Bodies in Labor in Holy Emy (Araceli Lemos, 2021)

Two young women starts their day early preparing for work, heading out to a fish market in Athens. Teresa (Hasmine Kilip) wears a short skirt, which her older sister Emy (Abigael Loma) scolds her for. They go to a shop owned by another Filipino lady, frantic and reliant on Teresa. Emy, presumed to be there because of her sister’s referral, is absent minded. Later Teresa hooks up with another employee Argyris (Mihalis Siriopoulos) in the supply room, while a customer asks if the story is open. Emy hesitates but later responds in Greek, yes. She then ruins the fish she is supposed to slice and starts bleeding, at first suggested from the nose. Later while Teresa helps her clean up, both are pretty calm about the blood coming out of Emy’s tear ducts.

This opening is significant in that it shows one of the few moments in the film where both of them are actually working, or at least trying to. One would think that Emy was undocumented, or newly arrived, or both. But this seems to be not the case. The aural binary between the sisters, which will be elaborated further, is set; Teresa is outgoing and street smart, while Emy is not. The elements of speculation and suggestion dominates the entirety of Araceli Lemos debut Holy Emy (2021), a composite of Filipino migrants’ episodes in Greece, opposing paths of coming of age of two sisters, overall told with understated body horror. The film’s ambition may justify its approach, but ultimately it is also its greatest burden.

The next day, Teresa prepares for church and asserts that Emy can’t come. Wait, I thought, so maybe she is undocumented after all, since she can’t even show up in a small closely knit Filipino church. The real reason is much more perplexing. Emy shows up anyway, alarming Teresa in the middle of the service. Linda (Angeli Bayani), a pious looking aunt-figure, talks to them and explains to Emy she can’t join mass because she is still unbaptised. After the service ends, an elderly Greek woman, Mrs. Cristina (Eirini Inglesi), recognizing Emy approaches her and offers her work in her house, a job formerly held by her mother. Linda immediately intercepts and tells Cristina is not welcome here. Emy is told to not even consider it as her house is ‘full of sin’. The three of them proceed to a community hall of the church for a group debutante party, Teresa is one of the girls who turns 18. Every time Teresa addresses Emy as ‘ate’, it is not being translated as ‘big sister’ in the subtitles. The dynamic between the sisters is off putting especially whenever Teresa’s maturity is contrasted to Emy’s stubbornness, who is in fact a few years older. 

Linda turns out to be a caretaker of sorts to the girls as their mother is in the Philippines. They live in the same building, but their mother in a video call, reminds Teresa firmly to keep Emy away from Linda. A very odd set up. One that is never fully explained how it came to be. To shut down completely Emy’s interest in working for Cristina, Linda revealed that Cristina took advantage of their mother, who she labels a mangkukulam, translated in the subtitles as witch doctor. Based on how religious Linda is, we can assume that is exactly what she meant. My first guess as Cristina’s house as some sort of brothel with Filipina or other migrant sex workers is now out of the question. Almost the entire first third of the film is made up of these fragmented scenes, building up on migrant experiences, but taking them in other more bizarre directions.

The pacing greatly improves when Teresa discovers she is pregnant, while Emy pursues the job offer of Cristina. When the pregnancy was announced to their mother, she casually says Teresa doesn’t have to get married, or even go after Argyris. Sneaking out one day, Emy goes on a tour of the house where she will work as an overall caregiver for Mrs. Cristina. She sees her mother’s former living quarters, while Cristina narrates their relationship, both personal and professional. Emy meets Luis (Ku Aquino), Cristina’s Filipino partner and well, resident healer, a more fitting translation than witch doctor. Emy witnesses an ‘procedure’ where Luis rubs a patient’s stomach, his fingers eventually covered in blood as he pulls out small organ-like material causing ailment to the person. This is a very uncanny scene of a phenomenon usually given the tabloid treatment in the Philippines. Other stories mention faith healers pulling out stones, nails, or glass shards from bodies without cutting their flesh. But those of course would stray too far from the film’s theme.

