican Cartel boss put any kind of effort and charm in but our supposed leading men work far below their capabilities. It’s hard to blame them, for the whole affair feels less like a film anyone involved actually wanted to make than a low effort pay check for anyone involved.


The Debutantes (2017): This Filipino horror movie by Prime Cruz about a teenage outsider (Sue Ramirez) with strange powers finding herself first pulled into, than degraded by her school’s queen bees and the ensuing deadly consequences isn’t any more original than 2 Guns but it sure as hell is more involving. That’s thanks to some more than decent acting by the whole of the young cast, spirited direction and a script that actually has a point and knows how to get there. Following my usual love for the local in horror cinema, I am also rather happy to report that the supernatural explanation for the minor mayhem that ensues is not quite as close to the Carrie model as I had at first expected but uses a creature of Filipino myth and legend to express thematic concerns about loneliness and alienation. All of which isn’t bad at all for a teen horror film.

Past Misdeeds: Darna! Ang Pagbabalik (1994)

aka Darna: The Return

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

If you want to know more about Mars Ravelo's Wonder Woman inspired yet supremely Filipino superheroine Darna and her different on-screen incarnations, head on over to my fellow agent of M.O.S.S. Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill, who has spent a lot more time watching and thinking about Darna movies than I have.

The home province of everyone's favourite rural superheroine Darna (Anjanette Abayari) is flooded in a villain-caused (yet not exactly explained by the film) catastrophe. Worse, a large woman clad in green and wearing a turban accosts our heroine in her non-superheroic form as country girl Narda while she's distracted by a snake and clobbers her from behind. The villainess then proceeds to steal the stone Narda needs to swallow to transform into Darna, leaving our heroine for dead and in the rather undignified position of having to be rescued from the rising flood by her Grandma and her little brother Ding (Lester Llansang).

Either the clobbering, the loss of the stone, or the trauma of the natural catastrophe leaves Nards rather addled in the brain, and she spends the following escape of her family to Manila - as well as her first days there - as a happy, mute, loon, though somewhat threatened by various unpleasant males who find her mental state all too inviting and don’t seem to take to the concept of consent. Still, it's like a super hero vacation.

Once arrived in Manila, the family takes shelter in the hovel of Pol (Rustom Padilla), who may or may not be a distant relative, but who in any case once left their country home for the big city.

After various adventures - among them a meeting with local gangster chief Magnum (Bong Alvarez) - a sort of plot develops. It turns out that Darna's arch nemesis, the snake-haired Valentina (Pilita Corrales), is responsible for the loss of Darna's stone. She needs it to keep herself from turning into an - probably ill smelling - heap of goo, it seems.

Apart from that Valentina has bigger plans too. Her - also snake-haired - daughter Valentine aka Dr. Aden (Cherie Gil) has founded a millennial cult playing on the fears of the poor parts of society, promising her followers that Manila will rise into the skies to save them all from the coming destruction of the Philippines by floods, if they just pray hard enough. Valentine's crazy preacher TV programme (she has interpretative background dancers) puts the mind-whammy on Grandma, who soon spends all her time praying and furnishing Pol's hovel with plants. Which is actually an improvement, but hey - evil!

Anyway, while he's out and about sniffing around the cult's lair (why? you got me there), Ding manages to steal Darna's stone back, and soon enough, our heroine is fighting evil-doers again, getting into a romantic triangle with Pol and a cop named Max (Edu Manzano), and saving the Philippines from the snake family's evil plans.

Well, say what you will against the at times plodding pace of this outing of the ever-popular Filipino heroine Darna, but it's still packed full of stuff, some of it interesting, some puzzling, some just plain weird. My plot synopsis has left out various side plots, "comic" distractions and characters - like Ding's female friend Pia (Jemanine Campanilla) - the movie decides to forget halfway through, but really, this is not the kind of film that's interested in a finely crafted dramatic arc. The film's structure is - like in most other films meant for a more rural Filipino audience I've seen - episodic and distractible, and often reminded me of the way 70s Bollywood tried and succeeded to be everything to every viewer. Despite the absence of musical numbers, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik truly squeezes everything and the kitchen sink into its 100 minutes of running time: cute children, low-brow humour, superheroic throw-downs, romance, a bit of horror, some excellent South-East Asian weirdness like freaky snake person transformation effects and an exploding villainess, a bit of social melodrama, and even a bit of religion (not terribly surprising in a Filipino movie, really).

