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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 crave, 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 maintaing 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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Tandem

Year of Release: 2015
Director: King Palisoc
Screenwriter: Zig Marasigan
Based on an original story by Mikhail Red
Producers: Tuko Film Productions, Buchi Boy Films, Quantum Films

Cast: JM de Guzman, Nico Antonio, Rochelle Pangilinan, Elora Españo, Alan Paule, Simon Ibarra, Paolo O’Hara, Dennis Marasigan, Joel Saracho, Karl Medina, BJ Forbes, Bongjon Jose, Marga Zaylo, Melissa Ramos, Carla del Rosario, Maja del Rosario, Dennis Corteza, Jenn Romano, Ysabel Yuzon, Prince, Grace de Luna

Roman commits snatch thefts with his younger brother Rex by working (though not riding) in tandem on their respective motorcycles. As an ex-convict, Roman feels protective toward his brother and concerned for his pregnant wife, although he also once had a fling with Rex’s current sex-working girlfriend. Rex however is too compulsive and reckless, as Roman once was. One of their attempts, caught on a security camera, incites an exchange of gunfire between Rex and a security guard. Alba, the corrupt police officer who provides protection for Roman, warns the latter about his brother-partner. The brothers then plan one last lucrative heist with an accomplice, where they pounce on the delivery agent of a construction company and flee with the bag that contains personnel salary. But the understanding that a failed operation will place them at the mercy of Alba drives a wedge between them.

The misconception that art films are antigenre by definition fortunately didn’t endure to the present, except for miseducated, often privileged products of the country’s communication schools. Unfortunately, the acknowledgment of the universal preponderance of genre principles was unsurprisingly transmuted by influential critics demonizing the socially oriented films that were created primarily for foreign filmfest exhibition. It took a concerted ploy among genuinely progressive commentators to point out that the desire for overseas validation was itself the problem—a critique that implicitly challenged the original film critics circle’s tendency to recognize foreign-exhibited films, obviously to suggest a parallel between the members and the foreign evaluators. The term used to downgrade social-problem films was “poverty porn,” a problematic throwback to the film-educated preference for genres that were not considered low and therefore dismissible (better designated by feminist critics as body genres, since these incited physical responses in their viewers; pornography itself has become one of the most productive areas of genre study since the late twentieth century). Tandem may be regarded as one of the numerous releases designated as worthy but trafficking in so-called poverty porn. Enough temporal distance ought to enable us to appreciate its careful appropriation of the semiotics of social significance even as it refuses to relinquish its valuation of the complexities and ambiguities of well-observed plot and character, with an ironic resolution that can only be fairly described as heartrending in its cold-bloodedness. The fact that the film was exhibited on the eve of the inauguration of a regime that made riding-in-tandem fashionable not for robbery, but for assassination, should alert the country’s commentators to their failure to read warning signs prominently presented in popular culture.

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Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw

English Translation: My World Is You
Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, Cebuano
Year of Release: 1965 / B&W
Director: Efren Reyes
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
From a story by Efren Reyes
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Susan Roces, Oscar Keesee, Lito Anzures, Victor Bravo, Pablo Virtuoso, Dencio Padilla, Vic Varrion, Mario Escudero, Rudy Meyer, Philip Coo, Marilou Murray, Esther Vizconde, Romy Nario, Resty Sandel, Angelo Buenaventura.

At the Manila Yacht Club, Don Larrazabal has asked his men to lock his daughter Vicky in the cabin of his vessel, to take her away from Daniel, the man she wants to marry. When they arrive at Matabungkay Beach in Batangas, however, they remain unaware that she jumped overboard and swam to shore. She finds a dilapidated cargo truck driven by Roman, who has stopped for lunch with his two employees. She steals their food and boards the open-air cargo section. Roman and his companions think that one of them has been sneezing, but when they stop they discover Vicky. She pleads with them to take her to Baguio, offering to help in their work and even drive the truck herself. Since her clothes are wet, they offer her Roman’s spare clothes while Roman later says he can provide her with work if she needs it. When her father and his men pass by in their car, the truck occupants hide her and deny they’ve seen her. But when the father finds out that Daniel has gone to Baguio, he and his men proceed to the summer capital, believing they might find Vicky there.

Male actors who became directors were such a guarantee of film quality that one or two overlooked names would not be such a big deal. (In a satisfying twist of fate, the country’s last excellent actor-director was a woman, Laurice Guillen.) As a performer, Efren Reyes also lingered in the shadow of Gerardo de Leon, another actor-director. Fortunately he made a number of films for yet another actor-director, Fernando Poe Jr., whose most significant contribution was … as producer. FPJ spent a major portion of his fortune on maintaining prints of his films, even those produced by others. He may have been artistically limited as a consequence of this commitment, but the rewards—the best video transfers of any official distributor in Philippine cinema, not to mention occasionally excellent titles not stored at the Singapore (now Asian) Film Archive, by directors who would have otherwise remained unrepresented—are available for anyone with a passing interest in local pop culture. Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw acquired a patina of nostalgia for its distinction of being the first film where FPJ teamed up with Susan Roces, over a decade since their emergence as major stars of competing First Golden Age studios, when their respective personas were already fully formed. Not surprisingly, these factors, alongside Poe’s and Roces’s equally matched levels of charm and ability, enable ADKI to sustain more strongly than most other first-time star teamups. The film’s success is evidenced in several more of their costarred projects over the next couple of decades as the most enduring lead duo in local cinema, although Roces’s tradition-enforced inactivity after her marriage to Poe must be counted as a regrettable loss, considering the superiority of her skills set relative to most of her star-level contemporaries. Their status as film royalty also contributed to a certain anxiety over the presumably dismissive response to their first project together: subsequent Roces-Poe movies were marked by a striving for allegorical serviceability, seemingly apologetic over the excessive pleasures provided by ADKI, which was supposedly further compromised by several moments reminiscent of its obvious source of inspiration, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). Yet ADKI does not aim to surpass the Capra, providing instead a credibly indigenous counterpart. It elects to resolve as an open tribute to another local film, outstanding but now lost: Cesar Amigo’s Sa Atin ang Daigdig (The World Is Ours, 1963)[1]—proof that it had not just its heart in the right place, but also its feet on the right turf.

Note

[1] Spoiler alert: Both Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw and Sa Atin ang Daigdig function as romantic comedies; the former is expanded by scope and locale in constituting for the most part a road trip, but the latter manages to focus more effectively on class differences. One might remark that the references to It Happened One Night diffuse the concentration of ADKI, but then again, social commentary is not its primary purpose. The parallels with SAD might be suggested by the commonality of the Filipino word for “world” in their titles, but the ending of ADKI dispels any doubt when it mounts a variation on the climax of SAD, where the central pair, played by Robert Arevalo and Nida Blanca, arrive at an understanding of their possibly irresolvable differences and the less-privileged Blanca character walks away from Arevalo, toward the camera; when Arevalo realizes he wishes to work out their relationship and calls to her, she continues advancing but this time with a knowing smile as he starts running, upon which the film ends. Film critic and scriptwriter (and National Artist for Theater and Literature) Rolando S. Tinio went on record to describe SAD as the best Filipino film he had ever seen, circa the early 1980s; I had included it as one of two black-and-white titles, along with Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa (1958), in my top-ten canon—see Joel David and Melanie Joy C. Garduño, “The Ten Best Filipino Films Ever Made,” National Midweek (July 4, 1990), pp. 125–36, rpt. in Fields of Vision: The Digital Edition (Amauteurish Publishing, 2014), posted online. A local article that interrogates instances of film appropriations is “Imitation and Indigenization in Melodramas in the Late 1950s,” Huwaran/Hulmahan Atbp.: The Film Writings of Johven Velasco (University of the Philippines Press, 2009), pp. 113–24. For a useful recent discussion that teases out the complexities of cross-cultural appropriation from relatively marginal locales to the center, see Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s “From Porcelain to Chips: A Genealogy of Global Technology and Capitalism,” Everyday Analysis (August 29, 2025), posted online.

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Here Comes the Bride

Additional Languages: Spanish, Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2010
Director & Screenwriter: Chris Martinez
Producers: Star Cinema, OctoArts Films, Quantum Films

Cast: Eugene Domingo, John Lapus, Tuesday Vargas, Angelica Panganiban, Cherry Pie Picache, Tom Rodriguez, Kim Atienza, Cai Cortez, Johnny Revilla, Bart Guingona, Ricky Rivero, Ricci Chan, Neil Ryan Sese, Ayen Munji-Laurel, Madeleine Nicolas, Timothy Chan, Nico Antonio, Cecil Paz, Ernie Forte, Malou Crisologo, Tess Antonio, Raul Vasquez, Eric Espiritu, Anthony de Guzman, Peaches Beleno, Raquel Donila, Tess de Guman, Mitch Dantes, Sammer Concepcion, Kim Buranday, Kevin Zaldariaga, John Carl Daluz, Arianna Jarmel P. Panganiban, Jeio Navel Suarez, Mark Anthony Saycon, The Bien Rivera Group

A wedding couple and the members of their party proceed to a beach resort in Rizal Province, where the ceremony will be held. People in five cars, alone or with their companions, are confronting crises of varying degrees. When they pass over Magnetic Hill, a solar eclipse takes place and their vehicles are involved in a chain collision. After the accident, a person in each of the cars notices unusual behavior, duly affecting everyone around them. A lawyer behaves like the prudish bride, eager to get to “her” wedding and worrying her best friend, the bride’s mother; a gay hairdresser turns into an elderly Spanish-speaking casanova, messing up a bridesmaid’s makeup but compensating by providing her with hot sex; a rustic nanny bamboozled by the family who employs her turns dominative and argues for her legal rights as well as those of others; a retired tycoon starts speaking like a naïve bumpkin and is delighted by the discovery of easy access to money; the prudish bride-to-be suddenly revels in her youth and beauty, changes into provocative clothes so she can flirt with hunks on the beach, and insists on a premarital romp with her flabbergasted fiance. The bride-in-the-lawyer’s body, who’s prevented from attending her own wedding, figures out that the five of them have exchanged personalities; they approach a paranormal expert, who informs them that the convergence of the accident along with the solar eclipse on Magnetic Hill might have been responsible for their alterations, but that if they have to replicate the incident in order to restore their original personalities, they will have to await the next solar eclipse two years from the present.

The high-concept comedy is such a rarity in Philippine pop culture that the qualified achievement of such an undertaking would be preferable to its total absence. Here Comes the Bride takes the further risk of elevating the attempt to a grand scale, premised on the entertainment skills promised by a larger-than-usual cast proceeding from various distinctive types, each one moving to personas far different from the one they started out with. All the actors have had sufficient training in the roles they embody, plus additional experience in one or more of the performing-arts venues of theater, TV, and/or film, honing their HCB role-playing further through preproduction exercises. The one exception is the semi-central role of the bride: as portrayed by Angelica Panganiban, she starts out opposed to her real-life identity of a bubbly, adventurous, occasionally outrageous lass, but transitions to an even more extreme version of her public personality, thus inadvertently though momentarily upstaging the rest of the cast. The measure of the self-awareness of HCB’s creatives lies in their figuring out how the narrative’s dynamic should play out. Since the setup’s complication lies first in tracking the transformation of each character before they figure out the underlying cause of the phenomenon, the process of awaiting the next paranormal opportunity and setting themselves up in order to replicate the opening multivehicular pileup takes on a technical (actually technological) aura. An attempt at a last-minute mixup, with the dislodged personalities winding up in still the wrong bodies, provides the standard race-against-time suspense prior to the requisite happy ending. Its arrival signifies as much the closure of the present plotline as the opening up of a challenge to tackle more high-concept projects with equal or greater ambition, matched with all the preparatory ability our collection of talents can muster.

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