The Road (2012)

A top-drawer script can be ruined by a poor director but no amount of top-drawer direction can improve a rotten script - I want my one-hundred-and-ten minutes back from this schmutz used to cover the porn hidden under the socks. This epic-fail is almost better than I could create in a weekend with some teenagers, an outline and a handy-cam with broken steady-shot because if it were well trimmed and tightly cut there would only be enough story to fill a quarter-hour. The plot is… is a decorated rogue cop who…, who…, oh yeah, there's no plot. The open-caption narrative subtitling in English throughout distracts even native Tagalog viewers, because the subtitling delivers the lines better than the actors. Schizophrenic hallucination transference (I must assume,) and the supernatural aren't enough undelivered explanation to fill the Kaybiang Tunnel sized plot-holes in this intentionally confusing yawner best screened in a theater for an air-conditioned nap. It's too easy to fall asleep trying to watch this pablum schlok, but there is no plot to miss should you do, it put the focus-puller to sleep over and over again. Low budget is no excuse for not employing a competent continuity script-girl, but apparently the fuzzy forms which vanish and re-appear among scene cuts and frame edges is. A tip to the viewer resulting from four frustrated attempts at genuinely trying to stay awake and stick with it - I was finally able watch it through to the credits, in fast forward. In FF you'll miss no story because the dialog is built into the open-captions, you'll not miss the easily forgettable laboriously long-drawn-out score and much of the film will return to normal speed. Here's a tip for Yam Laranas - Minutes do not manufacture mystery. Creeping a film along does not a creepy film make. If you're stuck with a thin script of kiddie-pool-shallow characters which is stretched several minutes between lines by vacuously empty repetitive images, don't liberally sprinkle your all-filler/no-killer film with over-crank and slow-motion to substitute for genuine tension or thrilling excitement. We want the killer, not the filler!

I didn't realise it was directed by the guy who directed Sigaw until after I'd seen it. (Sigaw is one of my faves). This director doesn't rely on cliché techniques such as jump scares, fake-outs, shadows jumping across doorways and all that other stuff we're so used to. He simply puts together a carefully crafted story and tells it beautifully with interesting twists and an obvious love for his craft. This is not a movie for the slash & giggle crowd or the jump-addicts. It's a psychological suspense drama that will - if you let it - draw you in and play with your emotions (and this coming from a chick who avoids dramas like the plague!!) while surrounding you with creepy suspense. It's actually a very sad tale for all concerned and isn't the kind of horror movie you can just watch for the "fun of it" and dismiss afterwards as just another horror flick. It's a tragic tale of dysfunction with a lot of ghosts and ghoulish moments.Some of the acting may have been a bit dodgy (particularly from some of the youngsters in the first act & one of the 'grieving' mothers unfortunately was laughably bad), but other more experienced actors were extremely good. All of the main characters in the third "act" were outstanding & I was deeply effected by their performances. The camera work was often brilliant and the director uses a range of techniques, lighting, camera shots, emphasis, background objects, etc to create the right mood or effect. For example, in one early scene he jumps between ordinary cameras and a shaky handy-cam throughout a particularly harrowing sequence. For a minute there I was afraid he was going to turn the whole movie into one of those unbearable "trendy" flicks where it's all shaky hand-held camera work and half the time the actors are barely on screen and you end up feeling violently ill from motion-sickness. My had was actually reaching for the eject button! But mercifully he didn't succumb to that. Just like he didn't give in to conventions anywhere in the movie. He was just using that convention for that particular scene to enhance the conveyance of terror felt by the characters. This is how that camera technique should ALWAYS be used (if at all!!). The movie's score was perfect and the settings used were excellent and put to good effect. One or two head-scratching plot holes perhaps - or it could be a cultural gap issue. I'm not sure. In any case, it doesn't detract from my overall view that this is a movie well worth seeing.I am not a fan of slow, overly clever, "arty" movies (eg The Devil's Backbone left me completely unimpressed - I rate this flick as better) and this movie, although it's not a fast past action-oriented one by any means, was well paced and grounded. It never stepped over the line into pretentious like TDB and similar movies.Watch this if you like mystery, suspense, thrillers and don't need to have a scream a minute thrill-ride every time you watch a movie. Don't watch it if you can only enjoy a horror flick if it's a screaming pointless gore-fest with no real story to it (or if you can't stand subtitles!! LOL).

