Movie review: Restraint in 'Shake Rattle and Roll 14'

The "Shake Rattle and Roll" franchise has everything going against it. It is, after all on its 14th installment, has been part of the Metro Manila Film Festival roster year in, year out, and without a doubt has had the worst installments. The Christmas tree that comes alive was a low point, really. So was that one with a creature in the MRT. 

 

But I gave "SRR 13" a chance to redeem itself last year, as a matter of seeing the names of Chris Martinez, Jerrald Tarrog, and Richard Somes as directors for each episode. I was not disappointed, flaws and all. This year it seemed like steps back, having Chito Roño do “Shake Rattle and Roll 14,” he whose body of work is filled with utterly disappointing horror films. 

 

Ah, but the gift of "SRR," you realize, is that it happens in these short episodes. And it seems that Roño does better in these bite-size portions. Or maybe he was just lucky: the scripts for the episodes were interesting enough, one better than the rest, but all unexpectedly grounded in contemporaneity, premised on an amount of familiarity, and all ending as succinctly as each could. This is not to say this was as great as last year’s installment. But it certainly was a surprise to have the stories resonate some.

 

A problem with time

 

Written by Ricky Lee, “Pamana” is the story of four cousins about to inherit money from a distant uncle, one who died angry because he was neglected. A writer of Pinoy horror komiks, he left behind an unexplained twofold catch to his inheritance: his heirs have to keep a portrait each of his horror characters, and all of them need to wait a month. The story quickly unfolds, revealing how that wait will be about those horror characters coming to life, one after the other, depending on who exactly cared less for the uncle and his work. 

 

Which is to say that what you expect will happen is what actually does, and there isn’t a whole lot of surprise to be had here. It didn’t help that these komiks characters are of a different era altogether, and it was difficult not to laugh at the vampire for example, coming out of the coffin the way he did; neither was there a lot of fear to be had over the white lady playing the piano, or the woman who was to kill you with her hair. The one komiks character that worked, and probably because it is unfamiliar, was Buboy, Ang Munting Diablo, which had plenty to do with Rain Papa’s portrayal of what seemed to be mere mischief and not, well, absolute diabolical boy.

 

It was cuteness really that was a surprise with Buboy, but too it might be an amount of cuteness that this episode wanted to work with. What with the three feuding heirs portrayed by Janice de Belen, Arlene Muhlach, and Herbert Bautista, dressed in 80s wear, because as it turns out we were in that time for this episode. That is to say it wasn’t obvious why we needed to be there, and what that element of the past added to the story. Other than these heirs taking jabs at each others’ failed careers as child stars, of course, and well the sheen of sepia over the whole episode. The truth is, if this was in the 80s, then those local comics characters wouldn’t be old hat yet. But for an audience in the year 2012, it could only mean being removed twice from this story. 

 

The future's possibilities

 

Roy Iglesias’ “Unwanted” is the last episode in this "SRR" installment, its paean to the future, or how it might begin to happen as far as an end-to-the-world scenario goes. So yes there are aliens, and yes the creatures looked too … “Men In Black” for comfort, and the conclusion of starting the new civilization is as b-movie as we might get. 

 

Thankfully, what this film has more of is the narrative of the present as bound to that end, and how we come to navigate the space we are left with and within. At the center of the story are Hank (Vhong Navarro) and Kate (Lovi Poe), who have just found out they are pregnant, and are in distress. They end up at a mall, and while Kate cries in the ladies room and is comforted by a nurse also passing through, Hank is witness to a criminal being accosted by mall security, as he returns to a flower shop for a gift he’s ordered. Those details are important because these are the people who Hank and Kate encounter as they wake up two days after an explosion does the mall in.

 

The wonder of this film happens then, when you find that the mall you were shown in the beginning, is still exactly that same mall in the throes of destruction. As such what becomes surprising and scary is what we imagine to be the dead now, the people we had just seen alive and well in the first 20 minutes of the film. And as Kate and Hank, and the small posse of survivors, navigate the devastated mall it would be the inability to imagine what is out there that’s eaten half the nurse, for example, that works at heightening the fear.

 

Until of course you see the first of the MIB-wannabe alien animals that are out to electrocute people and turn them into aliens, which you discover as you find a UFO and alien creature in one of the parking lots. Was it too difficult to come up with an end-of-the-world scenario that doesn’t take from elsewhere? Because having the end-of-the-world happen over at Mall of Asia is an inspired statement that rocks. 

 

The one that was fantastic

 

Rody Vera’s “Lost Command” was by far the best episode here, and probably one of the better stories told in the year’s MMFF. Daring to tell a military story at a time when it is but a thing of the past, Vera’s story is spectacularly scary, and yes, we can start with that premise of machismo that is intrinsic to warfare. A battalion of soldiers is in enemy territory, trying to find the culprits behind a series of vigilante killings. Soon enough half the soldiers are gone and reappear as zombie soldiers; what’s left of the battalion imagines that they can be saved. 

 

Instead they are brought across the river and deeper into the narrative of these soldiers gone rogue. They are led to a missing military officer, the one known as berdugo, the one who had control over this side of the forest, zombie-laden as it was. He was talking to the last soldier standing, Sergeant Martin Barrientos (Dennis Trillo), and the unraveling is one that is layered with notions of military abuse, if not the monsters in all of us. 

 

The telling of this story is quick, the use of technology apt. There is nothing over the top here, as there is a sinking feeling that they will all just die. As it turns out, nothing is scarier than the idea that there is no way out. The acting could’ve been better, where it was difficult to forget this was Trillo in the lead, and it didn’t help him any that Paulo Avelino (as Corporal Upaon) was actually doing the fear and anger combo quite well. Rommel Padilla as their superior officer turned zombie could give all these younger actors a run for their acting money. 

 

Director's cut? 

 

Suffice it to say that the hand of Roño as director is in this film, if not all over the place, given those alien creatures and 80s throwback, the un-scary vampires and white ladies. Thankfully the writing of these stories, the believable dialogue and fictional relationships, balanced out the false shine and shimmer of technologically enhanced creatures. Meanwhile, I stepped out of the theater with those zombie soldiers in my head. —KG, GMA News

 

Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.