Emy is ready to embrace this. Soon, she becomes Cristina’s star employee, attracting affluent patrons seeking treatment for otherwise hopeless medical conditions, and being celebrated for her skills and who she is. The validation feels amazing, Emy takes a breather from being infantilized by Teresa, Linda, or her absent mother, all preoccupied with other things. Faith healing, in this diasporic stage, becomes a seemingly artisanal practice, but still offers a window to its inherent class dimension. In a country with a decrepit health infrastructure like the Philippines, the spiritual practice persists. It is an alternative for the rich, a test of faith, but a first response, and often the only form of medical attention, received by the poor vast majority. When exported to Lemos’ horror narrative, this material dimension is shed off. A lost opportunity for the film to have a richer portrayal since the lack of social safety nets is after all a major driving force of migration of Filipinos to countries like Greece, among others.  

Emy is however pulled back by her sister as she shows she has as much control on harm as much as healing. Accompanying Teresa in a clinic for a check-up, pregnant women collapse at her presence. In a family dinner, she makes Argyris choke on a fish bone. What they have is very hard to see as a form of sisterly bond. It is difficulty to comprehend what goes on in Emy’s mind as she barely speaks and keeps a tortured look all the time. Lastly, anyone is barely speaking to her about her abilities including those who have working knowledge of it. This is excruciatingly maintained all throughout the film. Emy is a spectacle, one that is distant and hard to remain emphatic with.

Which is unfortunate since the film has several subplots, if fleshed out more, would actually put the body horror dimension in a better position to move forward the story and explore its themes. Two sisters in a foreign country with their mother absent, or one of them dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, a religious guardian witnessing changes in their bodies and behaviour, all has the potential to be compelling migrant narratives. Instead, we have inarticulate characters navigating themselves to random encounters of life in one moment, of death in another. Holy Emy is a bricolage of underexplored stories about faith, fractured nuclear families, and migration, without any concise statement about any of them. All of these became even stranger worlds in the end than they are in the beginning.    

Motel Acacia (Bradley Liew, 2019)

I did not want to believe the flak for this movie that I’ve read. International but primarily a Southeast Asian co-production, developed in and funded by several prestigious institutions, and an urgent premise to be executed in the horror genre. If it was bad, I thought, it can’t be that bad. Not exactly the first time when a foreign production aimed for the Hollywood market, and ended up being underwhelming. Ventures like these is prone to cinematic ‘miscommunications’.

I finally came around watching Motel Acacia. It was, indeed, pretty bad.

Story starts with a group of men, appearing to be illegal loggers, cutting down a tree (safe to assume to be acacia) in the middle of the night, when paranormal things happen. Suddenly a white guy appears. I don’t know if the original intention is simply illegal logging or capturing a monster in the Philippine forest. Somehow, he was able to transport it to a rural region of a temperate country. He (Jan Bijvoet) is now an old man, and with JC (JC Santos), his adult son. How he met his mother, and how or why did JC get to be with him wasn’t explained. The father, as he was never named, runs a special kind of business, for which he is grooming JC to take over.

In the middle of nowhere, he houses undocumented migrants in a ‘motel’. He also taps the people like Angeli (Agot Isidro) to entice others to stay at the place where fake documents will be prepared, for a fee. They kept talking about crossing a border, the US comes to mind, but it could be Canada or even Europe. One character, Bront (Bront Palarae) talked about being in a crowded boat, evoking the Mediterranean refugee crisis. I’m also hesitant about calling the place a ‘motel’. It is a sprawling underground structure, bare and brutalist, but comes with a pool and a surveillance system. JC was shocked to learn the original intention.

Desperate migrants are fed to the monster from earlier which is now a queen-size bed. I didn’t quiet capture the motivation behind it. The guy could just be racist, or the state or town council is paying him, or both. It wasn’t clear. How he gets paid, and in turn pays Angeli, also wasn’t clear. To his disgust, JC killed his father in the middle of a storm. He later finds himself back in the motel with more undocumented migrants, and to my bewilderment, plays it by the ear. Conflict started brewing, the monster started killing them. It is no longer just a bed, but manifested itself in the walls, in the pool, and started impregnating women.

