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Boy Pick-Up: The Movie

Year of Release: 2012
Director: Dominic Zapata [as Dominic C. Zapata]
Screenwriter: Aloy Adlawan
From a concept by Ogie Alcasid & Eri Neeman and a story by Ogie Alcasid & Aloy Adlawan
Producers: GMA Films & Regal Entertainment

Cast: Ogie Alcasid, Solenn Heussaff, Dennis Trillo, Michael V., Antonio Aquitania, Diego Llorico, Eri Neeman, Boy 2 Quizon, Sam Pinto, Sarah Lahbati, Gwen Zamora, Jackie Rice, Maey Bautista, Albert Sumaya Jr., Roadfill, Moymoy, Pepe Smith, Lilia Cuntapay, Kerbie Zamora, Isko Salvador, Caesar Cosme, Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., Jose Javier Reyes, Boy Abunda, Dingdong Dantes, Victor Aliwalas, Ellen Adarna, Ian Batherson, Kristoffer Martin, Adrian Alandy, Paolo Contis, Vicky Belo, Derek Ramsey, Loonie, Dello, Mike Swift, Reg Rubio, Rhon Henley, Apokz, Abra, Jonan Aguilar

Battle rap mutates into a variation where the contestants freestyle with pickup lines. The long-time winner by acclamation is Boy Pick-Up, who comes off as a doofus who somehow casts a spell whenever he delivers his winning dispatch. His rival Gabbs consoles himself by marrying his girlfriend Queen, but the latter’s so infatuated with Boy that she abandons her fiancé at the altar. The despondent Gabbs leaps into the Pasig River but is fished out by a masked manipulator who transforms him into Bagwis, Boy’s worst nemesis. Boy meanwhile resists his gay landlord Sharona and seeks a job, finally finding it at Heaven’s Bakeshop when he prepares his irresistible fishcake. The shop owner Angel is typically besotted with Boy from first hello, but Bagwis returns to steal her away in order to sabotage Boy’s supremacy in the battle rap competition.

The TV mainstay Bubble Gang has been around for longer than most of its viewers’ lifetimes (three decades and counting) so that it’s easy for older audiences to assume that its purpose ends with the entertainment it dispenses. The disappointing performance of the film adaptation of its otherwise satisfying satirical segment featuring a parentally unsupervised rich daughter and her beleaguered though sexually amorous nanny, titled Yaya and Angelina: The Spoiled Brat Movie (dir. Michael Tuviera, 2019), was not so much a reflection of the source’s limitations as it was further proof of the difficulty of crossover attempts from TV to cinema. By confining itself to the TV property’s elements—including unexpected guest stars, with the late rock legend Pepe Smith’s definitive film appearance—and punching up its potential for spectacle, Boy Pick-Up winds up revealing the tension between forcing a Western cultural innovation to address a developing country’s occasionally imperviable concerns. Proof of the approach’s effectiveness lies in how Boy Pick-Up results in a more holistic unit than the millennium’s other significant battle rap film, Treb Monteras II’s Respeto (Respect, 2017), although then again, it might be able to accommodate the latter’s allegorical ambition only with far more difficulty. Satire has nevertheless rarely been this rewarding since the departure of our Second Golden Age experts, so both films may be counted as essential twinbill immersions in a working-class culture that might not be around for too long from now.

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Kahit Butas ng Karayom … Papasukin Ko

English Translation: I Will Go Through Even the Eye of the Needle
Year of Release: 1995
Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. & Willy Milan [as Ronwaldo Reyes & Wilfredo “Willy” Milan]
Screenwriters: Eddie Romero & Manny Palo
Producer: Libran Films

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Bing Loyzaga, Subas Herrero, Paquito Diaz, Roy Alvarez, Lito Legaspi, Bing Davao, Caridad Sanchez, Roberto Garcia, Luis Gonzales, Sunshine Dizon, Mona Margarita, Jimmy Garcia, Rex Lapid, Ernie David, Tony Bernal, Danny Riel, Bobby Benitez, Rolly Lapid, Nonoy de Guzman, Jonathan Gabriel, Bert Garon, Bong Varona, Jess Vargas

Taking his young daughter to school, Sgt. Daniel Torres nearly hits the car of a spoiled rich kid, who complains to his father about the incident. The father wants to have Sgt. Torres killed as punishment, but his superior, a colonel awaiting promotion to general, arranges to have him and his family assigned to the conflict in Mindanao instead. Along the way, Sgt. Torres stops extortionists from victimizing a Muslim, Halim. Upon arrival, he finds that the men assigned to him behave abusively, so he whips them into shape by a combination of brawn and proper behavior. Rina, his daughter’s new teacher, takes an interest in him, but he also has to contend with a corrupt mayor and hypocritical officials, a disgruntled Muslim populace (led, as it turns out, by Halim), and rapacious business interests from faraway Manila.

With Fernando Poe Jr. gone, it will take another star of equivalent stature and influence before a more definitive commercial film on the Mindanao conflict can be accomplished. Nevertheless with Kahit Butas ng Karayom … Papasukin Ko, we can still count our blessings. The Willy Milan co-directing credit might make us brace for another relentless onslaught of machismo, compounded by issues of war and religious difference, but FPJ’s growing acknowledgment of feminine values enables him to set apart a hero who actually has moments of masculine tenderness, particularly in his fondness for his unruly, zany, yet suicidally plucky dirty-dozen squad. With Eddie Romero in their final collab, he finally had the epic scope of Romero’s hidebound Aguila (1980) and the careful focus on character of Ang Padrino (The Godfather, 1984, which he directed), with much less of Romero’s usual humanistic fence-sitting, possibly owing to the credit shared with Manny Palo. From hereon we also witness an elderly action star actually behaving his age, allowing his young daughter to outdo him in the manospheric enterprise of auto repair, and giving up when overpowered in a brawl so he can later resort to the same dirty trick his opponent utilized. But where he commits himself to the oppressed is where the unexpected takes place: the heartfelt and frankly romantic pledge in the film title is uttered by his army-commander character Daniel Torres not to any family or professional associate but to a Muslim rebel leader, upon confirming that the latter is fighting for his people’s rights against the encroachment of folks primarily represented by the likes of Sgt. Torres himself. The ultimately frustrating aspect of KBKPK is that satisfactory endings, even open-ended ones, can only occur in pop culture; but stars worth their salt can lead the way and leave it up to the rest of us to follow.

