VAMPIRE OF QUEZON CITY
2006 - NR - 73 Minutes
D: Khavn De La Cruz
S: Avi Siwa - Luanne Dy
DVD Provided by Pathfinder Pictures
Fullscreen/Dolby Digital 2.0
Extras: Interview - Short Film - Music Video - Trailers

Okay, we are plunged into the shadowy black and white world of the city of Quezon. People are living in fear of the Pinoy Vampire. Seems this guy captures women, violates, butchers them and leaves the leftovers for people to find to help instill even more fear in his legend. People have decided that it’s time to take the law into their own hands and find this guy before he kills again. One small problem. What if he’s not a normal guy? Shot in grainy black and white VAMPIRE is more of a study into the psyche of a disturbed mind. We see that he was abused as a child; he began by killing small animals and then graduated to women. Always women. There are lots of shots that look fuzzy around the edges as if we are seeing through the eyes of the killer. So, we have grainy black and white, some explicit gore, explicit oral sex and some bizarre storytelling. Does that make for a good movie? In a word, no. There are lots of things that work here. The use of music during the torture scenes instead of the actual soundtrack is a weird move. You have the relaxing effects of music combined with some pretty brutal stuff and it makes it go down a little easier. Other than that it just seems to wander for a while before the non ending. And it is a non ending. Not a set up for a sequel, although you could argue that point, but it’s just over. No resolution one way or the other and it makes the previous 73 minutes seem like a waste of our time. Experimental? Sure. Weird? Absolutely! Gory and perverted? Without a doubt. It just lacked cohesiveness and I was glad that I could stop watching. I wasn’t offended. Just bored. - Douglas Waltz

VIGILANTE
2008 – NR – 90 Min.
D: Aash Aaron
S: Robert Díaz - Margot Robbie - Kazuya Wright - Ozzie Devrish
DVD Provided by MTI Video
Widescreen/Dolby Digital
Screener Copy - No Extras

From the crunchy opening guitar riff and intense car chase followed by a well-choreographed fight scene that opens this film, I knew I was in for a treat. For a brief moment I thought I was witnessing a rebirth of 70’s style Ozploitation (MAD MAX, STONE, STUNT ROCK, etc.) and I was really stoked. I’ve been a fan of Ozploitation (high octane exploitation films from Australia, for the uninformed) flicks for as long as I can remember and everything about the opening scene of VIGILANTE brought me back to those glorious films…then along came the dialogue. It is not that the dialogue was bad or poorly written, actually I really can’t comment on if it was bad or not—because I couldn’t hear it! Yes, the audio for this film is so horrible that the dialogue is so low in the mix it can hardly be heard without cranking up your TV volume. This wouldn’t be so bad if the music in the film wasn’t extremely high in the mix making for an unwatchable if not annoying movie watching experience (to top it off there isn’t a subtitle option either—Doh!). From what I could make out, VIGILANTE is your run of the mill revenge film a la DEATH WISH, which has been done to death, but director Aash Aaron’s stylish take on it looked quite interesting—that is if I could have heard the dialogue and ya’ know, understood what was being said. Kind of an important thing for a movie ever since ‘talkies’ became all the rage back in the 1920’s. For the record, this was not just a problem with my copy of the screener, after some research I came across some other claims of poor audio. If MTI Video corrects this problem, I would love to give the film another chance. - Fred McKennon