Creepy crawlies
Still on the MMFF. Not the current edition, the good ones.
Mike De Leon’s Kisapmata was the Best Picture winner at the 1981 Metro Manila Film Festival. Watching it right after an earlier MMFF winner, Celso Ad Castillo’s Burlesk Queen, is an instructive experience. Burlesk Queen is big, bold, and messy; Kisapmata is small, timorous, and tightly-controlled. This is not a criticism of De Leon’s movie but a description of its form—you can almost feel the walls closing in. At times it becomes hard to breathe.
The viewer’s first impression is that Kisapmata is a horror movie. The theme music is reminiscent of Bernard Hermann’s score for Psycho, and the house where much of the story transpires is shot like a classic movie haunted house. All it lacks is a dog baying at the moon.
Things that crawl in the night, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
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