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Dagitab

English Title: Sparks
Year of Release: 2014
Director & Screenwriter: Giancarlo Abrahan
Producers: Cinemalaya Foundation & Ten17P

Cast: Eula Valdez, Nonie Buencamino, Martin del Rosario, Sandino Martin, Max Eigenmann, Frances Ignacio, Ronnie Lazaro, Rolando Inocencio, Valentin Naguit, Misha Lecaros, Ryan Peter Judd, Whammy Alcazaren, Chris Gallegos, Al Bernard Garcia, Vic Robinson, Ness Roque, Jovita Laureola, Marvin Gomez

Issey and Jimmy, both academics, have been married long enough for their colleagues’ children to be in college. Jimmy takes rural field trips to finalize his dissertation on a folkloric muse, but he also asks about Lorena, a woman fighter who disappeared with no one able to pinpoint her whereabouts; a rebel commander who knows his and Lorena’s shared history tells him to give up his quest. Issey knows that Jimmy’s research is a contrivance—that he’s actually seeking closure with his old flame, who left him to join the insurgent army. Indulging in cigarettes and alcohol, she attends an out-of-town workshop as a facilitator, where her friend’s son Gab, avoiding his roommate’s same-sex advances, bonds with her. Although aware of the ethical complications, Issey’s disappointment in her marriage impels her to allow Gab’s interest to acquire erotic attributes.

Over a decade since its initial appearance, Dagitab found new life in a stage adaptation. The film itself had an ambivalent critical reception, as observable in the various critics organizations’ indicators of appreciation: set aside (except for performance trophies) by the oldest group, declared “best first film” by the late-millennium group, and wholly embraced by the newest (and only non-academic) group in its annual survey. One can immediately comprehend where the hesitation of older evaluators would arise from: the film grapples with the dynamics of a radical movement that abided for nearly half a century, that originated from personalities identified with the national university, and that continues to influence its constituents’ deliberations on policy and aesthetics. In this context, one might ascribe the film’s silence on the movement’s defining upheaval, a schism that led to the formation and eventual strengthening of breakaway groups, to the filmmaker’s possible youthfulness. Yet a closer tracking of the male professor’s obsession with a former lover, whose disappearance during active service in the people’s army may or may not have been a consequence of its tragically rampageous anti-infiltration campaign, raises the further issue, as expressed by the filmmaker, of the male character’s “mythopoliticizing” the woman’s disappearance, “because otherwise her ‘death’ would not have been as sublime as someone who loved her could hope for” (Facebook Messenger reply, October 24, 2025). And the fact that the rebel-army commander he queries refuses to provide him with a useful account (perhaps to own the woman’s narrative, or protect his own feelings for her) suggests the standard allegorizing of the nation, or at least an idealized aspect of it, being imposed again on the figure of the woman. Without attempting to spoil any first-time appreciator’s viewing experience, we can read further into the handling of the wife’s discontent using gender as a means of critique—i.e., between the two academic protagonists, she’s the one who gets laid in real life, and her stud, after enduring the male prof’s retaliatory attempt at intimidation, will still be able to hope for further sexual liberation. The use of sexual exclusion as a means of indicating where a storyteller’s sympathies lie is a narrative tactic closely associated with contemporary Euro-Latin material, but to see it deployed in Pinas culture, with its Euro-Latinate roots, is to realize how much potential still lies in pathways we might have too readily abandoned for the sake of Americanization.

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Sila-Sila

English Title: The Same People
Year of Release: 2019
Director: Giancarlo Abrahan
Screenwriter: Daniel Saniana
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions, Quiapo Collective, UP Cinema Arts Society

Cast: Gio Gahol, Topper Fabregas, Dwein Baltazar, Phi Palmost, Bart Guingona, Kych Minemoto, Vincent Kevin Pajara, Meann Espinosa, Jay Gonzaga, Sunshine Teodoro, Adrienne Vergara, Thea Marabut, Juan Miguel Severo, Lin Javier, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Wilson Tenama, Rainier Carreon, Justin Hernandez, Maureen Gonzales, Daniel Morial, Daniel Saniana, Ilsa Malsi, Apa Agbayani, JL Javier, Marvin Matias, Gaye Angeles, Boo Gabunada

Gabriel and Jared, friends since college, are unable to recover from what Gab calls Jared’s betrayal when the former sees the latter’s flirtation on a dating app. He leaves the city to work at an interisland capital and returns after a couple of years to attend a college reunion. Goaded along by mutual friends, Gab attempts to resume communicating with Jared but his ex is still sore over his sudden departure and they wind up quarreling again. Matters get more complicated when Gab is promoted by the non-governmental organization where he works but the higher position happens to be a vacancy … back in the same distant place he fled to. He also entertains various degrees of entanglements with straight men, with Jared happening on the presence in his bedroom of a married man he’d been sleeping with and consequently having his own turn at a jealous fit.

After local culture had taken a womanly direction following the humiliating failure of the grand masculinist experiment of martial rule by Ferdinand Marcos Sr., filmmakers realized that they no longer had to resort to camp or negative imaging in order to present queer characters onscreen. The still-unsatisfactory positive characterization may have been intended to justify the espousal of same-sex intercourse—successful enough, despite reactionary gripes, to initiate postqueer storytelling in Philippine cinema. What might surprise observers still fixated on the premillennial valuations of dimorphic differentation and observance of socially designated gender roles is how, as exemplified in Sila-Sila, local queer subjects have assimilated Western best practice, possibly exceeding global models by enabling the rest of “straight” culture to arrive at a workable rapprochement with the community. The film in fact not only dispenses with the expected consummation of copulation scenes; it also casts a surprisingly critical perspective on Gab, its central character, who’s inclined to flee rather than confront conflicts (termed “ghosting” in social-media parlance, per a clarification on December 14, 2025, from the director via Facebook Messenger regarding the film’s misleading summary at the Internet Movie Database), engages in the promiscuity that he abhors in others, and insists on teasing cis-het males to the point where he succeeds in seducing a married man. SS’s feat lies in demonstrating the psychological motives behind Gab’s resistance to queer culture’s prescriptions, withholding moralist judgment while also indicating how his self-absorption becomes a source of frustration for people who genuinely love him. One might be invited to make correspondences between his long journey to self-understanding and the national condition of a young country that still seems incapable of maturation, but that might be a challenge better left to more appropriate social-science experts.

