Canon Decampment: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes

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1—Tiyanak

English Translation: Demon Foundling
Year of Release: 1988
Directors: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes
Screenwriters: Peque Gallaga, Don Escudero, & Lore Reyes
Producer: Regal Films

Cast: Janice de Belen, Lotlot de Leon, Ramon Christopher, Mary Walter, Chuckie Dreyfus, Carmina Villaroel, Rudolph Yaptinchay, Smokey Manaloto, Zorayda Sanchez, Bella Flores, Suzanne Gonzales, Betty Mae Piccio

Christy, together with her boyfriend Jojo, visits her sister Julie who has become hysterical after suffering three miscarriages. One night, Christy finds a baby in an abandoned home. An excited Julie immediately adopts the child despite objections from her family. Little does she know that whenever it gets dark, the infant she has taken in is not as innocent as it appears to her.

2—Aswang

English Translation: Viscera-Sucking Shape-Shifter
Year of Release: 1992
Directors: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes
Screenwriters: Pen Medina & Jerry Lopez Sineneng
From a story by Peque Gallaga, Don Escudero, Lore Reyes
Producers: Regal Films & Good Harvest

Cast: Alma Moreno, Manilyn Reynes, Aiza Seguerra, Berting Labra, Janice de Belen, Joey Marquez, Aljon Jimenez, Leo Martinez, Dick Israel, John Estrada, Pen Medina, Rey Solo, Eva Ramos, Orestes Ojeda, Gigette Reyes, Romy Romulo, Lilia Cuntapay, Edison Ang, Mar Mojica, Rudy Castillo, Totoy Magno, Jun Basilio

In the rural town of Talisay, a series of nocturnal attacks terrorizes the townspeople, the latest victim being the randy husband of a pregnant woman, seduced by a beauty who transforms after luring him. When a home in Manila is gang-invaded and the residents killed for the owner’s store of wealth, the daughter and her nanny are taken by the famiy driver to his hometown, which happens to be Talisay. The family’s security guard is identified in media reports as the gang’s tipster, so he suggests that they search for the survivors in the driver’s rural neighborhood. The place’s aswang, who’s also an outsider residing in a hut as an old woman, picks out as much as she can of the newcomers as well as the town residents.

Audiences were lured in by Regal Films’ ridiculously catchy tagline “Oh my god, ang anak ni Janice [the spawn of Janice]”—a canny erasure of the distinction between character and performer. The presentation they experienced similarly toyed with the easily blurred boundaries between the film world and real life: Who wouldn’t pick up any infant foundling? Who wouldn’t take offense at malevolent insinuations about one’s own baby? And who wouldn’t be terrorized by a flesh-hungry monster snacking on moviegoers, even as one watches the onscreen bloodbath as an actual moviegoer? Beyond this affirmation of spectatorial pleasure, Tiyanak purveyed a then-ahead-of-its-time call to ecological responsibility and, via a few subtle stabs at gender exclusion, devised a plot where all the protagonists—from imp to adoptive mother to vanquishing grandmother, plus shaman-chorus—were women. In terms of generic strategy, the movie chose to lean on comedy although it was founded on melodrama. This hybrid of otherwise distinct commercial categories upholds a principle that typifies some of the best—and most of the worst—commercial outings in cinema; called genre pastiche, the approach relies on a process of accretion in which several styles, mostly associated with successful pop-culture products, are brought together in an eclectic manner. This mode of practice exposes the filmmaker’s orientation, and all too often we see texts where political material is handled seriously while producer-imposed requirements are given slapdash treatment. Fortunately, Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes are true-blue movie buffs, always willing to meet new genre challenges, and making sure to devote as much screen time as possible to audience engagement; not surprisingly, horror filmmaking became their preferred area of specialization. A few years after Tiyanak, they reprised the eponymously titled episode in the second (of a still-continuing) Shake, Rattle & Roll omnibus series. The fuller version suffers from the expected narrative longueurs as well as the necessary demonizing of Others, but the interests in this instance are once more reflexive: Metro Manila tabloids were rife with stories of drug-fueled home-invasion massacres and manananggal sightings in slum areas, building up to the first presidential election after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. the same month that the film was released. Aswang turned on these historical resonances (hearkening back to the possibly hyperbolic claims of Edward Lansdale[1]), hitched to the otherworldly, borderline-abject beauty of a still youthful-looking Alma Moreno.