Just spelling out the plot already reveals poor characterization and half-baked motivations. Pacing was decent but the twists obscured rather clarified things. The effects were ‘Hollywood standard’ but weren’t grounded very well by the narrative or tension. The film took on an art-house direction without the meaningful payoff in the end.

My main takeaway is even if you have the technology and talent, it seems very hard to speak back to the Empire. In this case, it could either be Hollywood or the US, or both as the two as inseparable. Even in the advent of political correctness, the stories that Hollywood churns out could still easily make caricatures of other peoples and their cultures, whether they have cordial or antagonistic relations with these respective countries. The way things are, I don’t think Southeast Asian voices will be integrated to Hollywood anytime soon. Or if should they aspire to, is also open to debate. Looking back to J-horror wave and remakes of the 2000s, or the present Korean wave (Parasite winning Best Picture as a pinnacle), there are at least two criteria for ‘success’ in the US and other metropoles.

First, similar socioeconomic conditions, namely stories of capitalist routines and individualist values by alienated characters. Anything ‘less’, is art-house if not ethnographic cinema. Closely related to the first one, is minimal cultural signifiers or ‘political statements’. If foreign films ‘have something to say’ it should be towards the contexts where they emerged from, which audiences from metropoles could appreciate primarily in formal terms.

China’s recent tactics for cultural politics should be noted for comparative purposes. They either invest in usual Hollywood films and occasionally insert subtle messages but not too much to be labeled propaganda, or they dangle the huge and lucrative market of middle-class Chinese audiences and make American studios follow their censorship terms. Southeast Asian countries, even if they somewhat band together, aren’t capable of these gestures.

Many are praising the ‘global’ character of streaming services like Netflix to provide genuinely diverse materials, but viewing cultures of diffused populations from the global South existed long before. Netflix to a certain extent, is actually further homogenizing productions. Motel Acacia is an effort to counter this wave, unfortunately an underwhelming one.

Impaktita (Teddy Chiu, 1989)

Impaktita is probably one of Regal’s better horror films of the 80s. Story of a child of an aswang, facing not just the hardships of growing up poor but also of coming into terms with her nature. The film provides a lot of formal lessons in horror, and I was upset that the narrative momentum of the first half wasn’t sustained throughout the movie.

After the opening hook of an aswang attack to a drunk man going home in a rural community, the action kept piling up. We meet Roselia (Gloria Romero) and Guido (Romeo Rivera), and their newborn daughter Sita. Guido is anxious because of the gruesome attack near their home, on top of his wife deflecting talks of baptism of their child as well as of marriage. After another incident, the townsfolk put two and two together that Roselia is indeed the aswang terrorizing their community. Guido is greeted by a mob with torches as his wife transforms. Still in shock and furious, he flees carrying his child in the forest. The baby then manifested the same condition of her mother, ultimately killing him as well.

The transition of the story is fast and smooth, you get past the dated effects as attempts for a decent character study is laid out. Sita is picked up by a truck driver (Mario Escudero) who is having difficulty to have a child of his own. He goes home to his wife (Nida Blanca) in an impoverish urban community beset with gang violence. A place where he has learned to mind his own business. Sita (played by the Judy Ann Santos) grows up reading horror comics, and scavenging garbage to supplement the household’s income. When she was confronted with extortion by a criminal syndicate lead by Nato (Ruela Vernal as sinister as he was in Brocka’s Insiang and Cain and Abel), her claws appear to defend herself. The village thug then promises to exact revenge on the child.

