Aswang

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Aswang
1994 / Colour / 83 m. / The Unearthing / USA
Starring: Tina Ona Paukstelis, Norman Moses, Flora Coker, Mildred Nierras, John Kishline, Jamie Jacobs Anderson, Victor DeLorenzo, Daniel DeMarco
Cinematography: Jim Zabilla
Production Designer: Margot Czulewicz
Film Editor: Barry Poltermann
Original Music: Ken Brahmstedt
Written by: Barry Poltermann and Wrye Martin from a story suggested by Franklin Lee Anderson
Produced and Directed by: Barry Poltermann and Wrye Martin

Reviewed by Lee Broughton

Synopsis:

A pregnant girl, Katrina (Tina Ona Paukstelis), agrees to pose as Peter Null’s (Norman Moses) wife in order for him to meet the stipulations of a family will and the pair pay a visit to the remote country estate where Peter’s infirm mother (Flora Coker) lives. Peter becomes agitated when he discovers that a holidaymaker, Dr Harper (John Kishline), has found a number of strange skeletons in cocoons buried within the surrounding forests but Katrina is more concerned by the bizarre behaviour displayed by Mrs Null and her servant, Cupid (Mildred Nierras).

Critique:

The very best Kiwi and Australian films always possess a noticeably distinctive ambience. They’re presented in English and the settings look Western but they remain intriguingly alien on some levels. While we understand the language being spoken well enough, the best Antipodean filmmakers mine a vein of national cinema which ensures that their productions are loaded with their own cultural quirks, their own social norms, their own distinctive aesthetics and even their own mythic elements which stem from the region’s rich ancient history.

This inherent ability to effortlessly make the seemingly familiar feel unfamiliar, mysterious and threatening – see Peter Weir’s brilliant Picnic at Hanging Rock (1974) for an example of what I’m getting at here – has always been one of Antipodean cinema’s most attractive qualities. That same quality is present in Aswang, an unusual tale of colonialism gone awry that was actually shot in Wisconsin, USA.

Very strange things are happening in the Nulls’ secluded mansion house and it all has to do with the family’s curious backstory: they’re American colonialists who have returned from the Philippines under a cloud. But the social mores, the attitudes and the rituals of colonial life – and the dark consequences of the Nulls’ colonial adventure – continue to inform the family’s day to day behaviour.

Aswang is essentially a novel Indo-Pacific region re-run of themes encountered in both John Gilling’s The Reptile (1966) and Freddie Francis’s The Ghoul (1975). In this case, the Null household has added an aswang to its ranks during its stay in the Philippines. An aswang is a Filipino vampire which uses an extremely long but powerful tongue to seek out sleeping victims while it crouches on their rooftop.

The aswang is presented here as a disturbing but somewhat vulnerable creature that can be hurt if its victim should awaken and retaliate while its tongue is fully extended. However, when the aswang is in close-quarters attack mode, it can use its tongue as a weapon that boasts the kind of lethal accuracy that is associated with the xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

The influence of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) can be felt in the rushing camera tricks and sound effects that are employed to represent the aswang’s point of view when it is moving at speed. The same goes for the dilapidated cabin that Null’s mentally disturbed sister is said to live in. Both work well but further homages to Raimi and Tobe Hooper play rather incongruously: Aswang’s strengths lie in its presentation of the unusual and the unfamiliar and the contents of these additional Raimi/Hooper-inspired sequences were all too familiar by 1994.

These further nods of the hat to Raimi and Hooper disturb the film’s novel ambience, its stately rhythm and, ultimately, its sense of credibility. Why bother successfully suspending the viewer’s disbelief to the extent that they will accept the existence of a supernatural creature that can surreptitiously take out a human victim with one well placed jab from its projectile tongue, only to then ask the viewer to accept that said creature would choose to rest its lethal tongue and instead put itself at risk by attacking a victim with a noisy chainsaw?

The first half of this show plays like an idiosyncratic, modern day exercise in post-colonial Gothic horror and directors Barry Poltermann and Wrye Martin successfully generate a claustrophobic air of decay, deceit and conspiracy. If its second half had continued in this vein, Aswang might well have gone on to achieve minor classic status. As it is, it feels like Poltermann and Martin lost their nerve and decided to play to the gallery by filling the latter half of the film with a succession of generic and quite disturbingly gory set-pieces.

Ultimately, the film feels like a missed opportunity to produce a feature that could have been both original and pleasingly unusual from start to finish. That’s not to say that Aswang is a bad film. The cinematography and direction are good and the look of the Nulls’ grand mansion and its interesting interiors bring much to the film. It’s the kind of film that could have been a home video smash in genre circles if it had appeared on rental store shelves during the mid 1980s.

I’ve read harsh words about the quality of the acting here but I thought it was fine. Norman Moses steals the show as the slightly kooky and dangerously unpredictable Peter Null: just imagine Potsie (Anson Williams) from television’s Happy Days dying his hair strawberry blonde before coming on like Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and you’ve almost got him.

Aswang is a horror film that largely works because its finer cultural, mythical and post-colonial details are convincingly articulated and brought to life by some unfamiliar but talented and committed actors. The film’s predictable but nicely executed ‘twist’ ending also scores it some points. Unfortunately, the swing towards more obviously crowd pleasing generic scenarios at the film’s midpoint does work to defuse the satisfying sense of strangeness and mystery that had distinguished its early scenes, which results in Aswang ultimately becoming just another “quite good” genre flick.

Psychotronic Cinemas rating: Good

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