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Lupang Pangako [incomplete]

English Translation: Promised Land
Year of Release: 1949
Director: Susana C. de Guzman
Screenwriters: Quin Velasco & Susana C. de Guzman
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Mila del Sol, Eusebio Gomez, Tinno de Lara, Engracio Ibarra, Armando Canseco, Lila Luna, Maria Norma, Vita Ortega, Horacio Morelos, Felipe Ortega, Amado Rivera Jr., Bayani Casimiro, Angge, Pablo Vergara

[Note: spoilers provided] Wandering the streets of Manila, Capt. Eduardo Rosales, a World War II veteran, finds an army buddy pretending to be a blind beggar. After introducing himself, they walk together and discover another former fellow soldier busking on the sidewalk, with two kids whom he pretends to be his own; the busker dismisses the kids with the money they collected but regrets his generosity when Eddie admits he’s broke. They proceed to meet still another of their mates who operates a small eatery, where Eddie discloses that he was just discharged from a hospital after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. He tells the group that he has to inform the parents of their late comrade of the death of their son. While walking to their distant provincial home, where they work as tenants, he gets hit by the car of Cora, the spoiled orphaned heiress, who gets out and scolds him. On his way to the tenants’ home, he faints before Cora’s residence, where she learns about his terminal condition. But since she was guaranteed ownership of the family property only if she gets married, she offers Eddie some money if he agrees to a sham union. Eddie successfully negotiates for a higher price plus use of a fertile tract of land, and invites his comrades to form a farming cooperative, calling the place Lupang Pangako (Promised Land). He also thwarts the unscrupulous designs of Cora’s suitor, who pretends to still be wealthy so he could marry her and claim her wealth for himself. Cora berates Eddie when she realizes that her own tenants are abandoning their work on the farm in order to join his cooperative, but he insists on his husbandly prerogative and forces her to live in a farmhouse. With the help of women farmhands, Cora discovers the appeal of living directly off the land and attends a community celebration as one of her people. Missing portion (from “Lupang Pangako,” Melcore’s CinePlex Blog, November 16, 2020): Cora’s family doctor visits the couple, treats Eddie’s condition, and finally declares that Eddie has fully recovered. The couple realize that their pragmatic arrangement was the right one for each of them after all, and agree to live in wedded bliss in the company of tenants who have become their equals.

The first Filipina director of note, Susana C. de Guzman’s credentials were aspersion-proof. The clan she belonged to was famed not for wealth but for tremendous talent, so it was no surprise that after she retired from filmmaking, two of her nephews would commence their film careers—director Ishmael Bernal and composer George Canseco. Her brother Constancio’s music was always better than the films he worked on, though fortunately he scored several of her films including the current one. Her uncles Severino Reyes and Lope K. Santos (whose K was the Tagalog spelling for Canseco) were colossi of nationalist literature, so the question should not be why Lupang Pangako turned out to be so exceptional that it deserves to be canonized despite its missing last sequence, but why she detoured shortly afterward into wholly dismissible fodder. Meanwhile her own novelistic skill and Marxist sympathies render LP a cut above most other Philippine samples, with its exposition favorably comparable to the similar opening portion of Yu Hyun-mok’s Obaltan (Aimless Bullet, 1961), also a treatise on the consequences of war from the perspective of ordinary citizens. And rather than allow the shrewish heiress to be tamed by her disciplinarian husband, as the Brit bard would have handled it, de Guzman allocates the task to the plantation tenants’ womenfolk. The film’s missing portion only covers the solution to the plot’s primary setback, namely its male lead’s terminal illness, so in fact the entire work resembles a genuine socialist realist text, all the more extraordinary for showing up in a US neocolonial stronghold.[1] [Important tech note: Several LVN films, including a few listed in this volume, were transferred using the inexpensive method of telerecording—i.e., projecting celluloid material on a screen and recording the sound and image with a video camera, resulting in flickery images; as of this time, no institution has volunteered to take charge of repairing this problem.]

Note

[1] A cogent summary of Susana C. de Guzman’s prodigious clan is provided in Bayani Santos Jr.’s “[Ishmael] Bernal as Auteur: Primary Biographical Notes” (in Kritika Kultura, vol. 19, August 2012, pp. 14–35). The likeliest reason for the crackdown on progressive expressions in cinema would be her studio’s enthusiastic participation, via its owner’s son Manuel de Leon, in the US State Department’s intervention in the film cultural policies of the Southeast Asian region even through the 1960s, after the other countries had lost interest (Lee Sangjoon, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network, Cornell University Press, 2020, p. 12). Re socialist realism, a warning I sounded out elsewhere: a Philippine film author, whose points were endorsed by a Western author, nesciently claimed that the two most significant city films of the Second Golden Age, Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975) and Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980), were samples of socialist realism. One can only hope these purportedly progressive Orthodox-left experts have since read up on historical trends in global cinema and readjusted their clownish misperceptions.

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Brutus, ang Paglalakbay

English Translation: Brutus, the Journey
Additional Language: Buhid
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Tara Illenberger
Screenwriters: Tara Illenberger & Arah Jell Badayos
Producers: Bonfire Productions, Cinemalaya Foundation, National Commission for Culture and the Arts

Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Yul Servo, Rhea Medina, Timothy Castillo, Flor Salanga, Melario Nazareno, Jerey Aguilar, Irene Medina, Lagum Pasag, Yagum Maansig Solina, Aniway Solina, “Mayor” Yaum Sumbad, Mandy Sumbad, Tulay Yam-an, Ian Pagcaliwagan, Drandred Afundar, Fritz Silorio, Oyot Solina, Jimmy Rodaje, Jayvee Lachica, Raymond Abia, Charisse Pagcaliwagan, Jopeter Galicha, McDaniel Famisaran, Charles Kim Pagcaliwagan, Benjamin Jovinal, Marianne Oandasan, Roland Pagcaliwagan, Ramy Gadon, Jaimie Lazo, Christopher Arsega, Dennis Alegre, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Randy Salibio, Ariel Molina, Arlan Lachica, Richner Solangan, Alfredo Mabalot, Leonises Feticio, Jim Augie Bergado, Japhset A. Bahian, Sonny Gado

When her father falls ill from malaria, Payang Mansik is instructed by her mother to accompany Adag Ayan to perform brutus—i.e., transporting wood for illegal loggers from Manila, so she can earn enough money to buy medicine in their Oriental Mindoro town. Payang also looks forward to finding her brother, who went missing after an earlier brutus task, unusual for members of their Buhid tribe of indigenous Mangyan folk. After hauling the logs down a mountain, they construct a raft so they can paddle on the way to town. Although Adag warns that the current is getting stronger, Payang insists on going further, resulting in their raft crashing against some rocks. In the morning, having drifted away from their deliverables, they are picked up by an army unit led by Sgt. Sarosa, who asks them if they had seen a rebel leader named Ka Milo. Sarosa warns them that performing brutus is illegal, but he also tells them where they can find the logs they lost. While reassembling the raft, a stranger who introduces himself as Carlito helps them in exchange for hitching a ride.