This kind of approach does of course threaten a film's coherence and always risks to annoy a given viewer by spending too much time on the elements she isn't interested in. As a German viewer, I'm certainly not part of the film's core audience, seeing as it is clearly produced with a Filipino audience of the early 90s in mind, playing with and against the anxieties - poverty, religious mania, natural catastrophes - of its time and place. If you look at a film like this as an outsider, you need to bring a bit of patience and a willingness to just accept a slightly different view of the world than you're used to; in this regard, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik is just like a Ramsay Brothers movie or the body of work of Sompote Sands, though certainly more good-natured than the works of the former, and far less painful than those of the latter.

Fortunately, the film - co-directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes - does have more than a few elements that make getting into it quite easy for somebody of my tastes, and, I suspect, the discerning tastes of the typical reader of this column. If there's one thing that speaks a true international language, after all, then it's scenes of a statuesque and likeable beauty in a skimpy yet curiously not sleazy outfit flying around punching evil-doers and monsters. Abayari may not be the greatest of actresses (especially when playing trauma clown Narda), but she's likeable (you seldom see a US superhero grin this much, as if it were an actual joy being a hero, flying and saving people, instead of a pain in the ass), has the right physique for her role and manages to wear a skimpy costume with a degree of dignity that shouldn't be taken for granted.

But even when it isn't clobbering time, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik has more than enough enjoyable, or at least interesting moments. Some of the scenes surrounding the snake women's cult are actually somewhat disturbing in their portrayal of religious mania - those that aren't pretty goofy, that is - and the whole plot line of Grandma turning into one of the cult members is not exactly realistically handled, but quite effective as a play on the fear of losing a lost one to malevolent influences without having the power to do anything about it.

These scenes are pretty dark for what is at its core a family movie, and would be quite unthinkable in a Hollywood family movie (just as the semi-realistic portrayal of poverty and desperation), which is, of course something I do approve of.


And even though Darna! (you gotta love that exclamation mark there) Ang Pagbabalik isn't meant for me, it still made me glad to watch it.

Past Misdeeds: Magic of the Universe (1986)

aka The Magician

Original title: Salamangkero

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Stage magician Professor - we never learn Professor of what, though I do suspect trundling through the jungle to be his main area of expertise - Jamir (Michael De Mesa) loses his little daughter Freza (Sunshine Dizon) when he's doing a standard disappearing act. The little girl disappears well enough but she doesn't reappear again when she should. Looking not quite as worried as the situation would suggest, Jamir, his wife and his pudgy little boy assistant (Tom Tom) go off to visit a friendly black magician, hoping he can explain what happened to Freza. Alas, despite some tasteful licking of raw monkey brains (I don't think no animals were harmed in the making of this movie), there's not much concrete to be gotten from the magician, except some mutterings about Jamir being in terrible danger and some vague hints pointing the family in the direction of another jungle village.

Once arrived there, the family has nothing better to do than to stage another show (that is the sort of thing you do to find your disappeared daughter, right?), during which Mum disappears too. While Jamir and the pudgy boy start to get a bit depressed now, Mum finds herself reunited with Freza - as captives of an evil witch named Mikula (Armida Siguion-Reyna) who lives with a horde of child prisoners, some horned pig people and a cross between a gremlin, a toad, your worst nightmares and a TV in a palace in the jungle. Mikula finally deigns to do some exposition, so we learn that she has kidnapped the Jamir women to avenge herself on Jamir's dead great grandfather, who was her teacher at magic but cursed her with growing a big, pulsating head once he realized how evil she was.