We next see Sita as a young lady (played by Jean Garcia) that does ironing jobs to a nearby household, we also meet her suitor Rudy (Richard Gomez). Arriving home one day, she is informed she can’t continue her studies. She is fine and contented with what her family has. Later that night, in a trance, her mother Roselia shows herself and explained that her condition will catch-up faster now that she is 18. Roselia introduces her familiar, a giant bat that terrifies Sita, thought the term used was bantay. Working late one night, she goes home alone as Rudy was held up by friends in a drinking session. She was gang raped by Nato and his companions. I was expecting her abilities to show, as this was a moment of distress, but it didn’t. Tipped by a witness, her step father tried to save her. He was outnumbered and killed. While still tied, she turns and was able to kill Nato. A lost opportunity since it dragged on, a young timid girl turning into an aswang to kill thugs would have been a great transition. Following the film’s logic, I was expecting it to now turn into a rape-revenge plot, but it didn’t either. The rape was never spoken of again, which I found alarming.

It felt downhill from there on. The next subplot was also curious, but wasn’t executed very well. A dashing photographer Jessie (Aga Muhlach), who also writes for tabloids, another self-referential note to the genre, came to Sita’s neighborhood to cover the violent death of Nato. Upon seeing her, he was immediately attracted. He eventually offers her a modeling job, much to the ire of Rudy. While on a date in a fancy restaurant, Sita was uneasy catching site of her familiar, she then stormed off. She kills off the rest of Nato’s companions now headed by Asiong (Rez Cortez) while they dispose a body in the forest at night. In another incident she kills a peeping-tom taking pictures of a woman undressing. Jessie, still involved in the police beat, was able to connect the Sita is indeed the attacker. Jessie reveals this her mother, and later teams up with Rudy in an attempt to kill the giant bat. Jessie however disappears in the last 15 minutes of the movie, without much explanation. Rudy, Sita, and her mother later asks for the help of a priest to figures out how to kill the giant bat, and if things go bad, Sita herself. This is the time that religion reenters the story aside from the suggestion of its power earlier.

As I’ve mentioned, I greatly appreciate the fast pace of first half. It is somewhat fresh as conventional horror would like to spread out the scares, starting with giving bits and eventually going over the top in the climax. Impaktita views the longer frame, and at the same time reworks the melodrama bildungsroman that dominates Philippine cinema, then and now. Instead of depicting an episode where the equilibrium of bourgeois life is disrupted, this one is an accumulation of experiences where eruption of violence is not random or tangential. We have relatively better characterization, and this works very well since the lead comes from an impoverish background. She struggles with the horrors of her ‘nature’ and but also of her immediate sociocultural context of her class and gender. The love triangle wasn’t a completely bad subplot, but it wasn’t used to its full potential. The relationship with Rudy and Jessie was hostile upfront, that when they did cooperate it felt rushed. The torn between two suitors angle was dropped completely toward the end without a decent resolution. The religion as solution, though obviously a conservative gesture, should have been hinted a bit more throughout as well so as not to appear out of nowhere in the end, though that is in fact the genre’s deus ex machina.

Impaktita should be seen now as it provides an alternative template to monster’s perspective. Thought the huge weakness of the plot is maintaining Sita’s innocence when she could have been an anti-heroine, the girl that fights back to the horrors she had to go through. This could be utilized as a feminist spin on the genre that beyond the troubled mother defending her home and family in films like Feng Shui (Chito Roño, 2004) and Amorosa (Topel Lee, 2012), or the corporeal horrors of motherhood in Tumbok (Topel Lee, 2011) and Rain, Rain, Go Away (Chris Martinez, 2011). One progressive horror movie that creatively tackles similar themes in Impaktita that comes to mind is Wag Kang Lilingon (Jerry Lopez Sineneng & Quark Henares, 2006), which unfortunately is also almost forgotten. Impaktita, with its strengths and faults, is fascinating viewing as it provides possible directions at a time when local horror appears to be in a slump.

 

Impaktita is available in full for a limited time here.

Afterlives of Popular Cinema: re-viewing Ang Telebisyon (Maurice Carvajal) and Ang Tulay (Frank G. Rivera) from Shake Rattle and Roll VI (1997)

For some time now, Regal Entertainment Inc. has been making their films available on YouTube. Probably realizing the potential of a streaming audience, the past few months their uploads has been more thematic and done in rotations. It is interesting comparing this endeavor to that of Star Cinema’s restoration projects. Canon building is not a priority for Regal. There are several of their works that turned out to be classics, but most of the films they churned out are formulaic and forgettable. There was after all, no such thing as alternative cinema back then. As one of the emerging players after the break up or slowing down of the big three studios in the 70s-80s, Regal has an interesting story to tell.