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Sonata

Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, French, Italian, Czech
Year of Release: 2013
Directors: Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes
Screenwriter: Wanggo Gallaga
Producers: Film Development Council of the Philippines, Central Digital Lab, Wildsound Studios

Cast: Cherie Gil, Richard Gomez, Chino Jalandoni, Joshua Pineda, Chart Motus, Madie Gallaga, Dante Amaguin, Angel Lobaton, Tanya Lopez, Edouard Garcia, John Gilbert Arceo, Ricky Gallaga, Andrei Jalandoni, Manny Montelibano, Jack Triño, Louie Dormido, Milton Dionzon, Guillermo Gaston, Rudy Reveche, Pamela Henares-Jaladoni, Teresa Estrada, Jonathan Lorenzo Lindaya, Johnrick Ylosorio, Josh Motus, Raingo del Prado, Bull Dilag, Ricky Davao (voice)

When her voice fails her, Regina Cadena retires to her hometown in Bacolod in order to avoid the celebrity limelight. She explains to people who inquire about her condition that the operations performed on her throat only worsened her vocal condition and that she may never be able to sing professionally again. Her contemporary Cora, who’d been assisting the Cadena family since her younger years, goes to the Cadena residence to help Regina restore order to her affairs, since the diva became debilitated by alcohol; she brings her son Jonjon in order to keep him away from her estranged husband. Jonjon makes the acquaintance of Ping, an older kid who’s the son of a tenant family. With Ping’s help, Jonjon takes an interest in the exotic world that Regina came from, brings her treats when he notices she likes them, and fixes the mementoes she wanted to discard. Amused by the kids’ attention, Regina explains opera and, in effect, her life, to them, renames them after famous characters, and eventually makes plans to stage for them an aria from Antonin Dvořák’s lyric opera Rusalka (1901).

Sonata was a passion project of Cherie Gil, who passed away about a decade after its release. Its narrative resembled and, in a sense, reversed, the global trajectory of her experience, when she left a fairly successful career as a character actor in the late 1980s to be a housewife to Israeli violinist Rony Rogoff; her return two decades later coincided with the coming-of-age of digital-format independent film production, endowing her with several opportunities to flaunt her striking middle-age grandeur and upgraded performative ability. As seemingly further preparation for Sonata, she performed the role of the elderly, vocally busted Maria Callas in two English-language runs of Terrence McNally’s Master Class (1995). The film takes place in the idyllic manor in the midsection of Peque Gallaga’s full-length solo debut feature Oro, Plata, Mata (Gold, Silver, Death, 1982), where Gil played the lead character’s rebellious girlfriend who elopes with a gang of bandits. The connection is accentuated with Gil being the first major character to appear as well as the one who delivers the final topical statement, after having ironically gone off the deep end. The contrast with Sonata is more than just budgetary, with OPM being set in two additional locales; where the house is meant to be a refuge for the landed gentry, away from the violence of war (which nevertheless insistently approaches) and the savagery of the wilderness, both induced by the characters’ excessive privilege, in Sonata it functions as a ghostly, conflicted presence, bestowing Regina with the healing she seeks—but only her and no one else. The two tykes whom her character elects to facilitate her re-entry into the society she abandoned in the distant past, provide her with fulfillment and heartbreak with admirable aplomb, with the rest of the cast following suit. But the movie remained hers to claim, and she makes sure that no frame she appears in is wasted, with whatever vanity we might suspect on her part totally earned by the magnanimity she displayed.

Note

[1] Edward Lansdale, a psy-war operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, alleged in his book In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (Fordham University Press, 1972) that he undermined people’s support for Communist Huk rebels by kidnapping recruits and sympathizers and hanging them from trees after draining their blood; the natives supposedly concluded that any aswang would be on the prowl for antigovernment insurgents and avoided providing assistance thereafter. In Aswang, the monstrous creature takes on some properties of the manananggal by feeding on a fetus while still in its mother’s womb, but also exhibits werecreatural properties in stalking and attacking people of either gender and is ultimately destroyed, vampire-style, by sunlight.

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