Director: Vincent Soberano
Release date: 2019
Contains spoilers
This is another aswang movie to come out of the Philippines, though the film’s country of origin is the USA and it was recorded in English rather than Tagalog. Rather than embrace horror this is very much an action film and whilst the Aswang (or hybrids – I’ll get to that) look similar to some flicks we don’t actually see anything particularly vampiric.
It starts with a comic book as the opening credits roll and then a voiceover tells the viewer about battles between humans and aswang, the latter led by an Aswang Queen. The humans were represented by Section One, a group of soldiers and mercenaries, and they captured the Queen. They took her blood but the Queen was killed and one of the commanders injected himself with her blood and became a hybrid of human and aswang. Where we are now is a place where it is the hybrids that are being hunted.
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| Sarah Chang as Gabriella |
We move to Gabriella (Sarah Chang), who is in the forests. Nearby, on an abandoned, decrepit bus, a girl cries and she is approached by the hybrid Gundra (Mekael Turner). Gabriella gets to the bus, they fight and he, moving at astounding speeds, throws her out of a window and… well he buggers off, it seems. This is where we get a weakness, in that things kind of happen without good explanation or being referenced, even. Later we do hear that they are keeping Gabriella alive but we’ve already had the suspension of disbelief damaged.
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| Mekael Turner as Gundra |
Gabriella is actually hunting down Naga (Temujin Shirzada), as he killed her husband and child when she was a cop, Gundra is more a ways and means. She manages to track Gundra down again and takes a shot with a projectile that blows up something he’s stood on. She is thrown by the explosion, he seems to have totally escaped the explosion and stands over her. After a family exposition dream sequence she awakens in a bed, where hunters Kali (Roxanne Barcelo) and Max (Ian Ignacio) have taken her… again we don’t know why her enemy didn’t finish her off.
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| aswang |
So, she is at a training camp and after she passes the news on that Naga is back, with Gundra, it is decided that they will have to take the fight proactively to them and need the hunters Monte (Monsour Del Rosario) and Bolo (Vincent Soberano), who is a hybrid himself and seems to inject hybrid blood. The film then essentially has them raid a hybrid encampment using guns at first and then hand to hand combat (as guns don’t work – so the one’s they took out with guns were presumably human?). The action works well but there is a betrayal telegraphed, which was obvious as the character was the only one available to be the betrayer and the return of a family member that had no emotional impact.
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| the queen |
This is the issue with the film, the dialogue delivery was wooden and the narrative fairly broken, so there was no emotional attachment to the characters. The story was poorly constructed but the action lifts it up that bit. There isn’t much else to say for this one – the action with more careful plotting and decent delivery (in the actors’ first language) would have left us with an interesting action flick. As stands, 3 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Amazon US
On Demand @ Amazon UK
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