The neorealist social-problem film, largely repressed during the increasingly prohibitive cost of film production during the late celluloid era, made a comeback via the transition to digital filmmaking. Its proportion was more abundant in Pinas than in Western cinema, largely owing to media critics and teachers romanticizing the output of artists identified with the antidictatorship movement during the martial-law period’s Second Golden Age. While some of these titles garnered attention, even prizes, in global events, no one dared to voice the possibility of affirmative action at play, or even their insidious insistence that what used to be called Third World subjects should confine themselves to political miserabilism, resulting in a reactionary downgrading of the local audience that would have horrified SGA practitioners.[1] Brutus demonstrates how smart filmmakers could observe these requisites and thereby win the approval of funding agencies, but also figure out ways to improve on the formula. The work’s title is derived from the hardy though now-discontinued 140cc Kawasaki motorcycle used for hauling logs uphill, a term exclusive to the Buhid tribe featured in the film (per a Facebook Messenger response by the filmmaker); it commences like every other neorealist-inspired work, through which a line may be traced all the way to the output of the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the trend’s primary contemporary exponents. Yet though Brutus diverts through the expected worrisome and increasingly stressful developments, it insists even more stubbornly on a light-handed, even tender depiction of its dramatis personae, even the most threatening and dangerous ones. It’s an unusual perspective, feminine in its most empowering sense, although those who may have traversed the many possible routes through which lifestyles caught in the crosshairs of capitalist and militaristic pressures find their own resistance in maintaining the distance and wonderment that so-called primitive cultures provide, will be able to recognize the behavioral patterns depicted in the film. Lyrical realism was supposed to be one of the traditions that neorealism meant to improve on, if not displace; Brutus makes us see how approaches faithful to the sensibilities of sufficiently Othered subjects can provide their own vindication in the face of more pragmatic but overused options.

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High Tide

Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2017
Director & Screenwriter: Tara Illenberger [as Tara Barrera Illenberger][2]
Producers: Bonfire Productions, Dark Media Creations, Universal Harvester

Cast: Arthur Solinap, Dalin Sarmiento, Sunshine Teodoro, Forrest Kyle Buscto, Christine Mary Demaisip, Riena Christal Shin, Nathan Sotto, Onal Golez, Allen Rivera Galindo, Allain Hablo, Runshien Olivete, Mitch Fresnillo, Kyle Fermindoza, Christian Demaisip, Farida Kabayao, Dianna Baloran, Joan Paulette, Mary Libo-on, Edwin Caro-Lauran Jr., Ma. Luisa Nalupano, Elvie B. Razon-Gonzales, Emilyn Espera, Genina Toledo, Jeremy Descuatan, Wenil Bautista, Melita Penafiel, Daniella Julieta Caro, Tracy Baky, Jocelyn dela Cruz, Jennifer Tobongbanwa, EJ Mier, Stephanie Rodriguez, Joemel Banas, Harlen Grace Esmajer, Leonard Villanueva, Rafael Dionio, Genie Delareman, Jeffrey Dilag, Ignacio Dumancas, Lily Belle Palma, Ivan Kenjie Villalobos, Roshiel Fernandez, Zahara Shane Lino, Allen Rivera Galindo, Jeson Panes, Lily Belle Palma, Mark Joseph Magada, James Gulles, Josh Berso, Jeren Sola, Zedric Bacolena, Ivan Kenjie Villalobos, Rynshien Olivete, Marilou Doloritos, Jade Claire Villa, Prince Jarandilla, Leo Quiachon, Mereyel Salvacion

Young sisters Dayday and Laila are sent to school by their fisherfolk parents despite their hand-to-mouth existence on an island in Iloilo. When disaster strikes a neighboring island, their neighbor Mercy agrees to adopt a boy, Unyok, who’d lost both his parents and barely speaks as a result of trauma. The sisters develop a bond with Unyok, with whom they scrounge for shellfish on the beach to sell directly to a restaurant, but the proprietor complains because the sizes of the mollusks they harvest are too small. When the sisters’ mother is diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy and they need to raise funds beyond their means, the three stop attending school and look for ways to help. Unyok remembers how the sea harvest where he used to live was always plentiful, so he convinces the sisters to go there during low tide and return to their island before the tide rises.

Climate change is the impassive and increasingly destructive force that confronts the most dispossessed citizens everywhere, with the Philippines already marked by meteorologists as the most vulnerable country in the world. Much like the issue of the nuclear arms race in the twentieth century, this ensures an existentialist pessimism in any discourse where the prospect might arise. Hence the expression of any form of hope, as High Tide endeavors to furnish, might sound like whistling in the dark. Yet the film manages to exempt its narrative’s future generation from the defeatism that we know lies in store for them—ironically by focusing on its future generation. To witness them already battered by the ravages of the natural environment, when previously tried and tested measures like calendrical almanacs and miniature timepieces no longer function as they should, yet insist on persevering for the sake of their loved ones and for one another, is to imagine them carving out enough space for their fantasy to prevail, if only in fiction. This makes of High Tide that rarity among independent productions: a work rooted in solid scientific findings and closely observed ethnographic reality, that nevertheless refuses to drown in harsh and overwhelming data. It will make sense primarily for characters like the ones who populate its story, but within a framework where no winners can be guaranteed, the attempt may be seen as possibly desperate, but heroic in its desperation.

Notes

[1] The differences between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad actually began with the former’s discursive appreciation of a Filipino film, Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977): in “‘Art Naïf’ and the Admixture of Worlds,” the final chapter of The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 186–213), Jameson argued that Third-World films essentially present as political allegories, refining an argument he first articulated in “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (Social Text, vol. 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88); Ahmad, in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (Social Text, vol. 17, Fall 1987, pp. 3–25), spearheaded the response of several cultural critics, some of them understandably from Pinas, in pointing out how Jameson had to suppress “the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialized formations.” For a tracking of the critical shortcomings that led to this state of affairs, see Joel David, “From Cloud to Resistance,” Amateurish (August 30–September 13, 2022), uploaded in three installments starting at amauteurish.com/2022/08/30/the-problem-of-our-critical-approaches/.

