While the triumph of Filipino horror with recent pics like The Road and The Healing is arguable, there's still that part of the genre in which pics are a little too dumb. Tara Illenberger's Guni-Guni is a constant reminder of that, a horror that is widely uneven and painfully scares very little.
Enter Mylene (Lovi Poe, Aswang), a student nurse who boards in a mysterious house. Unbeknownst to her and her boardmates, the house was venue to many brutal killings. Souls, trapped within the premises, intermittently appear, but with constantly intense desires to finish what's unfinished. In shorter terms, the house is haunted by spirits.
Swiftly, they start to see peculiar things. Nightmares start to dominate still nights; doppelgangers with eyes holding of what looks like a metal; people start to embrace madness. Mylene, Pao (Banjamin Alves) and Joanna (Empress Schuck, Dalaw) tries to find out the root of the multitude of haunting.
Illenberger's script was too tedious and interminably boring to even draw sincere attention (I periodically look at my watch, trying to figure out when the "real" nightmare--the movie--will finally call it "fin"). It would appear as if Illenberger borrows a lot from different horror films but ultimately fails with a script that is predictable, because derivative. Characters were a mixture of different textures and shapes, some amorphous and only few with recognizable feel and figure.
Mylene's character, while well-developed, could have been executed better, if either director or actor done more. Lovi Poe playing Mylene is not a surprise no more, people dubbed her as the "Horror Princess of Philippine Cinema" due to the commercial success of Aswang, which was in my opinion barely a good movie to start with. We all know Poe's min and max when it comes to acting, and albeit she's likable in few events, horror is definitely not her genre.
Benjamin Alves' debut acting in a feature film was not too depressing as one would think. He's passable, though the discomfort to generate convincing emotions is printed in his face in 64-bit color. Schuck, has a certain sharpness, sometimes too sharp, that is mildly likable.
Support actors like Gina Alajar, a mother who've longed grieved about her son's death, Jaime Fabregas, the landlord who's got some issues of his own, and Irma Adlawan, Mylene's mother, were all good acts as they usually are.
Bugged by a by-partition-hackneyed narrative and execution that falls flat, Guni-Guni is unfortunately predictable, drab and numbingly unscary.
RATING: C
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