Aswang

Oh NetFlix, how you have betrayed me.  I took your recommendation. I trusted you. You said, Aswang, it was a big old too-do at Sundance some years back.  It caused a panic at the midnight showing. It's scary. Fie! Fie I say! I think maybe the panic it caused was people trying to leave because it was so damn boring.

In Aswang, Katrina is young, unmarried, and pregnant. She strikes a deal that looks pretty good on the surface – Peter Null is a rich man, and to keep his money he needs an heir. Problem is, his wife can’t have children. Solution- he hires Katrina to pretend she is his wife. Katrina’s problem is this – why is the family so damn creepy? Why is the housemaid giving her hard cider and getting her drunk? What about the weird dreams and the weird dried up baby cocoons in the trees surrounding the house?

What I could have liked about this movie was the idea behind it all. Aswang, Filipino vampires, would be scary, but not in this movie. Instead they creep around and have weird, phallic sucker tongues that get squished in windows. I mean, soul-sucking vampires that like to eat children. That’s scary. The problem is, none of it ends up being scary. The story is thin. The atmosphere is practically nil. The big twist, or the one thing I saw as possibly a twist was obvious from the beginning.  The acting is poor at best and laughable most of the time. 

I hate to be so negative about a horror movie. I mean, I LIKE bad horror movies. Usually there is something I can find that makes me laugh or spooks me or has some camp value that I'll remember fondly. But this, well, this one was bad with no camp value. Bad with no Manos, Hands of Fate value.  Bad and the cardinal sin of all movies - just plain boring.

Rating: 1 Hiss for nothing. I mean, I can’t think of anything here.