[2] The landgrabbing family in the director’s 2008 film Brutus, ang Paglalakbay is introduced as “Barrera.” The filmmaker speculated that she probably associated her maternal grandfather’s name with the issue of land: “Friends’ and family members’ names show up in my films…. My grandfather was not landed. He was a soldier in the war. But later he became a successful businessman. And people would borrow money from him, offering their small land titles. And that’s how he acquired property, some of which he didn’t really want” (Facebook Messenger reply, October 17, 2025).

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Iskalawags

English Translations: Scalawags; Rascals
Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriters: Keith Deligero, Gale Osorio, Remton Siega Zuasola
From Erik Tulban’s story “Kapayas (Papayas)”; with lines from “Sa Aking mga Kabatà (To My Fellow Youth)” (1868), attributed to José Rizal, Celso Ad. Castillo’s Asedillo (1971, written by Castillo), and Pablo Santiago’s Hindi Ka Na Sisikatan ng Araw: Kapag Puno Na ang Salop, Part III (The Sun Won’t Rise for You: When the Container is Full, Part III, 1990, written by Pablo S. Gomez & Jose Bartolome)
Producer: Deligero & Co.

Cast: Kerwin Otida, Reynaldo Formentera, Windel Otida, Johnreil Lunzaga, Joriel Lunzaga, Micko Maurillo, Mark Lourence Montalban, Jeric Raval, Dionne Monsanto, Michelle Acain, Mariah Gonzaga, Marcheta Ortiz, Narciso Dizon, Rey Samaco, Ramil Alcordo, Edwina Alcordo, Jobert Lucero, Pina Gonzaga, Robertson Tampus, Erik Tuban, Keith Deligero, Lawrence Ang, Fel Louise Alingasa, Jerome Villamor

In Barrio Malinawon, an islandic town in Cebu, seven male friends can’t wait for school to end so they can hang out, talk about movies starring their idol Jeric Raval, and embark in new adventures in one another’s company. Led by their self-appointed leader Palot (who claimed precedence over the rest by being first among them to grow pubic hair), they adopt the loanword iskalawag, which was used as the title of a popular action entry. They set as their goal the acquisition of humongous papayas they heard were growing in the garden of their teacher Ma’am Lina, but along the way they live out typical teenage hijinks mostly from the pursuit of illicit thrills, replicating their classmates’ admired declamations in Filipino by mouthing dignified populist speeches uttered by Fernando Poe Jr. in Asedillo (Celso Ad. Castillo, 1971) and in Hindi Ka Na Sisikatan ng Araw: Kapag Puno Na ang Salop, Part III (The Sun Won’t Rise for You: When the Container is Full, Part III, Pablo Santiago, 1990). The appearance of the flesh-and-blood Jeric Raval to attend to his personal businesses as Ma’am Lina’s military husband demonstrates the power that their imagination holds over reality.

The exemplary final chapter of Bliss Cua Lim’s The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024) contains as exhaustive a reading of Iskalawags as anyone can ask for. To the casual viewer, the film might appear to be a takeoff from the feel-good multicharacter youth films of the Second Golden Age. But then it goes way beyond the realist premise that typified those products. The closest to a Milinawon territory anywhere is a small district in Mindanao, and even the preteen poem ascribed to Rizal and recited from memory in the characters’ classroom is considered a false attribution by historians, thus challenging standard notions of reality premised on acceptability. Drawn from director Keith Deligero’s autobiographical experience, the Iskalawags narrative moves temporally back and forth in retelling a formative event in the shared lives of its gang of seven, until it flashforwards to an indeterminate future with the story’s narrator en route to an uncertain destination. Lim points out how certain details in the film’s design may be anachronistically outmoded or advanced, although in the use of Betamax technology, Deligero himself interjected to point out how a technological trend considered passé in imperial Manila denotes prosperity in the margins for people who have no other means to access the pop culture they crave, in the government-prescribed language they have to study. Iskalawags also stakes more than a linguistic claim to Cebuano cinema: the celluloid-era products from the region fiercely partook of genre appropriations, in contrast with the Europeanesque-arty approaches marshaled by the digital-era generation who might have been too eager to distance themselves from the commercialist anxieties of their predecessors. Iskalawags could be more comfortably situated with, to name a rare available sample, Joe Macachor’s Ang Manok ni San Pedro (St. Peter’s Rooster, 1977), a comedy, originally shot in super-8mm. in order to provide the region with its first color film, where an easy-going peasant gets killed by a rival for a woman but is rewarded in heaven with a magical gamecock. Iskalawags’s fantastic counterpart arrives when Jeric Raval, the title gang’s movie idol, materializes as the husband of the teacher whose papayas they covet, but stumbles upon her after his counterinsurgency activities, during her moment of indiscretion with a younger lover. The kids suddenly witness everything as members of an outdoor-screening audience, perhaps as a way for them to frame the traumatizing event that was about to unfold before their voyeuristic eyes. In managing to maintain its tonal equanimity to this point and beyond, Iskalawags enables us to think through the many implications of its plot and purpose.

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Lily

Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, Hiligaynon, Japanese, English
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriters: Pam Miras, Timmy Harn, Keith Deligero
Script Consultant: Dodo Dayao
Producers: 8thumbs, Bards sa Kasamahan, Heritage Productions

Cast: Rocky Salumbides, Charlton Dano, Shaina Magdayao, Rey Samaco, Natileigh Sitoy, Enrie Estevez, Mikka Cabreras, Chrystal Alesna, Sunshine Lim, Georgette Nunag, Gurprit Singh, Kathleen Pador, Niña Igot-Makipig, Nicole Blackman, Tuesday Zabala, Zalde Lapiña, Ligaya Rabago, Edwina Alcordo, Gale Osorio, Chloe Novie Solasco, Darcy Arguedo, Baby Boy Arellano, Jvi James Luib, Ruel Dahis Antipuesto, Lawrence Ang, Gladys Areopagita, Ronnie Gamboa Jr., Ric Rodrigo Porminal Jr., Denzel Yorong, Hesus Deligero, Ramil Alcordo, Juvel Alvarez, Mario Lowell Baring, Anecito Disuacido, Charles Lim, Fel Louise Alingasa, Romy Warain, Earl Vincent Ramirez, Lav Diaz, Eula Valdez, Remton Siega Zuasola

In hunting for a sigbin, a mythological creature regarded as an aswang’s (native vampire’s) pet, Mario Ungo is distracted by Lily, who hides him in her convent after he suffers a mysterious injury. Mario falls in love and lives with Lily. Although not averse to participating in criminal activity, he’s forced to kill a burglary victim, then claims that he will be unable to provide adequately for Lily and their child if he stays put. Despite Lily’s protestations, he decides to migrate for work in Manila, where he is reduced to servitude in the employ of better-off people. At one point in his job as security guard of a plush subdivision, he winds up killing an arrogant driver. He also falls for Jane, a nightclub dancer, and they cohabit when she gets pregnant. Lily however has also set out for Manila to find him, her face displaying an unsightly self-inflicted scar.