From Pro Bernal, Anti Bio, collected interviews of Ishmael Bernal. Available from Everything’s Fine PH.

Most significant for me is uploading old Shake Rattle and Roll (SRR) films. There are no other genre that managed to survive the slump of the 90s into the 21^st century than the famed horror franchise, with the total of 14 films. The same can’t be said to action bakbakan and heterosexual soft-porn bold films whose declines could be linked to rise of malls with cineplexes. Two segments stood out for me Ang Telebisyon (Maurice Carvajal) and Ang Tulay (Frank G. Rivera) from Shake Rattle and Roll VI (1997). This is not the oldest SRR installment I’ve seen, but the oldest one I remember watching as a child. Probably as reruns on TV during Halloween.

Ang Telebisyon is a story of a Jennifer (Camille Prats), a child with the makings of a couch potato, left alone with her yaya by workaholic parents whose marriage is on the rocks, when a travelling salesman offers them to try out a new TV. The new TV turns out is home to a IT-like jester/magician that traps children on the world inside the TV. This is juxtaposed to the subplot of theft planned by the yaya and her lover. Faced with paranormal elements, the scheme was ultimately foiled. This was terrifying when I watched this as a child. I have vivid memories of the stuff toy with worms, and the jester being thrown acid on its face. My mouth dropped when Jennifer was trapped on the TV with all the other children, thinking this is a pretty dark ending. But then the parent come home, weep to their own neglect, reconcile, and save Jennifer. The nuclear middle class family is reinforced, the housemaid is forgotten.

I would like to link this episode to the massacre film trend of the early 90s. Adaptations of tabloid crime stories overblown for the screen usually directed by Carlo J. Caparas and starred Kris Aquino. Maybe there is a link of Aquino being the scream queen transitioning between genres (See Sanchez 2016). The premise is the same. Intrusion of a stranger to domestic space, harming of vulnerable members namely children and women, and its closure. On a slightly ironic note, the horror genre makes this one more child-friendly. It was the late 90s, and horror film viewing is framed as a family affair, this was after all a slump period in local cinema. The industry never recovered which can be sensed on how recent horror movies still play safe to the violence and gore to secure a general patronage rating.

Because of economic underdevelopment, we didn’t have the same emerging demographic of young people with purchasing power like in that in US and other places, whose postwar horror movies [Night of the Living Dead (1968), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978) and so on], took a more radical break from the earlier and wholesome Gothic-inspired Hollywood conventions. An exception I believe in handling on-screen deaths and gore is Chito Roño’s slasher-like films Feng Shui (2004), Sukob (2006), T2 (2009), The Healing (2012). He however, to my opinion, has not been able to maintain this streak, ironically, starting when he directed all three episodes of Shake Rattle and Roll Fourteen: The Invasion (2012), the last film of the franchise.

 

Ang Tulay is more eerie. Story of several youngsters; Lilian (Aiza Seguerra), Marice (Matet de Leon), and Sunny (Ara Mina), in a town with a bridge that is said to be haunted. After a bunch of detective work and seance sessions, it was revealed that one kid was sacrificed during the building of the bridge, and since then has been luring others to their deaths. The ghost of Mauro (Tom Taus Jr.) is lonely and wants more playmates. Stories of kids being abducted, for the purpose of padaga or padugo or blood sacrifice, is ingrained in me as something adults would say, only because they also grew up hearing similar stories. My grandmother once mention a period during Martial Law when several parents would stay in front of the schools until classes end to ensure the safety of their kids. I heard theories that argue that the most number of children taken was during construction (1969-1973) of San Juanico bridge connecting the provinces of Samar and Leyte, and by extension other projects that Imelda Marcos did to feed her edifice complex.