Jamir hears about the same story from the ghost of said great grandfather the very same night, because now it's finally exposition time, the film just can't stop itself anymore. Gramps also adds that Jamir needs to find some magical doodad to be able to fight Mikula, else he and his family will die and Mikula will rule the world.

The rest of the film sees Jamir and the pudgy boy wander aimlessly through the jungle, getting saved from the attentions of a guy with a very big sword by the Guardian of the Woods (whose power is shooting cartoon laser beams from her eyes, if you need to ask) and impress a tribe of feral little people with the old pigeon trick. Then the boy is kidnapped too and the film spends most of its time with everyone not Jamir escaping from Mikula, meeting strange things and people and getting kidnapped again, until it is time for Jamir to become undeservedly powerful and win the day with his own new cartoon lightning beams. What a hero!

I suspect Filipino Magic of the Universe to be one of those at least part-time disturbing kids movies all Asian countries seem to excel at, though its combination of naive and round-about plotting, bad rubber masks, cruelty to adorable little monkeys, freakish creatures making even more freakish noises, and little children (sort of) saving the day might just as well be explained by everyone involved in the production being batshit insane or hopped up on snorting crystallized EC comics; actually, now having thought about it for a few seconds longer, it's probably all three.

Connoisseurs of this sort of movie - the little sister genre to my beloved weird fu genre - will pretty much know what to expect from Magic: awkward and somewhat dull direction (by Tata Esteban); a primitive - possibly borrowed from somewhere - synth soundtrack that fluctuates between the trite and the disquieting (the latter is especially awesome here in the fight scene between Tom Tom and a demonic kung fu kid, or whatever he/she/it is supposed to be); editing of the rough and tumble kind; ideas and concepts so disturbing most Western movies for grown-ups wouldn't dare use them (that poor monkey at the beginning or the Guardian of Forest's head being eaten to give Mikula more magic power, anyone?) presented with shoulder-shrugging nonchalance; a lack of explanation for a lot of things (what is Mikula doing with all these children?); an English dub job so atrocious one can't help but think it was done by random tourists who were kidnapped and locked up in the cellar of the film's producers as a cheap alternative to professional voice actors.

All that and more is there and accounted for in a film that does its best to sabotage its rather mind-blowing effects with somewhat ponderous pacing and a hero of utmost incompetence (he's really just wandering around until he points a stick at his nemesis), but that just can't be anything less than entertaining as long as it is adding one weird and wondrous thing after the next. When the film's not actively disturbing you with Mikula's increasingly pulsating head, it's weirding you out with a sudden monster synth rock party (Mikula has her own band, just like a Bollywood villain, although the film lacks a scene where Jamir pretends to be part of a dance troupe), or throwing in a random easily depressed swamp monster and a woman turned to stone for good measure.


I don't really like ending a write-up on a "you'll like this thing if you like this sort of thing" note, but what can a boy do when confronted with a movie whose main achievement apart from being oh so very strange is that nobody making it does seem to have just stopped for a moment and said "what are we doing here, guys?"?

In short: Dune Warriors (1991)

Welcome to drought plagued post-apocalyptia. A scouting party of decidedly evil warlord William (Luke Askew) takes the small, peaceful village of Chinley (who knows how it is spelled?) that is a water-y paradise in the desert, waiting for William to come and complete the invasion. Val (Jillian McWhirter), the daughter of one of the village elders, knows it’ll be over with any idea of democracy or non-slavery once William takes over, so she sneaks out into the desert to find warriors to get rid of the scouts and fight William.

She’s in luck, too, for fleeing one of those Filipino post-apocalypse movie mainstay groups of angry little persons, she is saved by Michael (David Carradine), who just happens to be William’s arch enemy, even though he isn’t telling that yet. Michael helps Val find the usual bunch of fighters – there’s her new love interest Dorian (Blake Boyd), his friend, the self-declared “scoundrel” John (Rick Hill), who were running a scam in the fine sport of motorcycle jousting, John’s friend, martial artist Ricardo (Dante Varona), and shotgun toting Miranda (Maria Isabel Lopez). Not the magnificent seven, but they’ll have to do.

