Vivamax: Review of KAMADORA: Escaping Exploitation

August 12, 2023

For the past five years, Ica (Tiffany Grey) had been living in the boarding house of school teacher Aling Adeng (Angie Castrence) and her teenage nephew Abner (Itan Rosales). She worked as a salesgirl at the Davidson Mall, the biggest mall in the Camanava area, with her friends Melai (Armina Alegre) and Inday (Hurry Up Tingson). She was very hardworking and dedicated to her job, but would not hesitate to answer back to rude customers. 

Pretty and feisty, Ica had three men pursuing her. First was her predator boss Sir Galvez (Karl Medina) who kept calling her into his office for "reprimands." Second was a crooked policeman Roman (Jun Jun Quintana) who forced her to be his mistress by withholding information about her missing father. Third was her true love Dave (Victor Relosa), heir apparent to Don David Tantengco (Emmanuel dela Cruz), owner of the mall where she worked. 

With all the plot threads and characters that cult director Roman Perez, Jr. juggled in this film, he could have made his complicated story into a mini-series. However, he still tried to cram everything into its one hour and 44 minutes running time. Of course, he also had to stuff in various permutations of sexual couplings along the way, involving even minor side characters, leaving a very limited time for the meat of the story to be dramatized in full.

Because of this, Perez had to resort to a very detailed narration by Ica, relating her traumatic experiences from her childhood growing up with her mother Selya (Sue Prado) and her common-law husband Ruel (Raffy Tejada) who was engaged in criminal activity. She also had to narrate how she eventually got involved with Roman, then Dave. These were sordid melodramatic tales of abuse, rape and exploitation, signature Vivamax.

Through all the going back and forth in time and all the multiple characters involved, the film was not that easy to follow. By the end, however, I recognized that the idea of the story was actually good in substance, but sadly, those extraneous sex scenes really got in the way of good storytelling. A "kamador" was a henchman responsible for getting rid of murdered bodies. You need to wait up to the very last scene to see how the title fits into all this. 4/10.