January 11, 2024
Police Col. Clark Martinez (Derek Ramsay) had been discharged from the police force after a botched mission gone tragic. He now ran his own business to earn money to comfortably support his wife Eileen (Beauty Gonzalez). They were still childless after eight years of being together, something that their insensitive family and friends never failed to remind them about, which caused understandable distress between the infertile couple.
One stormy night, Clark went to check the front door when he heard the doorbell ring. Outside, a small girl was standing in the rain. She had a piece of paper identifying her as Jade Bitangcol (Erin Espiritu). While Eileen tended to the child, Clark was being very suspicious about their unexpected visitor. Asked where her mother was, the child cryptically said, "she cannot come back." Asked where her father was, Jade pointed to Clark.
Most of the films by writer Dodo Dayao had been horror films, like "Violator" (2014) and "Midnight in a Perfect World" (2020), which he also directed himself. His script alone earned "Kampon" one of the four outright slots of MMFF 2023. The evil child is a common trope in horror films, but Dayao wasted no time to put a scene of Filipino black magic rites by Na Almira (Lui Manansala) right at the start to get the creeps going early.
King Palisoc directed this film, certainly a long-overdue follow-up to his auspicious debut, "Tandem" (2015). Unlike most local horror films, this one did not go much for jump scares (until those shocking "Scanners" via "Poltergeist" explosions in the final act), instead opting for more subdued scare techniques. Having a little girl Jade in the center of nightmarish demonic events made the proceedings even more intense and unsettling.
After seeing "Kampon" get a number of 0/5 ratings from critics, I went in expecting the worst. However, it turned out that it was a solid horror movie, with a complex sick storyline told clearly, nifty visual effects and remarkably vulnerable acting performances from its leads. The "Caged Man" (Christian Gabanan) was a creepy mysterious entity, but a bit too reminiscent of "The X-Files." I would have wanted to know how much time lapsed between Loretta's (Zeinab Harake) revival and the events in the Marinduque nightclub in 2017. 6/10.
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