This could also be a simple ruse to contain misbehaving children, and has variations depending which figure is the most frightening bogeyman at the moment; criminals, soldiers, rebels, and in recent years, the police. On top of the war on drugs, the Duterte regime is also known to be cosy and lax with offshore gaming companies from China, and its offshoot of criminal activities. The figure of abductor is now racialized, stories of which trend online instead of being narrated by adults to children. As these cases show, all conspiracy theories have roots to public sentiments, especially anxieties. In Ang Tulay, prayers save the day. Another narrative device that younger horror directors are trying to break away from. The most sustained efforts of presenting faith itself as horror are probably from Erik Matti with Vesuvius (2012) and Seklusyon (2016), and by thematic extension Pa-siyam (2004) and Kuwaresma (2019).

The quality of these films are pretty bad, grainy with a low-resolution, sometimes the audio is also off. Production value is leaves much to be desired. I don’t think these titles will ever qualify to projects for restoration. Only one horror movie, Patayin sa Sindak si Barbara (Chito Roño, 1995), so far has been restored by ABS-CBN, and it is not even the original one by Celso Ad. Castillo. It was a private effort, and logically Star Cinema would prioritize its own. Which film gets to be preserved is a very contested question. Ideally it is the responsibility of the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) but it has neglected this institutional role in recently years. Even in the hand of a public institution, chances of restoration of horror flicks are grim. This also means that movies made by studios now bankrupt have almost zero chances of existing beyond their digital afterlives in file-sharing communities online. This is huge loss since popular or mainstream cinema reveals the national condition as much as critically-acclaimed art-films, if not more.

Since it is more accessible, I think films from this period, late 80s and 90s, should still be seen or rewatched, despite their relatively poor quality. It was a time of ingenuity in effects and writing in genre film making, spearheaded by figures like Peque Gallaga. Local audiences and filmmakers should to learn to look back to the popular canon, older attempts to broaden their frame to the stories that made it to the screen. Recent horror films have a noticeable aura of mimicry, I would assert, because they attempt to be on par technically with whatever foreign (no longer limited to Hollywood) horror is fashionable globally at the moment, often overlooking the fact that these texts also emerge in their own respective sociohistorical contexts. CGI is often thrown in with lukewarn results, again because of formal restrictions a film industry in perpetual crisis enforces; not too much violence and gore, and an assured positive resolution that tend to fall along the logic of Catholicism.

Ang Telebisyon and Ang Tulay show as well the pivotal role a child character could take in the narrative. It is relatively rare to see children pay significant roles in melodrama or comedies, where they mostly serve as miniatures, prepping for bigger roles in the future. SRR follows this genre convention until the later films, where kids either play the naive but braver than adults hero or the brooding and secret source of horror. Most cases of children characters in stories are from affluent backgrounds. I guess it is easier plot-wise, to show order and comfort disrupted in bourgeois settings.

There are of course exceptions. One episode I show to my class is Rain Rain Go Away (Chris Martinez) from Shake Rattle and Roll 13 (2011). Story of factory owners who subject their workers, several of which are children, into slavery like conditions, including locking them up in cramped quarters. A huge typhoon then wrecks havoc and floods the city. These drowned children’s ghosts would later haunt them. In this case, justice is served even if ambiguously. I explained that the immediate context of the film is Typhoon Ondoy from 2009, significantly flooding large parts of the Metro Manila. The script was inspired by an actual incident that was said to be covered up by a media blackout. Typhoons affecting the provinces though more frequent and devastating, don’t get as much attention or cinematic recreation. When I first saw this episode, I was thinking about Typhoon Frank (2008) instead. My students from Aklan and Antique added that they in turn were thinking about Typhoon Ursula. The storm passed by their homes and localities last Christmas, a mere few weeks before that class film-viewing activity.  If done well, popular cinema utilizing local experience, or fears and anxieties, with a fixed audience in mind can bring about fruitful discourse.

