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Great Film overall

A different way of telling a story

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I try to watch local horror movies. I like to see how local directors would portray Filipino superstitions and folklore. This movie "Sundo" is the follow-up of director Topel Lee to his previous opus "Ouija" two years back, which I also watched. Aside from that, the buzz was good, so I caught it when time permitted.This movie is based on the folk belief that before the moment of one's death, a spirit of a previously-departed loved one would come fetch him, hence "sundo." Star Robin Padilla plays Romano, a soldier who woke up from a coma with an "open third eye." However he found this "gift" unwelcome, and isolated himself in Baguio, with his pretty, blind sister Isabel (Rhian Ramos).One night, Romano was convinced to accompany Isabel to Manila to have her eyes checked. En route though, he was able to avert a fatal car crash that was supposed to involve them when he was alerted by his spirit sightings. After that though, one by one, their travel companions in the van all meet gruesome deaths. So Romano has to figure out how to extricate himself and his sister from this dire predicament.Acting was very campy and hammy. Robin Padilla is really hampered by his very irritating acting tics. His incessant posturing when walking, and even when just standing, is really very distracting. The rest of the cast (Sunshine Dizon, Rhian Ramos and Katrina Halili) I am not very familiar with since we do not watch GMA shows too much. Surprised to see Mark Bautista (as the sleepy driver!)from the other network giant in this, good for him.I was also amused to see supporting actresses who were staples of horror flicks, like Mely Tagasa, Estrella Kuenzler and the consistently spooky Odette Khan. Seeing Rina Reyes play Katrina Halili's Mother was unconvincing.Some sets were unrealistic. Does a roadside eatery along the road from Baguio have a restroom that looks like that? But my one biggest complaint about the set was the doctor's clinic. Who would believe that people will go all the way from Baguio to Manila to see a supposed renowned eye specialist from the States with a clinic that looks like it has not been cleaned for years? The doors and corridors look like that of a seedy rundown motel.I also have a beef about one scene in the marketplace where Romano was seeing several spirits surrounding several customers of an eatery there, just prior to a fiery explosion. It was one of the better shot sequences. Unfortunately, I have seen this one done on a much bigger scale in the Thai horror classic "The Eye." I must say that the final series of events at the end of the movie, and the way the movie suddenly ended, was provocative. You will have to think about more afterwards to process what happened, and that is good. There was no convenient epilogue to explain things, it just ends, and I like that.Overall, a bit of a disappointment, but the ending was good. For me, this ending sequence makes up for the rest of the movie.

Topel Lee never recaptured in his later works the brilliance of "Yaya," his episode for the 8th installment of the irrepressible horror omnibus "Shake, Rattle & Roll," though for a while he has quite a bit going for "Sundo." Instead the director's latest endeavor ends up as a disappointing, by-the-numbers ghost feature, as a result of its eventual reliance on cheap scare tactics that fails to generate a modicum of authentic scare despite the constantly unsettling mood of the gloomy cinematography.Lee and scriptwriter Aloy Adlawan's thriller concerns former military man Romano (a tempered down, initially Jesus Christ-beard sporting Robin Padilla) who, after spending a significant amount of time in a coma, discovers he can see dead people. It turns out these spirits are not the usual harmless specters, but are harbingers of Death (with a capital D) appearing near a person about to conk out; which is to say, everyone who got a second crack at life when, courtesy of a dream, Romano saved a van from a fatal crash, and that includes him, his blind sister Isabel (Rhian Ramos), his friend Loeulla (Sunshine Dizon), a mother (Glydel Mercado), her son (Hero Angeles), and a hitchhiking actress (Katrina Halili).It's a promising premise, designed to fuel the fear entrenched from the it's-a-blackout-and-yaya-will-tell-a-ghost-story years about how sick or dying people supposedly see someone who has earlier died. Up to a point, "Sundo" has the makings to live up to that primal fear, generating a credible performance from Padilla while effectively employing the constant sense of dread through its methodical mise-en-scene, as typified by Padilla waiting outside an ophthalmologist's clinic and a shot near the climax that has Padilla sitting on a couch in the dark. Yet the script's unfortunate decision to swerve into a rote hybrid of a shoddy J-Horror and "Final Destination" undercuts whatever merits it has gained, and while Halili is here to provide the obligatory cleavage, it's frustratingly drowned by the weight of the studio's demand to keep it at a more profitable PG-13 rating.