Cursed

CEBU, Philippines – A funny thing happened to me over the weekend: I was left alone in the movie theater while watching what was touted as a sexy thriller. What’s even funnier is that the film was actually neither sexy nor thrilling, and yet I still got up from my seat and stood under the emergency exit sign near, well, the exit. What was I watching? The “indie” film Sumpa, starring Joross Gamboa, Mark Gil, and the Mocha Girls.

I swear, my hook was Mark Gil. Well, him, and the fact that I actually like giving low-budget local films a chance.

How I was left alone in a movie theater that could seat over three hundred is easy to explain. There were only three of us to begin with: a couple, one-half of who squealed when the lights went out, and yours truly, armed with a big tub of regular popcorn. Judging from the girl’s squeal, they were probably expecting a big horror-fest and when the movie failed to deliver within the first half hour, they got up and left.

Directed by Melvin Brito and Carlos Agustin, Sumpa follows the mysterious experience of a troubled young man, Raymond (Gamboa), who after a really bad day (his words, not mine) hies off to a rest house in Laguna and is suddenly drawn into a curse that was placed on the house and his family, unearthing a family secret in the process. The rest house, which was given to him by his uncle, is apparently being haunted by a beautiful young girl named Jackie (Mocha Uson) who likes swimming in the pool and running around the house buck naked.

The plot was promising enough—heck, I stood around for around 45 minutes rooting for the film—but the movie just failed on so many levels that it was really no surprise it was playing to an empty theater. The narrative was so much of a mess that the movie never really manages to get its act together, “surprise” twist notwithstanding. The acting is bad, like high school movie project bad. Mark Gil as Raymond’s uncle was the lone saving grace, but he’s clearly vibrates on a different level than the rest of them. In fact, I would have been left with the impression that he was acting for another movie, if not for the cloudy, too-bright-to-too-dark quality of the shots that, like the wooden acting of the rest of the cast, remained pretty consistent from start to finish.

It’s pretty apparent that Joross brought his game to the movie, but his character’s being lost reaches a literal level because it fails to achieve any of what it set out to do: thrill, titillate or scare viewers. It’s also pretty apparent that the movie was made for the Mocha Girls, who are crossing over from singing and posing in sexy pictorials to acting sexy in “non-sexy” flicks.

I’d never heard of the Mocha Girls before—obviously, I’m not their target market—but for the amount of skin they showed in Sumpa, they failed miserably to come across as sexy. I mean, there are many naked scenes, bed scenes, and there’s even that supposedly controversial (and totally unnecessary, in my opinion) girl-on-girl scene, but none of them managed as much as a single sizzle.

Near the end of the film, a janitor came to clean up the litter. He saw me standing under the exit sign, and asked me if I was alone. I gave him a deliberately unintelligible reply, but he called the guard anyway, who came promptly enough and offered to keep me company.

“Oh, it’s okay,” I told him, explaining that I wasn’t sure if I was going to finish the movie anyway.

“I don’t understand why you are watching the movie alone,” he said, “Where is your boyfriend? Why aren’t you watching with him?”

There was a hint of a pick-up somewhere in the course of our conversation, and I ended up lying about a boyfriend who works in a call center, doing his shopping somewhere in the mall, just a text message away, as I watched a movie alone.

If the only scare a viewer gets while watching your thriller happens outside of your film, and, in fact, in that single solitary point under the bright red exit sign in an empty theater than can easily fit three hundred, it won’t be easy to deny your movie’s been cursed.