Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles is without excuse the type of movie that I enjoy whatever in-between flaws may appear. One other popcorn movie, Erik Matti's lark in the [sometimes] dumb but [unjustifiably] fiendish - and all the while fun - realm of the "aswangs", the film is ought to be glowered with its visuals tingling to a sensation for the eyes, best visuals in Philippine Cinema by far. Matti's undeniably underwritten script is like the excess calories in a pack of chips, it sits there, printed in clear letters, but you don't care anyway. It follows the - stereotypically - obnoxious but true-lover Makoy (Dingdong Dantes) pursuing a stopped relationship with pregnant ex-girlfriend Sonia (Lovi Poe). He plights on a small village in Negros Occidental on a quest to get back together with her but, as her nagger of a mother (Janice De Belen) dismisses this idea, a pack of aswangs terrorizes Sonia's home, until the night forlornly fights the dawn.
Comparable to Hollywood's fanboy Robert Rodriguez, whose most resembling work to Tiktik is one of the recent few good zombie films Planet Terror. Matti's dark humor obviously work similar with Rodriguez's, fleshing out twisted one-liners and tasty acts involving guts. Literal guts. How the movie is visually handled, is first-rate, or in other words, in Philippine Cinema, is quite revolutionary. The computer-generated aswangs, who rather looked like a mutated species of dogs from the Resident Evil movies is quite flawed, but it's forgivable. After all, in any man's creation, there's always room for improvement.
The talks before the movie reached the screen was all about how the movie was made: green-screen. Shot in a four-cornered studio, like the recent Disney mishap John Carter 3D, the hyper-stylized Filipino myth-inspired tale's green-screen gimmick isn't the thing to take note of. What Dantes displays in his performance a range broad enough to be acceptable. Poe, on the other hand, is loathing, if honest opinion is what is asked. De Belen's performance, if not for her character's nature, is too deafening to handle. Ramonn Bautista plays Bart - an awkward left-hand to Sonia's sympathetic father (Joey Marquez) - whose performance is amply likable, but his best was in his equally luxurious, ambitious and entertaining horror film, San Lazaro. Marquez's performance serves enough for the audience to take him seriously.
Matti's script is in the trappings of a popcorn entertainment, but the film is overly fun, to even pass up. The vampire-werewolf-zombie-like creatures's pack-master, who was played by Roi Vinzon, is legitimately creepy and has to be the only person in the film who is seriously formidable, besides Erik Matti himself. Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, as Filipino as it become, is Philippine Cinema's most inventive. After all, it isn't everyday that we get to watch intestines twirled like spaghetti, and how oddball it is that "Boy Bawang" is an essential alternative if one runs out of ammo? A
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