Lily is an example of what we might term a maximalist approach to filmmaking, as opposed to minimalism. Such a project would necessarily turn on the sustenance of paradoxes, starting with the association of this strategy with the big-budget pursuit of presenting as many elements as possible in order to attract the greatest number of viewers; the fact that the project is not just independently sourced, but regionally centered as well, may have therefore put off evaluators when it first arrived. The film advances itself with an audacity that can be better understood by going over its director’s fairly recent output. Preferring to immerse in genre expression rather than art consciousness, Keith Deligero first tinkered with elements of suspense and the prison film in Kordero sa Dios (Lamb of God, 2012) as well as comedy and the youth film in Iskalawags (Scalawags, 2013). With Lily, he furnished the usual elements of horror closely associated with rural settings by Philippine audiences, but incorporated the most innovative technical devices ever seen in a local sample of the genre, exceeding the peak achievements of older, mostly gone specialists. Major characters’ appearances shift sometimes in the same scene (complete with a nervy reversal of roles in a Catholic confessional), and the erratic, discontinuous, occasionally repetitious cutting provides a distinctly cinematic experience of uncanny disorientation in the narrative’s reality effect (described by Deligero in an email response as “like putting back pieces of the mirror that Lily broke in one scene”). As if seeking to further top off this already formidable challenge, Deligero introduces an inside joke that keeps advancing toward external dimensions: the male character starts out wearing a jacket inscribed with the director’s regional film festival, and reveals a T-shirt after being felled by an unidentified assailant, on which the director’s previous film title is displayed. At a peak horrific point much later, the entire production aesthetic suddenly turns conventional, in the best way our most accomplished filmmakers could execute; the reflexive twist, too delightful to divulge, should be left up to curious explorers to discover. Underlying the entire situation is the profound and melancholy pathos of rural natives grappling with the prospect of permanent poverty by seeking better prospects in the metropolitan capital and discovering there how their status is even further downgraded; the native female, already oppressed in her local habitat, experiences twice the degradation, even if she happens to possess supernatural abilities. In a perfect world, a talent such as Deligero’s should be deluged with offers—a prospect that may yet arrive, if we can fix our deeply flawed critical mechanisms.

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A Short History of a Few Bad Things

Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriter: Paul Grant
Producers: Binisaya Movement, ABS-CBN Film Productions, Cinema One Originals

Cast: Victor Neri, Jay Gonzaga, Publio Briones III, Maricel Sombrio, Kent Divinagracia, Hesus Deligero, Rey Samaco, Arnel Mardoquio, Julius Augustus Ambrad, Felicismo Alingasa, Ryles Cameron, Mel Baquiran, Remton Siega Zuasola, Crezzo Paz, Vitto Neri, Shiela Hontingoy, Fe Louise Alingasa, Alieza Despojo, Keith Deligero, Nony Pador, Alice Castro Dizon, Bebot Arias, Minerva Gerodias, Eric Bico, Zeny Nepomoceno

Felix Tarongoy and Jay are described by Ouano, their perpetually highly strung chief, as an ideal police investigation team for being smart and handsome respectively. Despite strict orders to follow their supervisor’s instructions and report to him at every turn, Felix interrogates witnesses to the drive-by assassination of a prominent local businessman in Cebu and identifies Tito Abog, an ex-military officer, as suspect. He proceed’s to the latter’s well-off residence and makes the acquaintance of Maria, Tito’s sullen, intimidated wife. Tito confronts Felix and Jay in Ouano’s office, confirming his and Felix’s background in counterinsurgency operations, and threatens Felix with retaliation for discounting their shared past. Running into Maria in public, Felix finds out from her that Tito’s plantation worker also witnessed the killing. Just when Felix thinks he’ll be able to solve the crime, a series of new killings throw more mysteries his way, making him fear for Maria’s safety.

A Short History of a Few Bad Things will resemble a light workout after the complex gymnastics of Lily. In fact, as studies of Classical Hollywood affirm, its genre consistency and singular vision are deceptive properties that could easily trip up less-prepared practitioners. The script of ASHFBT benefits from the contribution of a well-schooled outsider who took up residence in a regional center and participated in academic challenges, acquiring fluency in the native language along the way.[1] Since the Communist Party of the Philippines observes Maoist prescriptions, the protracted guerrilla war it has waged for way over half a century finds its way into the country’s most dispossessed rural territories, with counterinsurgency soldiers often opting to retire early due to the trauma of combat operations. ASHFBT leans on the tragic irony of the most idealistic members of the Philippine armed forces, who would otherwise have proved heroic fighters in the people’s war, being understandably regarded as no different from their less-scrupulous comrades by those who survived their offensive maneuvers. The apparently serial attacks that erupt midway in the narrative could thereby be read in this context, but the film grounds itself in the anxious, conscientious, yet outwardly impassive delivery of Victor Neri, far removed form his teen-idol appearances, redolent of Jaime de la Rosa in Gregorio Fernandez’s Cold War spy caper Kontrabando (Contraband, 1950), minus any hint of smarm. The performance assists in recuperating whatever cynicism might prevail in the material: good intentions will never guarantee positive outcomes, but the moral clarity they provide does make for powerful storytelling. In an interview with Bliss Cua Lim, Keith Deligero described Iskalawags, Lily, and ASHFBT as comprising “an incidental trilogy on the politics of languages,” and definite as ASHFBT‘s formal departure from the other two might seem, its counterfeit final titles ironically represent a more triumphant resolution than its actual closing credits.

Note

[1] Essential disclosure: Professor Paul Grant once interviewed me regarding canonization activities, a way in which this capsule review potentially catalyzes its own mise en abyme, for those inclined to reflect on reflexive activities. See Paul Douglas Grant, “The Transnational Pastime: An Interview with Joel David,” Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, vol. 14, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 135–145. In returning full circle to the topic of Cebuano movies, Grant is better known as co-author (with Misha Boris Anissimov) of Lilas: An Illustrated History of the Golden Ages of Cebuano Cinema (University of San Carlos Press, 2016). A related issue is that the term proposed by Grant and Anissimov in place of “regional cinema” is “vernacular cinema,” which Keith Deligero also strongly prefers inasmuch as, per Bliss Cua Lim, “it exposes the provincialism of Manila culture and the unacknowledged linguistic ethnocentrism that its long-unchallenged dominance fosters” (“Binisaya: Archival Power and Vernacular” chapter in The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema, Duke University Press, 2024). While radically ideal, however, such a semantic adjustment would be tantamount to a displacement of nearly all the other categories and premises in Philippine cinema, so it should first be applied in a comprehensive account of non-Manila film production.

