It is difficult to understand anything that is going on in Bahay Ampunan. It is not a complicated film; it is just another horror movie, and it doesn’t really do anything different. But both the visuals and the sound are so bad that it becomes a challenge to just watch the movie. But even if those technical qualities were improved, the movie would still be pretty bad. It is just standard horror nonsense strung together in the rough shape of a movie.
Noel (Jake Vargas) is all set to leave the country with his band. The only problem is that he's got no one to take care of his little brother Eboy (Martin Venegas) while he's gone. Noel travels to Manila, hoping to find a temporary home for his little brother. He takes him to the house that he grew up in, an old orphanage that is home to abandoned and abused children. But the house isn't exactly as he remembers. It is now home to all manner of strange happenings, and the residents seem intent on doing the boys harm.
The typical scare in this movie plays out like this: a ghost appears somewhere behind one of the boys, where he can't see. It disappears when he turns around. When one of the boys does see something that seems to be out of the ordinary, it more or less turns out to either be a dream, or a flamboyant gay resident of the orphanage. The film already struggles with making anything scary. It further undermines its own efforts with this sad attempt at humor.
The film also suffers from awful production values. It is well below what one should expect from a movie that is commercially released. It is well below what one should expect from any movie at all. The sound recording is awful, making much of the dialogue unintelligible. Shoddy visual effects turn out to be an extremely poor investment. The money and the effort should have just gone into the shooting of the movie. All the digital effects in the world can't make a poorly shot movie look any better.
Or maybe we could have started with the story, which is barely anything. There's nothing to hold on to. Almost all of the interesting stuff happens in flashbacks, the characters left to wander these halls in the present with no real goal to accomplish. Jake Vargas ends up looking pretty confused in most of his scenes. And in spite of their conviction, neither Rustica Carpio nor Maria Isabel Lopez can do much with this empty narrative.
It’s actually been a while since we got a movie like Bahay Ampunan. There was a string of super low budget local independent films last year that inexplicably made it into our cinemas. One would have thought that the cinemas had learned their lesson. These movies just don’t deserve to be projected on large screens, the production values falling so far below the standards of our cinema. Bahay Ampunan isn’t worth the space that it’s taking up in our cinemas; space that could be used to exhibit any number of much better local independent productions.
My Rating:
