December 30, 2022
Live-in partners Stella (Ayanna Misola) and Dado (Sid Lucero) were also partners in the skin trade. They work for a mysterious man they call the Boss, who set them up with various customers from their online brothel. One day, they helped a teenage free-lance prostitute Baby (Hershie de Leon) who being harassed by her customer. When Baby told her about her sad backstory, Stella took pity on her and invited her to stay in their home with them.
This basic story is as generic as it gets for a Vivamax film just so that it can fulfill the expected formula of sex and violence and director Adolfo Alix Jr knew that. Since they were prostitutes, that opened the floodgates for any random combinations of partners of any gender in its numerous sex scenes. With their powerful and dangerous Boss character remaining unseen for the first two acts, you knew this was setting up for a bloody reveal in the final act.
Ayanna Misola was introduced in the first Vivamax film of 2022 Roman Perez Jr.'s "Siklo" as the young wife of Vince Rillon. She ends the year as a senior prostitute, being called "Ate" (or elder sister) by Baby in her every sentence. Her best work was in the sex-comedy film Bobby Bonifacio Jr.'s "Bula." But in dramas like Roman Perez Jr.'s "Ang Babaeng Nawawala sa Sarili" and this one, her delivery of lines still tended to be mechanical and monotonous.
Veteran actor Sid Lucero also debuted in Vivamax this year in Law Fajardo's "Reroute" and has since been involved in some of the channel's steamiest films like Mac Alejandre's "Silip sa Apoy" and Brillante Mendoza's "Virgin Forest" (where he literally let it all hang out). As expected Lucero (with his penetrating gaze) was the best actor in this ensemble, even if he was given those awkward scenes when he was caught with his pants down.
Ever since Vivamax invested on prosthetic members, they have been used more frequently and more brazenly. There was a surplus of sex scenes here, with more than 10 of them! The film opened with one, seguing to another right after, then went from one after the other with just a minimum of story and dialogue in between, until it got tiresome. I seriously hope this shallowness is not the direction Vivamax intends to take in the coming year. 3/10.
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