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Samar

Language: English
Additional Languages: Filipino & Spanish
Year of Release: 1962
Director: George Montgomery
Screenwriters: Ferde Grofé Jr. & George Montgomery
Producers: MAM & Winchester

Cast: George Montgomery, Gilbert Roland, Ziva Rodann, Joan O’Brien, Nico Minardos, Mario Barri, Henry Feist, Tony Fortich, Johnny Cortez, Carmen Austin, Esperanza Garcia, Danilo Jurado, Luciano Lasam, Pedro Faustino, Joaquin Fajardo, Pamela Saunders, Rita Moreno

In 1870 in the Philippine Islands, “a colony of imperial Spain—ruled with an iron hand” (per an opening title), Dr. John David Saunders, an American, criticizes the occupation government and is banished to the prison island of Samar. He manages to befriend Col. Juan Sebastian Salazar, the penitentiary’s commandant, and learns of the former’s aspiration: to organize a trek to a difficult-to-access wilderness abundant in gold. Salazar conscripts the prisoners, with Saunders serving as his right-hand person. Unfortunately Capt. de Guzman, an old army nemesis, gets wind of Salazar’s plan and attempts to sabotage the wayfarers before they reach the promised land.

John Saxon had more film projects, Pam Grier was on the verge of recognition, Marlon Brando was already more famous, but George Montgomery’s involvement in Philippine film production held a few distinctions of its own. Seeking to boost his Hollywood standing after a stint as a leading man whose options had started to decline, he persuaded financiers to invest in a country where their funds could still yield A-scale results. His six projects, all except the first made during the 1960s, were way less than ten percent of his total output as film actor, but they were all modestly budgeted and color-processed; even more significantly, all except the first and last were directed by him. Interestingly, all films except the present one were set during or right after World War II. And unlike Saxon’s and Grier’s projects, which benefited from the participation of local creatives (in contrast with the technicians and performers whom Montgomery maintained), Montgomery’s films played fast and loose with historical and geographic realities. Samar’s false premises bookend its outlandish El Doradoish myth-making: not only does a mountain of gold not exist anywhere on the island, Samar never was a penal colony. Amazingly, even more egregious errors mark Montgomery’s other Philippine-set films.[1] He also did himself scant favors by being a less capable actor than any of his aforementioned American confreres. Nevertheless Samar still endures more than Montgomery’s other films, primarily because its pre-American setting enables him to provide an unsparing critique of foreign occupation, without necessarily looking forward to more benevolent rule by the next occupants, inasmuch as US interest in the islands was still a few decades in the future. His jokester persona also provides a refreshing contrast with the narrative’s actual lead, the dream-driven Spanish officer. And although the always-pernicious demonizing of indigenous tribespeople continued apace here, the practice tended to endure to the recent past in local genre works and is only now encountering pushback. But with the fiction’s sufficient distance from the Philippines’s neocolonial center of power, certain possibly unintended historical resonances unapologetically occupy center stage during their respective moments: the hanging of blood-drained rebels’ bodies from trees, for one thing, and the climactic celebratory pealing of a church bell (reminiscent of the anticolonial Philippine army’s commemoration in Samar, which peeved the Americans strongly enough to confiscate the church bells of the town in retaliation). We may also note in addition that Samar preceded Irving Lerner’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969) and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972), both better-received El Dorado tales set in the actual locales ravaged by Spanish explorers; for further, immediate, but perhaps futile, intertextual reference, the main character in Montgomery’s From Hell to Borneo (1964), still Philippine-set despite its title, welcomes companions to his property in Mindanao, with its name unannounced but displayed over its entrance: El Dorado, none other.

Note

[1] George Montgomery’s team may have been proceeding from an awareness of the Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm (hence the film’s more accurately situated German title, Der Rebell von Palawan); even then, the Iwahig setup was conceived and implemented during the American occupation. Montgomery’s first Philippine-set project was John Barnwell’s Huk! (1956), a propagandistic effort where he played a plantation owner in conflict with Communist guerrillas, whose organization the characters mispronounce to rhyme with “fuck.” His Pinas career started in earnest with The Steel Claw (1961), which he directed, but which was mostly set on a ship at sea, hence largely exempted from having to acknowledge historical events. In From Hell to Borneo (1964), his character travels from Manila to Mindanao to defend his island property from interlopers, but never really strays away from local territory despite the film’s title. In Guerrillas in Pink Lace (1964), he plays an army officer evading deployment by masquerading as a priest, but gets stranded on an island with a bevy of go-go dancers; their panic is occasioned by news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a few days earlier, despite the fact that the attack on the Philippines was historically scheduled the same day (reckoned in 1941 on the 8th of December instead of the 7th because of the International Date Line), delayed by only a few hours because of cloudy weather over the attack base in Taiwan. Montgomery’s final Philippine film, Warkill (1968), was directed by his regular scriptwriter, Ferde Grofé Jr. (son of the celebrated composer of Grand Canyon Suite), an overt and fairly astute combat film that’s only undermined by a comparatively less-distinguished use of film style compared to what Montgomery managed to brandish.

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Tubusin Mo ng Dugo

English Translation: Redeem with Blood
Alternate Title: Tubusin Mo ng Dugo … A Crime Story
Year of Release: 1988
Director: Pepe Marcos
Screenwriter: Jose N. Carreon
Producer: Bonanza Films

Cast: Rudy Fernandez, Marianne de la Riva, Debbie Miller, Princess Punzalan, Johnny Delgado, Eddie Garcia, Perla Bautista, Rez Cortez, Roy Alvarez, Ernie Forte, Zandro Zamora, Romy Diaz, Val Iglesias, Abbo dela Cruz, Ruben Rustia, Renato Robles, Conrad Poe, Estrella Kuenzler, Rene Hawkins, Usman Hassim, Renato del Prado, Bella Flores, Felix E. Dalay, Bert Vivar, Joey Padilla, Big Boy Gomez, Rommel Valdez, Naty Santiago, Luis Benedicto, Cheryl Garcia, Manny Doria, Emily Tuazon, Robert Miller, Jimmy Reyes, Bebeng Amora, Bert Vivar, Ernie David

Fresh out of prison, Carding participates in the small-time neighborhood rackets to which his upbringing accustomed him, with the help of his lesbian pal Bing Bong. He courts Elena but her father disapproves of her favoring a common hoodlum, while he also hooks up with Sally, a bargirl, whenever he’s in desperate need of quick cash. His mother asks her old friend Captain Torres to watch over him, but during another stint in jail, he’s able to escape when an inmate, Gordon, is freed by his homies. Counted as the newest member of the gang, Carding finds himself working on big-time heists but gets into scrapes with his mates because of their ironhearted code of conduct, necessitated by the crisis situations that they confront during their money-making activities.