So soon enough, things will explode, people will be shot, knifed and sworded (technical term), David Carradine’s legs and Maria Isabel Lopez’s breasts will be shown off, and peasants will be trained as warriors. To mix the Seven Samurai formula up somewhat, this village does have its very own traitors.

I often grump about the films directed by Filipino exploitation film king Cirio H. Santiago because I find most of them even more boring than they are shoddy – the capital sin in low budget cinema – but from time to time, I find one I actually enjoy watching.

Dune Warriors does have it rather easy to conquer me (I suspect William would be jealous if I were a village), for if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Seven Samurai style films. Not that anyone would confuse Santiago’s approach to the material with Kurosawa or Sturges or Sayles, but it’s a perfectly fine scaffold to hang one’s action scenes on, and a straightforward structure for a plot. Quite unexpectedly for Santiago the director (I generally respect his work as a producer quite a bit more), he doesn’t mess up the traditional structure, but keeps so close to it this is actually a Santiago film I’d call tight. At the very least, the film moves from one fight to the next with pleasant pace, not getting bogged down in bad comedy, or distracted scenes full of nothing.

Santiago still doesn’t like to move his camera much, it seems, yet this time around, the film isn’t killed by the nailed-down camera set-up of doom, and the action sequences are actually edited together from of so many different shots, I suspect you could make three other Santiago films from them. It’s not pretty but it’s dynamic enough to make the action scenes actually entertaining, with many a stunt double throwing himself backwards, random explosions, David Carradine posing with his sword while wearing boots and no trousers, copious blood squibs whenever somebody thought about using them, and a rusty assortment of cars, motorcycles and – of course - dune buggies. It’s not deep, either, but Dune Warriors sure as heck is fun to watch.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,in short,post-apocalypse,cirio h. santiago,david carradine,rick hill,luke askew,blake boyd,jillian mcwhirter

The One Armed Executioner (1983)

Interpol agent Ramon Ortega (Franco Guerrero) and his children's book writer wife Ann (Jody Kay) have just returned from their honeymoon. Sad piano music plays when they make love, so that's already three strikes against poor Ann even if you ignore the mild suggestion of coming violence the film's title subtly provides.

Ramon becomes involved into the investigation of an American business Interpol knows to be an important drug dealer, but alas can't prove anything about. An explosive helicopter raid and some slight police threats of the "we've got our eyes on you" type later, and the main baddy decides that his best bet is to go into traditional movie villain overreaction mood and send out a bunch of his favourite henchmen to torture, rape and kill Ramon's wife and saw off one of Ramon's arms.

Understandably, our hero spends the next twenty movie minutes or so becoming a moping alcoholic but - unlike the real-life moping alcoholics I know - he's got a fatherly ex-Interpol agent friend to not only set him straight again but also teach him the martial (and shooting) arts ways of one-armed fighting, which for some reason involves stuff like learning how to balance on a log while being blind-folded.

Once Ramon's up to speed, it's time for him to go out and kill a lot of people. Explosions may be involved.

It's difficult to watch a movie made by One Armed Executioner's director/writer/producer Bobby A. Suarez and not make comparisons to the body of work of Cirio H. Santiago, or more specifically, to imagine Suarez as the good guy Filipino exploitation filmmaker with an eye for the US market to Santiago's shady one, with Suarez always putting the extra effort into his films that makes them actually fun for an audience, a concept which Santiago only seemed to care about - if at all, on his good days - intermittently.

One Armed Executioner is really a case in point here. The film's plot is as basic, possibly crude, as they come, told in a manner that reduces its type of martial arts vengeance flick to its most basic elements, up to a point where even things like character names seem superfluous. However, Suarez really digs into these simple basics, giving the melodramatic set-up an air of surprising conviction with the sheer power of earnestness as well as through an effective performance by Guerrero. There's a sense of concentration on the central parts of the plot (such as it is) with no time for filler that makes the melodramatic build-up just as interesting to watch as the climactic violent release. (Subtext? What subtext?)