 

Rolando Tolentino (2016) asserts that episodes from the horror franchise can be read as analog of the anxieties of the nation, as well as a symptom of the dire state of the film industry. My own motivation for writing this piece is primarily nostalgia, but quickly snowballed into teasing out of the dynamics of horror restagings of the other classics. An exercise much need in these times, not because lines separating the horrors of real life and fiction are blurred ‘again’, but because the layers of social contradictions giving birth to these narratives of fear and redemption are more exposed than ever.

 

Shake Rattle and Roll has a playlist in the Regal Entertainment, Inc. YouTube Channel here.

 

 

Reframing Filipino-made B movies: notes on The Beast of the Yellow Night (Eddie Romero, 1971)

 

It was not good. I don’t’ know what yellow night or the yellow smoke suppose to mean, and I’m too lazy to look it up. It is the first film I watched after finding copies of a handful of B movies made by Filipino directors when the popularity of the form was at its height. The directors namely Eddie Romero, Gerardo de Leon, and Cirio Santiago. Many B movies were made in the Philippines either for cheap production costs or for exotic locations, or both.

 

Faces of Bystanders

 

None of these directors made it big in Hollywood, nor did they make a lot of money from them. With the exception of Santiago, National Artists Romero and de Leon were remembered for their different works. Romero, however admits it greatly helped him in honing technical skills in film making.

 

Vic Diaz and John Ashley

 

The Beast of the Yellow Night is a story of an American deserter and criminal (John Ashley) on the run and dying in the Philippine countryside just after the war. In the forest, he made a deal with Satan (Vic Diaz) for internal life. He would inhabit several bodies of people and make them do evil things. After decades of this set up, he attempts to exert his free will not do the devil’s bidding anymore. However when he does, he turns into a werewolf, rampaging in the streets of Manila. The story is basically him fighting his ‘instincts’ and not trying to get killed by the police.

 

A scene in front of a church, and inside a impoverished community beside train tracks

 

The B movie crowd didn’t like it. It was too complicated, talky, and there was not enough gore or sex.

 

Sex worker who approached and was later killed by John Ashley

 

The English spoken was curiously poetic, the literary Philippine English variety, not surprising since Romero wrote stories for Philippine Free Press before getting into movies while still studying in Siliman University. Fascinating to hear a mark of sophistication placed in the context of camp.

 

Leopoldo Salcedo and Eddie Garcia

 

Filipino actors have lines in English but also in Filipino. There are no subtitles provided for Filipino lines. For foreign audiences, it is an added exoticism. I greatly welcome this since I also have copy of The Blood Drinkers (1964) by de Leon where they dubbed it completely in English. In fact I saw the restored Genghis Khan (Manuel Conde, 1950) narrated by James Agee and Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik, 1977) narrated by Tahimik himself. The voices in Filipino sound either as whispers or gibberish in the background.

 

Angry mob waiting for Ashley outside the police station. Eddie Garcia negotiates with them in Filipino.

 

Another fascinating aspect of watching The Beast of the Yellow Night is how well preserved the film is, as it was released in DVD back in 2001. Manila and the countryside in the 70s looked so vivid. I think this cult horror movie is in better condition than when I first saw Ganito Kami Noon…Paano Kayo Ngayon? (1976). I think it was a really bad VHS-ripped copy in Youtube. Thankfully it was restored and remastered in 2013.

 

 

Jose B. Capino has an excellent chapter in his book Dream Factories of A Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema (2010) discussing the Blood Island series, made up of Terror Is a Man (1959), Brides of Blood (1968), Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), and Beast of Blood (1971). The series was a collaboration between Romero and de Leon, and Capino framed it as having indirect anti-imperial tones. The Beast of the Yellow Night is considered the fifth film in the series, but I don’t think we can do the same level of unpacking here. Nor do I want to extract a distinct directorial ‘style’ in accordance to auteur theory, or a distinct ‘Filipino style’ in accordance to nationalist film history.

 

Confrontation inside a bahay na bato

 

My own critique are fairly tangential. The Beast of the Yellow Night and other similar works are part of film history that directly overlaps with that of the empire. These were never shown for local audiences. Since they are accessible now, they be should seen and discussed. A quick search showed very few results online, and none tackling beyond the B movie aesthetics of the films written by aficionados.

