‘Amalanhig: The Vampire Chronicle’ review: Charmless disaster

Francis “Jun” Posadas’ Amalanhig: The Vampire Chronicle is quite a charmless disaster.

Gratingly noisy

Amalanhig is a gratingly noisy film.

Posadas populates his film with all sorts of abhorrent sounds, with every lousy visual meriting a lousier sound effect. The dubbing is atrocious. The acting is terrible. The special effects, cheap. Heck, the titular monster is actually nothing more than a greased up actor wearing a sooty long-sleeved shirt with computer-generated embers following his trail.

It seems that Posadas’ idea of horror is to bombard his audience with as much ugliness as possible. With all its haphazardly woven scenes that hardly evoke any semblance of mood or dread, the film only manages to shock by how truly awful it is and how clueless it is about its inescapable awfulness.

This isn’t a case of a film so bad, it’s good. Amalanhig is just reprehensibly lazy that even its attempts at humor falls flat.

Bereft of any insight

Amalanhig isn’t just that it is a shoddily crafted horror flick. It is also brazenly bereft of any real insight.

It struggles to make sense of its horror, wasting the precious lore it borrows from local folklore just to service a ridiculous story of witless students who put themselves in mortal danger all for the sake of a research paper. It also doesn’t help that the film’s main star, Jerico Estregan, has the charisma of a dried up twig. He is paired with Sanya Lopez, who proves to be as forgettable as the rest of the teens who all end up as fodder.

Posadas, who also wrote the screenplay, posits confused theories about his titular monster, peppering his film with all sorts of useless information, from Catholic imagery to pseudo-science, that amount to nothing. He only succeeds in making a mess. 

No real pleasures

Amalanhig is just joyless. It offers no real pleasures, just aimless suffering, at least for the duration of its running time.

Its biggest mystery is how it got made in the first place. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.