Angela Markado marks the return of Carlo J. Caparas to the director’s chair. Caparas, to put it kindly, doesn’t have the most stellar filmography, and this film does nothing to improve his reputation. Though the production seems to have some money behind it, there is little evidence of the skill necessary to tell a decent story. The film misses on the simplest details as it jumps from one lurid situation after another.
Angela (Andi Eigenmann) used to work at a shady bar, trying to make enough money to get medicine for her sick mother. There, she catches the attention of a group of friends involved in criminal enterprises. When she rejects their advances, they decide to abduct her. They tattoo their names on her back and assault her repeatedly. But Angela survives, and she later manages to escape. She then sets out to take revenge on the men that did her wrong, hunting them down one by one and killing them.
The film never does answer the question of why Angela doesn't just go to the police. She does get away, and the evidence of wrongdoing is literally tattooed on her back. Even if we put that aside, we are left with a narrative that doesn't have any real forward momentum. The script doesn't have any structure, Angela basically stumbling into one foe after another, managing to get the better of them in spite of a lack of planning. On their part, the villains of the piece are just entirely too dumb to be threatening. They don't do much to keep themselves safe, even after several of them have already died out.
The movie just isn't very interested in the nuts and bolts of storytelling. It's just trying to get from one lurid moment to another. And so Angela keeps popping up out of nowhere, able to magically sneak behind her targets even when there's nowhere to hide. The movie keeps flashing back to her abduction, making sure to pepper in the scenes of assault all throughout the picture. It gets in the way of the flow of the story, but the choice is seemingly made to keep the violation of the main character in the foreground at all times.
Subpar production makes things worse. There are just a lot of odd choices throughout the film, like the scene that has an establishing shot of an exterior of a mall, but follows with a shot that's an interior of a house. It doesn't make any sense, and even a film student wouldn't let something like that happen. There is a reused set that the production doesn't even bother covering up. The sound mix is spotty all throughout. The acting is not good. The movie gets bad performances from pretty good actors, and awful performances from everyone else.
Angela Markado is really frustrating, because one can see the money behind it, the resources that were spent on things like visual effects and actors and all the surface details. But it messes up the more basic things. It feels like most of the effort put into this picture was delivered during post-production, with that crew trying to piece together a film from really terrible footage. Subpar action is covered up with an excess of editing tricks. Visuals effects create the illusion of a decent production. But the core of it is still rotten. Angela Markado is a dumb, trashy film that just doesn’t deserve our attention.
My Rating:
