I had the opportunity to sit down and watch the 2023 Filipino horror movie "Ang Mga Kaibigan Ni Mama Susan" (aka "Mama Susan's Friends") here in 2025. Sure, I had never heard about the movie, and thus didn't know what I was in for. But it being a horror movie was essentially all the persuasion I needed to give the movie a chance.
Writer Bob Ong put together a somewhat bland and mundane script. Running at nearly 2 hours, nothing much of any interest had happened at 60 minutes into the playtime, and it was getting a dull experience sitting through this, hoping something exciting or scary would happen.
Given my limited exposure to the Filipino cinema then I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie. But I will say that the acting performances were good, just a shame that they didn't have a more thrilling and entertaining script to bring to life on the screen.
Visually then the movie was okay. It was a fairly low-key special effects movie, but it worked out nicely enough, as the effects were done to emphasize the situations in the movie, and not to impress the audience visually.
Maybe someone native to the Philippines would enjoy "Ang Mga Kaibigan Ni Mama Susan" more than I did.
Given my love of Asian horror cinema, I have to say that director Chito S. Roño's 2023 movie "Ang Mga Kaibigan Ni Mama Susan" wasn't particularly noteworthy. There are far more entertaining and scary movies out there in the Asian cinema. And this was not even close to some of the more enjoyable of Filipino horror movies out there.
Would I recommend you to sit down and watch "Ang Mga Kaibigan Ni Mama Susan"? No, not really. The movie just simply didn't have anything thrilling or scary to offer, aside from a rather slow paced narrative where nothing much happened.
And running at 113 minutes, the movie could have seriously benefitted from a more round-handed trim in the editing room, to cut away some of the all the pointless fillers that prolonged the runtime of the movie.
My rating of director Chito S. Roño's 2023 movie "Ang Mga Kaibigan Ni Mama Susan" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.