It's thanks to this irony and slack-free tone that there was really never any doubt in this viewer's mind that Suarez means business, and knows he needs to apply himself to the melodramatic parts before he can get into the slaughter and action bits effectively. It's surely not easy to find the right balance in this regard, but for my tastes, One Armed Executioner hits the absolute sweet spot for cheap martial arts vengeance flick, with never a boring moment or one that isn't at least important in some form for the rest of the film.

Once we get to the actual action, the film makes much out of the comparatively little it has to work with budget-wise, really going to town with one helicopter and a speed boat, a few crazy and many not quite so crazy stunts and minor actors who literally (nope, not figuratively) throw themselves into their death scenes as is the sweet tradition in cheap action movies. There is, to be sure, a certain lack in originality to be found in the action scenes - by 1983 we really had seen all of this more than once before - but Suarez stages them with such a sure hand it'd be churlish to complain about a lack of originality when it's actually so much fun watching them in The One Armed Executioner.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,action,martial arts,bobby a. suarez,franco guerrero,reviews

Nam Angels (1989)

Remember the Vietnam War, when a handful of buff Americans slaughtered hundreds of Filipinos pretending to be Vietnamese standing in a row and doing backflips when getting shot by an assault rifle? By 1989, only a handful of Italian and Filipino exploitation filmmakers still did (most of whom were in bed with Roger Corman, I assume). Even the Philippines' finest in form of Cirio H. Santiago had his problems coming up with new twists in the tale of how some 'roided guy got his people out (a lot like Moses, but with an assault rifle, generally).

But hey, what's this lying around in the costume department? A handful of jeans jackets with the Hells Angels logo on them? It's exploitation movie gold is what it is! This, or something quite like it must have gone on in Santiago's mind when he came up with this one.

Just two weeks before finally being allowed to get home, manly man solider Calhoun (Brad Johnson) and his trusty lasso - yes, he's from West Texas - finds two of his platoon members taken prisoner by a former SS/Foreign Legion guy named Chard (Vernon Wells) who has gone all Colonel Kurtz as the living god of some formerly godforsaken North Vietnamese tribe. It's a particularly dangerous area completely under control of Chard's men and the North Vietnamese forces, and while Calhoun's superiors aren't going to hinder him from going on a manly rescue expedition, there's not much they can do to help him, especially because getting in and out quickly seems to be rather important to the whole thing. So Calhoun does the logical thing, goes into the next bar, sees the only (US) Hells Angels in Vietnam beat up some Special Forces soldiers and get themselves arrested, and offers them a get out of jail free card as well as the gold treasure Chard has assembled if they help him. For reason of later plot complications, our hero doesn't mention the whole "free my buddies" aspect of the plan instead of offering them the gold for their help in freeing the prisoners. Oh well. Anyhow, there will be many explosions, shooting and biking before the film is over.

Despite its particularly stupid/genius set-up, Nam Angels is one of the better namsploitation movies you can waste your time on. I was a bit surprised by that, because director Cirio H. Santiago's films often tend to waste perfectly great exploitation ideas on perfectly boring execution. Nam Angels, however, does include everything one could wish for in an exploitation film of its genre, gets to the point of shooting and explosions without pretending too long anyone cares about its characters, and never looks back once it's gotten going. In fact, the film seems hell-bent on including as many awesome/ridiculous bits and pieces as possible, so we're not just getting a film about Hells Angels led by a lasso-swinging super soldier from Texas biking through the Vietnamese jungle aka the countryside of the Philippines, causing backflipping and explosions wherever they (oh so stealthily) ride, that treats the silly set-up with all the seriousness of an epic, but also one that does its low-budget best to have variety in its action scenes. Would you believe some of the action scenes even show people using tactics like flanking?

