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Vampariah
Language: English
Additional Language: Filipino
Year of Release: 2016
Director & Screenwriter: Matthew Abaya
With Lawrence Yagomour as consultant
Producer: I Don’t Care Productions
Cast: Kelly Lou Dennis, Aureen Almario, Scott Mathison, Arlene Boado, Jeffrey Lei, Roberto Divina, Desciple, Alex Benjamin, Daniel Miller, Ken Shaw, Jason Bustos, Abe Pagtama, Vin (Kaiju), Ryan Liguid, Gabi Dayer, Mahalya Kim, Jamie Nalla, Roczane Enriquez, Jordan Lacey, Will Schindler, Alan Smithee
An elite US-based secret squad of military-type hunters seek out monsters to destroy. Mahal, the most highly skilled member of her unit, wonders why her commander refuses to give her the more dangerous assignments. Bent on avenging the killing of her parents, she goes to the Philippines to hunt down the manananggal (self-segmenting viscera-sucking vampire) that she blames for the tragedy. She finds other monsters, including an East Asian jiangshi (reanimated hopping corpse), but her quest leads her back to the US, where she discovers that a particularly violent and powerful manananggal named Bampinay has been terrorizing the male population in the city where Mahal operates.
The Philippines’s still-underappreciated B-movie tradition is revived and updated for the present millennium by Matthew Abaya, in what remains an uncanny debut feature. The best output of Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero toyed with identity politics, a form of activism based on categories such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, etc.; another way of looking at it is by considering it an extension of Marxist principles to cover areas other than, or in addition to, social class. Vampariah (evidently a portmanteau of “vampire” and “pariah”) is stamped all over with identity consciousness, but it also administers sufficient doses of laughs, stunts, special effects, skin exposure, and synergetic myth-making to keep the pickiest fanboys satisfied. Yet Abaya brings to the table a resource that de Leon and Romero could only approximate at best: a first-hand understanding of race- and gender-based Otherness that only a Filipino-American, schooled in updated cultural and critical theories, would have the ability to process within the framework of a creative project. The standard masculine trope of hunter and hunted finding common causes between them would already be a subversive notion, but Abaya intensifies the situation by making the protagonists not just women, but also people of color, and essentially undead. The B-movie project is critically vulnerable to accusations of being too syncretic, or dependent on the fusion of disparate sources, to be genuinely original; predictable in its reliance on genre formulas; and often more fun to anticipate and discuss than to actually watch. Vampariah works out these limitations by embracing them with a vengeance and demonstrating, to both the Filipino and the American communities that Abaya straddles, how being mixed and indeterminate brings advantages and pleasures that the squarest citizens on either side will never be capable of imagining, to no one else’s misfortune but their own.
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