July 21, 2023
Mary Cherry Chua ( Abby Bautista) was a topnotch student in Regina Coeli Academy in 1965. One day, she was found dead in the pool area by a janitor, Emilio Baldonado (Rolando Inocencio), who was blamed and convicted for her murder. Since then, the matter of her brutal death and stories of her ghost haunting the school grounds had been an urban legend among the students over the years.
30 years later, second year high school student Karen Dimaranan (Ashley Diaz) was particularly curious about the mystery surrounding Mary Cherry Chua. She chose to investigate the case further as the topic of her term paper for her English class under Mr. Manzano (Joko Diaz). For her partner, the teacher assigned class bully Paco (Kokoy de Santos). Unfortunately, no one among the senior staff or faculty was willing to be interviewed.
An old school had always been very commonly used as the setting of a horror film, where a restless ghost of a deceased past student would sow terror among the current batches. A fairly recent example would be Mikhail Red's "Eerie" (2019) which was also about a Catholic school haunted by female students who had previously died in the campus. It was likewise set in the 1990s so that the students would have to visit the library instead of the internet.
However, writer-director Roni S. Benaid injected surprising plot points along the way to distinguish it from prior films of the same sub-genre. There was only one ghost in the whole film, so effort had to be made to vary the ways how Mary Cherry would haunt Karen, with varying success. This led to plot holes (why haunt someone who is trying to help, instead of the perpetrator?), some simply led nowhere (what happened after the induced heart attack?).
Ashley Diaz is a tall, mature-looking 19 year old, so it would have been better to make Karen a senior instead of sophomore. She dwarfed co-stars Lyca Gairanod (as her BFF Faith) and Krissha Viaje (as her nurse elder sister Lena). With the benefit of hindsight, the casting of Joko Diaz as the teacher of his daughter Ashley was a stroke of genius. Rascally Kokoy de Santos as Karen's reluctant partner lent humor and "kilig." 5/10.
Thank you :)
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