The Road

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"The Road" starts off very strong. The first segment scared the hell out of me, something that almost rarely happens to me. Sure, the film doesn't have a high budget, and it probably would have benefited if they could manage to pull off the effects they were trying to achieve, but the small budget is sufficient enough. However, after the first segment, the film gets noticeably less exciting as we're given more backstory and information to solve the whole mystery surrounding the story. It would have helped if they tighten up the pace a bit, keep things going rather than slow everything down. Still, there is a satisfying payoff by the end as everything falls into place as well as unexpected emotional pathos rarely seen in horror films. Overall, the film reminds me of a Tarantino horror film. It's ambitious and may be a bit too convoluted for its own good, but it's above-average horror.