Rudy Fernandez had at least one other celebrated bad-boy role, in Edgardo Vinarao’s Diskarte (Strategy, 2002), which aspired for ill-advised redemption by detouring midway into religious-revivalist folderol. Tubusin Mo ng Dugo was a far more impressive endeavor, nearly derailed at two junctures by the character’s tendency to force himself on women who resist his advances, even if they implicitly yield afterward. Such pigheadedness, aggravated by the hero’s otherwise charming insouciance, would be part of a cultural tradition that was already newly primitive during the time it was presented. The measure of TMD’s achievement may be collocated in the analog era, before computer graphics became available as a matter of course. From this strictly technical perspective, nothing else during its time came close; even the deplorable negligence it suffered due to inadequate recognition mechanisms barely impinges on its skills display, inasmuch as it proceeds from a satirical approach rarely attempted in the genre. It also immensely benefits from the successful realization of an ambitious thematic scheme, wherein the psychological stress that inheres in outlaw activities not only grows with the organization but also turns inward, resulting in (occasionally well-founded) paranoia over one’s allies and in terrifying internecine conflict. In certain respects, TMD turns out to be as much of its era as, say, Lino Brocka’s Maynila (1975), and likewise deserves its own share of appreciation amid acknowledgment of its unfortunate shortcomings, if a decent print can still be salvaged anywhere.

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Kahit Pader Gigibain Ko

English Translation: I Will Even Tear Down Walls
Year of Release: 1998
Director: Joey del Rosario
Screenwriters: Humilde “Meek” Roxas & Joey del Rosario
Producers: RS Productions & Regal Films

Cast: Phillip Salvador, Rosanna Roces, Elizabeth Oropesa, Eddie Gutierrez, Richard Bonnin, Dindo Arroyo, Alona Amor, Bob Soler, Susan Galang, Gamaliel Viray, Ernie Zarate, Eric Francisco, Mon Confiado, Denver Razon, Jetro Castro, Ric Arellano, Bernard Fabiosa, Cris Daluz, Joey Sarmiento, Jec Chaves, Rona Rivera

Former sex worker Sandy Galang dresses in a habit and makes a killing begging for alms with real nuns. Members of a rebel group attempt to kidnap her but she is rescued by Captain Roman and his team. Sandy confesses that she is on the run from Senator Madrigal, whom she witnessed and recorded murdering a cabinet secretary. Roman brings Sandy to his superior to narrate her story, but Madrigal’s henchmen are able to track them down wherever they go. Roman contacts Senator de Joya, an opponent of Madrigal, to get more reliable assistance.

Joey del Rosario cut his teeth on Fernando Poe Jr.’s series of blockbusters in the 1980s, while Phillip Salvador started a bit earlier with the film and theater projects of Lino Brocka, but persisted in the action genre after his mentor’s death. The final element in the mix was Philippine cinema’s so-far last sex star, Rosanna Roces, an atavistic beauty justifiably famed for her startling candor and raunchy humor. Kahit Pader Gigibain Ko hangs its narrative premise on her unique precocity, complemented by her real-life backstory of professional sex work. After an opening flashback following a suspense detour halfheartedly ascribed to political rebels, the narrative settles into its standard series of silly chases and increasingly impressive shootouts, punctuated by its characters’ articulations of their plans and motives, plus the requisite makeout scene between the two leads. The resolution, whereby national-scale electoral politics is cleansed by its own principled players, would be problematic in any serious context, but KPGK laces (or may we say poisons) its proceedings with the same camp-sensationalist treatment, leaving the one definite conclusion we can make: that the undertaking was essentially a tribute to and update of the romantic comedies that solidified the respective star statures of FPJ and Susan Roces, bequeathing a confection that can be occasionally snacked on through the then-forthcoming millennium.

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Totoy Buang: Mad Killer ng Maynila

English Translation: Totoy the Lunatic: Mad Killer of Manila
Year of Release: 1992
Director: J. Erastheo Navoa
Screenwriter: Humilde “Meek” Roxas
Producer: OctoArts Films

Cast: John Regala, Mark Gil, Aurora Sevilla, Rina Reyes, Francis Magalona, Bob Soler, Sharmaine Arnaiz, Kevin Delgado, Zandro Zamora, Daria Ramirez, Howard Zaleta, Lollie Mara, Romy Diaz, Danny Labra, Nonong de Andres, Johnny Vicar, Josie Tagle, Cathy Sablan, Lorena Mendez

The son of a police officer, Totoy sees his father respected by the community but experiences abusive treatment, also extended to his mother when she tries to intervene for his sake. His mother decides to flee with him but the father’s able to stop Totoy from joining her. Now completely at his father’s mercy, Totoy suffers not just physical battering but also sexual assault. His psychological equilibrium suffers permanent damage even though his body ultimately heals: he slays his father and somehow manages to get away with the crime, leading a life of apparent working-class normality—until he encounters other instances of excessive cruelty, even when committed against other people. He becomes a person of interest when several murder victims are straitjacketed in the same way his father used to torture him.

Totoy Buang will probably be one of the most extreme samples of genre films in the Philippines. You can set out to catalogue its shortcomings and your checklist will be full, even in terms of the selling point it became known for: the presence of lead actor John Regala, who by this time had lost whatever physical sightliness he started out with. The genre’s populist predisposition, however, helps tide it over several near-disasters, including a then-standard flirtation with religious revivalism. The main character is also furnished with complex female characters (his survivalist mother, a privileged girlfriend, and a gangland insider) as well as with an upright police officer, the kind of person his father never was, who shares Totoy’s outrage when he learns about a white-slavery racket that preys on homeless children. These plot elements ensure that Regala’s uniquely inspired anarchic delivery remains rooted in a working-class perspective marginal enough to occasionally make anyone sufficiently sympathetic with his circumstances wonder whether he might be the sane one after all. Actors understandably regard the performance of madness as an opportunity to showboat their store of skills and technique; Regala apparently drew from the reality he was intimately familiar with, which tragically overcame him in the end.

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