 

 

It is interesting watching this now because of the reignited talks about what an Oscar win would mean for the country, ignited by success of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), Erik Matti ranting the dismal state of local cinema on its centennial, or groups of Asian descent in the metropoles demanding more representation, hailing Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018) as a landmark text for diversity. A few years back, movies like Bourne Legency (2012) shot in gritty Manila, or Yam Laranas’ underwhelming Hollywood foray in The Echo (2008) (see also Campos 2013/2014), animated interesting although dead-end discourse.

 

Andres Centenera and Joonee Gamboa

 

As these horror cult classics show, there was already representation. One that is marginal, dictated by convention, and only appreciated in certain subcultures. I believe this openly disadvantaged arrangement from the past will make people reframe their cinematic aspirations, both as creators and audiences.

 

 

What does ‘respectable’ or mainstream visibility to the empire’s gaze really mean? And is striving towards it a viable substitute to dismantle the structures of empire itself?

 

 

This is a first in a series of reflections about these low-budgeted flicks created with outsourced Filipino labor and talent. This is a process of omission, but I want to highlight images of the postcolony instead of the white lead actors. Not just as a window to what it was like (appearance of places, actors when they were younger, etc), but how were these images utilized and meanings it created.

 

Flame throwers used in the final scene, evoking Vietnam War films. Some of which were also shot in the Philippines.

In Praise of Darkness in Patayin sa Sindak si Barbara (Chito S. Roño, 1995)

I recently rewatched Roño’s remake of Patayin sa Sindak with my girlfriend, who was seeing it for the first time. It was her introduction as well to the sort of franchise or ‘universe’ that Celso Ad Castillo started in 1974. I honestly like Roño’s version (script by Ricky Lee) more. The new one from iWant, Barbara Reimagined (Christopher Ad. Castillo & Benedict Mique, 2019) was a bit underwhelming. I was in high school when the mini-series came out in 2008, with Kris Aquino as Barbara, but I didn’t pay much attention then.

While watching I realized there was a direct link to Lino Brocka’s Ina Kapatid Anak (1979), also discussing a strong woman returning from abroad (the US) to deal with the bourgeoisie household in shambles, both literally and figuratively. I reflected on Brocka’s drama here. This juxtaposition sounds like a great material for a serious paper, especially since both texts have been remade for younger audiences. The Ina Kapatid Anak tv series came out in 2012. There’s a lot to unpack there.

This post however is a simple appreciation of two parts of Roño’s version. I am not an editor, and I have very limited knowledge on editing, but these scenes were highlights in the movie for me. There is probably nothing revolutionary in them according to horror conventions in the lighting or montage, but it was beautifully composed as well as effective in creep and suspense build up.

Reflecting on these just made me realize further how the horror genre is neglected in the national film canon and scholarship, and it is my wish for people more capable than me to share their thoughts and praise on the craftsmanship that goes into Filipino horror movies.

The first one is the sequence where Barbara (Lorna Tolentino) is trying to find out the events surrounding the death of her sister Ruth (Dawn Zulueta). She was looking into the house as well as into the people inside it, ending up with very few answers. All throughout her sleuthing, large areas of her face is covered in darkness. This gives off an aura of voyeurism to something sinister, providing ambivalence to audiences also involved in unearthing secrets.

Ruth’s situation will later be brought to light.

The second scene involves Karen (Antoinette Taus) being won over by Ruth through her doll house. In this version, Roño downplayed the role of Karen’s doll, the object where Ruth ‘transmitted’ her wrath before her dying breath. During the first half of the film, Karen is mostly a passive and barely grieving child, but when her doll house comes to life in the middle of the night, Ruth lured her to be her instrument. Excellent build up of terror interwoven with innocence from Karen’s face as her toy set in manipulated by her dead mother.

 

There are more amazing parts in this film, especially those where Antoinette Taus dominates the scene.

Patayin sa Sindak si Barbara is available in iTunes.

Trailer here: