The Road

An off-beat and gripping Filipino ghost tale.

It is essentially a sort of Pinoy Norman Bates story told in retrospective spanning two decades, with heavy amount of supernatural and sufficiently creepy elements thrown in for a good reason.

The yarn is simply structured and easy to follow. The chain of events revolving around the stark consequences of abused childhood experience is pretty dark and disturbing. Overall, in my opinion, the film has balanced mix of mystery, horror, drama ... and comedy.

Comedy? Well, I must be kidding, but I count one particular instance, which may be regarded, to certain extent, as a kind of comic relief in the midst of mostly depressive storyline: a redundant exposure of excessive puke masses ejected on the floor wasn't a fun part unless accompanied by the mother's self-mocking chant. Yum!

The direction perhaps is too heavy-handed at times with superfluous horrific clichés methodically stuck on one another, and the conclusion is somewhat rushed and improbable. But hey, the horror genre is rarely and less than anything else associated with scientifically correct, 100% logical, polished, visually stunning and accomplished piece of art.

Not bad at all.

A Filipino horror crime thriller that blurs the boundary between slasher killer and the supernatural subgenres. Directed and co-written by Yam Laranas. The two lead stars were Carmina Villarreal and Marvin Agustin.

The movie unfolds in three parts going backwards in time.

It opens in 2008, with the promotion of a cop, who is besieged by a woman to help find her two young daughters, who vanished 10 years earlier, along with a boy. The cop's commander urges him to solve the case.

The story flashes back to 1998, and then 1988, as it unravels who is doing what to whom - and why.

In Part I, three adolescents get lost on a deserted country road and encounter a driverless car and apparitions including that of a bloodied woman with a plastic bag tied around her head, a motif that Is repeated throughout.

In Part II, the two lost girls we are told about in Part I, break down on the same road, and are lured into sequestration by a passing country boy. The boy locks them up in separate rooms in a dilapidated house, chaining one of them up, and mercilessly beating up the second.

Part III explores the boy's childhood, as he is brought up in isolation by a disturbed mother who psychologically and physically abuses him, and a suicidal religious father unable to protect his son.

At the very end of the movie, the link between the cop and the boy, is revealed.

My major issue with the movie is Part I, where after the cop promotion ceremony, the screen is plunged into around 25 minutes of gloomy foggy darkness of an unlit country road, with apparitions of bloodied girls and driverless cars popping up here and there. I struggled to make sense of who is whom, and what is truly happening and why, as the scenes abruptly shift from long shots to close-ups, from scene to scene, from angle to angle. Moreover, the darkness made it difficult to easily pinpoint the film's subgenre; i.e. Killer slasher horror vs supernatural horror. Better editing could have helped. The moviegoer shouldn't be asked to struggle with determining a subgenre.

It is only when Part I comes to a close that the screen lightens up and the moviegoer can sit back and follow events with minimal confusion.

This film by Yam Laranas ("The Echo") is divided into three segments. The first story concerns three young teenagers who drive down a desolate road at night, not knowing that it is haunted. This is a very cool, lengthy sequence with some nasty looking ghouls. The atmosphere is dense and the scare tactics are nicely crafted. The next two stories are flashbacks that show the historical acts of violence that are connected to the hauntings. The style here feels like a modern French horror film. It's very professional, with great photography, very eerie scoring, and solid performances. No humor or stupid one-liners to be found here. The deliberate pacing and gloomy mood will likely wear viewers down, which is a trait that I find to be a very positive thing. I strongly recommend this.

On a side note, I find it somewhat annoying that this film has such a low IMDb rating and such negative reviews. In a day and age where crap like "The House of the Devil" (2009) and "Insidious" (2010) are praised and hyped as new genre classics, I guess I shouldn't be surprised when a genuinely strong horror film like "The Road" (2011) is derided and criticized for being "too slow." Perhaps a few dozen cheap jump scares or some graphic violence would have sufficed to keep our attention deficient audiences awake. For goodness sakes, "Rob Zombie's Halloween" is currently rated higher than "The Road."

Yeah . . . okay.

I guess I have to point out something positive about the growing numbers of foreigners in our land, in that the numbers will justify cinema from their home country to be viable for big screen outings here. I get my fair share of the latest blockbuster movies from India given that it's one of the major cultural make up in Singapore already, then there's the Thai, Korean and Japanese flicks that not only cater to foreigners residing here, but to its legion of fans from time to time. And with films from ASEAN from The Raid to The Collector gaining prominence everywhere, it's only time to add Philippine Cinema to the list.

It's true that indie or art-house films from the Philippines do make it to film festivals here, but for the mass market audience, The Road is perhaps one of the earliest to hit commercial cinemas here in a long while, as far as my memory serves. And what better way than for a horror film to try and open up the doors, one that features an ensemble cast of stars with idol looks to spark an interest, besides providing Filipinos here with something from home. But as with most horror films around the region, it's usually touch and go basis, and The Road, boasted for getting itself a US distribution, it's somewhat of a roller coaster ride with its fair share of creepy moments, ultimately done in via a runtime that artificially sustained a thin plot.

Written and directed by Yam Laranas, The Road is actually made up of three story arcs each set in a different time line separated by a decade each, and linking them is the titular road along which something strange and macabre even that had happened in a dilapidated house found along it, together with an abandoned car. The opening shot, pardon the pun, set the stage for an epic mystery to be unravelled, with the stage set for a hot shot cop Luis (TJ Trinidad), decorated with a medal for his string of successful case closures, to prove himself in the series of events that follow.

In the first arc, three friends go out for an illegal joyride, making a detour into The Road to avoid a police roadblock, and in what would be a case of bad luck, encounter ghouls that seem to be stuck in groundhog day fashion, repetitive hauntings of the trio. Things don't really happen with much logic here, and the strength of friendship amongst the trio got rather telling when it becomes every man (and woman) for him/herself. So much for solidarity when the poop hits the fan. This arc was more teenage drama before the effects and make up crew shifted gears and made it their own toward the end.

The second arc tried to become a mini outing along the torture porn genre, but unfortunately with the more violent offering in practically every film in the genre, this arc turned out to be rather tame, with a man inexplicably hammering his victims, two sisters, away without remorse or reason, making it a battle for survival against complete madness. It's also responsible for some interest to wane, as the story here proved to be one of the weakest, and overstayed its welcome through a series of scenes that dragged out quite unnecessarily. We know who's alive and who's not from the earlier arc, and the narrative really took its time to get there.

But thankfully, the redeeming factor came from the third act. While it didn't offer anything we don't know about nor new in the narrative sense with similar themes being explored before in other films, and tosses up some more questions than answers, it is the actors here delivering better performances from the rest, and a story that's set against a dysfunctional family, that showed of Laranas' strength in storytelling. The narrative got creepier as it went along, with practical effects enhancing moments within that will make your hair genuinely stand on ends. By now you'd realize that Laranas rarely dips into the oft used box of the same old techniques used to scare audiences with quick jump cuts and edits, preferring to let the camera take its time in revealing presence that's spot on in creating both suspense, and eerie atmosphere.

The Road plays on the gimmick of having a horror film told from three expanded story arcs with common characters linking them all together, and in essence scores in its effort. However, horror film fans with a penchant for the same old boo scare tactics dished out by filmmakers may find this a little bit sterile. and not offering that adrenaline rush each time a scare comes on. For those who wish to explore what horror and their films mean to friends from the region.

"The Road" tells the story of violent occurrences on a stretch of an abandoned road over a timespan of 20 years. It is divided in 3 Chapters, each then years apart. The chapters are interconnected, the whole story unfolding with the third episode. The storyline moves back in time - it therefore starts with the most recent occurrence in 2008 and depicts then the incident of 1998. Finally it connects the lose strands left by the two previous episodes by showing us what happened in 1988.

Good things first: the sonic ambiance, the score if you like, is great. It pushes expectations right from the start. Bad thing : it is utterly wasted on this film. I don't want to go deep into the tremendous holes in the storyline, illogical behavior all around and very cheap and sententious depiction of the development of a psychological illness. It's enough that you know that these are annoyingly obvious even for a genre that thrives on them. The real pain of the movie is the acting. The first two chapters have a cast from the Children's Hospital of the Terminally Talentless! The script lets 16 year olds act like toddlers. The dialogs are horrible. They are like an audio summary for the blind: never telling more than the absolute obvious.

While I do think it refreshing if a horror movie for once doesn't exploit violence and gore, this movie is not giving a valuable solution - I have seen more violent fisticuffs in Stan&Laurel movies. The uneasy avoidance of graphic violence while actually implying its existence, leads to ridiculous scenes - like a girl bleeding from a head wound apparently because she fell on a mattress.

There is no special twist. It is a well used recipe in filmmaking to divide a movie in several chapters that intertwine and all get connected in the end. This was professionally executed, but without major surprises. The movie in itself is neither scary nor startling or revealing. It develops some more depth with the third chapter, which is so much better than the others that it seems to be from a different director entirely. But too little, too late.

3 Stars because sound and cinematography deserve recognition.