January 3, 2025
Actor Enrique Gil came up with "Strange Frequencies" where he would lead a group of celebrities to visit some of the most haunted places in the world. For its opening salvo, Gil chose to visit the infamous Xinglin Hospital in Taiwan. This hospital had been closed down 30 years ago after reports of malpractice that led to multiple patient deaths. Since then, it had attracted ghost hunters the world over, even if many of them do not live to tell their tales.
Gil invited a motley group of celebrities for this trip. This includes his friends from show business like Jane de Leon, Rob Gomez, and Alexa Miro, along with beauty queen MJ Lastimosa, ghost-hunting YouTuber Ryan "Zarckaroo" Azurin and gay tarot card reader Raf Pineda. Despite warnings from a Taiwanese medium that their planned show disrespected the spirits trapped in that place, Gil and his foolhardy crew still proceeded with their plans.
The first remarkable thing about this film was that the main cast of actors were starring as themselves. Apparent early on was the satiric take on showbiz types -- ever-conscious of the talent fees they were going to earn after this project, which was dependent on the social media engagement they can generate with their live stream. There was a goal to reach a magic number of 3,000,000 views, for which each actor will get double their fees.
Production designer Jerann Ordinario should be commended for creating those spooky sets of the children's ward (with those creepy crayon drawings and old photo albums) and the operating room (which was turned into demotic ritual temple). It was also very interesting to see modern equipment used in ghost-hunting, like electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, ghost balls, radiating electro-magneticity (REM) pods, EVP spirit box and strapped on camera rigs focused on their faces (which caused a lot of vertiginous shaky scenes).
Being a show aiming to generate views, certain "roles" were given to the actors, like Rob as the loud annoying prankster, Alexa as the reckless, "anything for a hit show" one, MJ as the pragmatic non-believer. With "I Am Not Big Bird" and this, Enrique Gil is determined to break away from the love team movies he used to do. But here, it was Jane de Leon as the most level-headed team member who got the more stressfully grim acting moments, fully deserving her Best Actress nomination. Try to read the comments of the netizens watching the live video, as they can be quite darkly funny (like the Darna reference for Jane).
A remake of the Korean horror film "Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum" (2018), this was supposed to be the first meta found-footage Filipino film ever. This whole film was a high achievement in cinematic technical elements -- film editing, production design, visual effects, musical score and especially the award-winning sound design -- all of which director Kerwin Go successfully used to create an immersive, realistic experience of fear for audiences. 8/10
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