I wish "The Road" was a better movie. It's based on a neat idea, and has the bones of what could make for a terrifying and fairly epic horror story. Unfortunately, the film is undone by dumb dialog, clunky editing, an underdeveloped script, laughably thin characters, and bad acting.The neat idea? A haunting in present-day, which claims the lives of three teens in the film's first section, is revealed to be caused by events which occurred a decade previous in the film's second section. But those events which caused the haunting weren't without their own causes. We see a young man kidnap and murder two girls, but it's obvious there's something more at play; he seems to respond to a presence the girls don't see. And so, in the film's final third, we jump back in time yet another decade, and discover how the young man of part 2 was driven to violent madness by an abusive mother and an ineffectual father.The recursive nature of this tale provokes some thought. It depicts a cycle of violence which spans generations, and leaves a dark spiritual footprint on a place. There's a poetic quality in that. It leads one to wonder, how far back does the violence actually go? Could we jump back yet another generation, and discover the horrifying circumstances that made the abusive mother into the monster she's shown to be? And from there, beyond? One imagines a chain of evil, begat at the dawn of time, handed down through generations, each generation damaging the next and thus forging the next dark link in the chain. There is no beginning; there is no end.Or something like that. These were the thoughts this film inspired in me. It's unfortunate, then, that it's not a better movie. The cinematography is competent and creepy, the lighting is never bad, and the sound effects were passable. Fortunately, those things count for a lot, and they made the movie watchable.Where the film falls down the most is in the script. These characters just aren't fleshed-out at all. There's a cop in the present-day section who is trying to piece-together the mystery, and his character is so thinly-defined as "Hero Cop" that I imagine that's what his name was in the script. It becomes unintentionally funny.There's also, I think, a big problem with the young man who was cast to play the killer in the film's second section. I understand what the filmmakers were going for -- I believe they wanted a timid sort of guy who is driven to murder girls because of his mother's tormenting voice in his head. Sort of a Norman Bates persona. Unfortunately, the guy cast in this role is just an average-looking, clean-cut, blank-faced boy of about 17. He doesn't have a threatening frame; he's not "big" enough to be imposing; it's not believable that this guy could knock a girl out in one sideways punch, as he's shown to do. His shirt and jeans look too laundered; the grease and blood that accumulate on him over the course of the film look like makeup; he never actually looks dirty or disturbed or mad. He looks like a guy who would be much rather be playing XBox in his bedroom then murdering girls. I just didn't buy his performance at all, not for a second. I hesitate to even call it a performance. I don't think the actor understood how to play this role. He's utterly unbelievable.Anyway, those are the film's strengths and its biggest weaknesses. It's not a total waste of time. It's just a shame it isn't better.

MANILA STANDARD: Isah V. RedIf Sigaw and Echo were about a haunted apartment, what is The Road all about?Laranas explores the idea of terror in this sleek horror-thriller. No, there are no supernatural creatures that terrorize the other characters in the story, there is just a crime that for many years has not been solved, and the perpetrator is still on the loose.The police is baffled. So is the father of the character played by Tween star Barbie Forteza after receiving a call from her in the middle of the night asking for help.Even the audience is confounded as Forteza disappears from the screen after nearly 25 them endlessly. She is with Derrick Monasterio and Lexie Fernandez who spirited the car without permission for a good time.When Derrick and Lexie die in terror, the action shifts to Rhian Ramos and Louise de los Reyes in car that breaks down in the middle of the road. This is in a different era and Laranas wants us to take a closer look as this can provide us a clue on what happened to Monasterio, Fernandez, and Forteza.The sisters see a man walking and ask him if he could help them with their car. Without saying much, he leads them to a house. As soon as the two girls are in the house, they are subjected to a mind-boggling and terrifying torture. Richards seem to be a docile man, but inwardly he is sick and wanted to inflict pain on his victims.Again, this baffles us because there seems to be no direct connection to the previous scenes with the three younger actors.Yet, we suspect something, this could be the ghosts that haunt the road, but why?Laranas takes us to an even earlier time, at home, with a strange family. A kid, played by Renz Valerio, wonders why her mother, Carmina Villarroel, forbids her to talk to strangers, even to the laundrywoman, Yna Asistio. As punishment for even trying to connect to her, she is locked in a closet. Valerios's father, Marvin Agustin, tries to talk to Villarroel about not being to hard on their son, but to no avail. What happens after adds even more to the baffling issue of how are this connected to the three.When finally, Laranas takes us back to the present, we are able to breathe in relief. Forteza finally finds herself again, and the police wonder how she was able to be in the place,Oh, there's one character we failed to mention, that of TJ Trinidad, a policeman helping in the investigation of the crime. What he does to his fellow policeman at the end of the movie answered the question. No, Laranas isn't interested in a police story, he is interested in how people behave in terror.The Road is perhaps the first local movie I've seen in years that I didn't feel the urge to go out of the theater after the first 15 minutes. I would have if I wanted to, but something was telling me to stay so I can find out what the terror was all about. Is it a ghost, a creature, or is it all in the mind of Forteza, Fernandez, and Monasterio. But Fernandez and Monasterio have died, so it leaves Forteza to tell the story, but can she?Forteza surprises us with an honest performance. No, she's not the tween star we see on TV, but more of the young actress that delivers the kind of performance serious critics should notice. She reminds us of Dakota Fanning in her younger years starring in terrifying thriller Hide and Seek with Robert DeNiro.While the role is not lengthy enough to show more of what Forteza can do, I think it's enough that directors like Laranas is able to see beyond the 'tween stars sweet-young girl image.Alden Richards is in my opinion the biggest revelation in the movie. With nary a dialogue, he is able to imprint his character on the audience's memory bits as the disturbed murderous teen who tortures to death Rhian Ramos and Louise de los Reyes.Richards, in creating this character, makes a prototype for other actors who are dreaming of portraying a significantly different character.Yet, the actor that makes a big mark for us is the young boy played by Renz Valerio. Physically abused by his mother (Villarroel) and unable to be protected by his preacher-father (Agustin) we empathize with the young boy's confusion and inability to discern love from punishment. He is also unable to tell his father of his mother's infidelity lest he upsets her. And even after her death, he can still see her unaware of what his father did to her.It seems Laranas wrote the policeman role for TJ Trinidad. And he delivers exactly the kind of performance that I like in movies. With no frills but more substance, Trinidad's menacing character is hooded by his good looks and we are left with no inkling of what he is really made of and what he can do until the last minutes of the film.Laranas, apparently has picked up many things about filmmaking while making The Echo. He is now able to tell a story without too much bending to the whims of producers who want movies to be really so damn sophomoric you'd want to puke at th end. Here's a film that explores the Gothic and thriller genres, fusing them to make a really terrifying experience for the audience. This is way too ahead not by just a mile but by millions of miles of other local films shown in theaters.