Of course, Nam Angels does also include the genre-mandated exploding huts, a white bad guy with copious appetite for the scenery, utterly random nudity, cursing, hilariously "poignant" moments - all presented with an actual sense of breathless excitement that is as atypical for the often drab namsploitation film as it is for Santiago's body of work.

Nam Angels is a lovely piece of exploitation cinema that may have not a single clever idea in its head, but sure wants its audience to have a good, mass-slaughter-filled, time with all the dumb ideas it has. For me, it succeeds admirably at this.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,action,war,cirio santiago,brad johnson,vernon wells,reviews

In short: Driving Force (1989)

aka Roadwars

The Future. The US have hit an apocalyptic economical crisis, even further deepening the divide between the rich and the poor. Law enforcement is corrupt and unavailable if you aren't rich enough, and everyone hustles somehow to survive.

Well, at least gas is still cheap, or that's how I explain that former engineer Steve (Sam Jones) has finally found a new job as a tow truck driver to keep himself and his little daughter, sugary sweet Becky (Stephanie Mason), in bread. Sam's a basically decent chap, so it does not take long until his classical view of the tow trucking business comes into conflict with a trio of rogue tow truck drivers led by the psychopath Nelson (Don Swayze, Patrick's even less talented brother). Nelson and his crew are what happens when the no-good post-apocalyptic punks of other post-apocalypse films finally get a job: tow truck drivers who cause the accidents they survive on themselves and blackmail people into paying them. In the end, the streets won't be broad enough for Steve and Nelson's crew.

As if a trio of psycho punks weren't enough of a problem for our hero, he is also fighting a custody battle for Becky against her grandparents, who are rich and evil and will therefore get their dirty, manicured hands on Becky sooner or later.

Somehow, Steve still manages to romance good rich girl Harry (Catherine Bach) during all this, but their love story is as boring as it is trite.

By 1989, when the Filipino/US co-production Driving Force was shot, everything had already been done in the post-apocalyptic movie genre. Or nearly everything, as director Andrew Prowse and screenwriter Patrick Edgeworth must have decided in a moment of genius/madness. Really, who wouldn't want to see a movie about post-apocalyptic tow truck drivers? (As always, don't answer that, please).

As goofy as the film's basic idea sounds, as basically decent seems its early execution. This is one of those movies that are more inspired by the first Mad Max film, taking place in a post-apocalyptic world where the old social structures have not entirely broken down, but are deteriorating fast. Thanks to its world still being so (uncomfortably) close to the world as we know it, the movie gets by fine with a few shots of grubby back roads, run-down buildings and people in dirty clothes to set up a somewhat satisfying idea of what this particular post-apocalypse is all about. Even the evil tow truck brigade makes a certain degree of sense in a pulp fiction kind of way.

Unfortunately, Prowse doesn't seem to know what's actually good and entertaining about his film, and adds that stupid custody battle storyline and that unpleasantly cutesy kid to the whole she-bang. Whenever the custody plotline starts, the movie turns from a mild, yet entertaining exploitation movie into Lifetime Channel family movie fodder that drags the film's pacing and my patience down very quickly. I blame Over the Top. The added love story is not much better.

It's always too bad when a film so clearly neither knows what it wants nor where its strengths lie, but that's exactly the case with Driving Force. It's a film that permanently sabotages itself, and becomes unnecessarily boring over long stretches.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,filipino movies,in short,post-apocalypse,sam jones,catherine bach,don swayze,andrew prowse

On WTF: Darna! Ang Pagbabalik (1994)

It had to happen! I finally make my first frightened step into the wild and joyous world of Filipino superheroine Darna.

Because I'm a wimp and like understanding what's going on in a movie, I chose to start with the one Darna movie I have subtitles for. It was a wise decision, as my column on WTF-Film will hopefully show.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,reviews,peque gallaga,lore reyes,superheroes,fantasy,horror,anjanette abayari,cherie gil,other places