In the wake of past evils, how do we recognize evil when it comes again? In Jet Leyco's film Second Coming, that exact question is asked of us. Framed as a story of a family settling into a new home, it is a movie that covers surprising breadth.
The pieces are present from the start, but it takes a while to come together. One begins to see patterns in the noise: isolation, control, violence that is inherited from one generation to the next. There is also fear grounded in domesticity, especially the kind felt when acclimating to new, uncertain surroundings.
The identification of evil walks hand in hand with the tolerance of evil, in that people can be conditioned to ignore it or not notice it until it has consumed everything around it. The greatest horror in Second Coming is conceptual rather than supernatural; true evil from the hearts of men being more terrifying than any ghost or spirit. This concept gathers even more meaning, considering recent contemporary events.
The film does run into a bit of trouble in the first third as it tries to gain its footing, telling (through voiceover) rather than showing. But ultimately, Second Coming can be appreciated either surface level as a standard thriller, or as something much more profound.
The plight of half Filipinos has been touched upon before with films like Manny Palo's David F. (2013) and Ivan Payawal's I America (2016). Borne of two cultures, these people don't exactly belong in one or the other, yet belong to both (the mixing race also playing a part through Filipino perceptions of race). Stories like this tell the tale of a fish out of water that lives in the water too, a weird Schrodinger's fish of sorts.
Those notions don't really have much of a presence in Jerry Sineneng's Familia Blondina, a low-effort comedy from Star Cinema that seems to have been phoned in at the last minute. Although there are some notable performances in the cast, the film as a whole leaves much to be desired.
It looks like the cast and crew of Familia Blondina had a lot of fun making this film, but that fun really didn't extend itself to me. A lot of the filmmaking feels really lazy, with many scenes cut from just the first take. It sometimes makes sense from a comedy perspective, but not in this case. The film often plays fast and loose with continuity as well; a scene involving the characters talking to the town mayor (Lou Veloso) has the mayor's eyewear disappearing every other shot, because they shot two different angles and neglected to consider the glasses.
The brand of comedy embodied by Familia Blondina is the kind popularized by Vice Ganda and her ilk, the kind that builds itself on making fun of people for their appearance or their weight, etc. If insult comedy is not your thing, this will likely be a dud. (Fellow audiences present when I watched this, perhaps still entrenched in that kind of comedy, found the movie funny. Kudos to them I guess?)
To be fair, there are one or two scenes that legitimately elicited a laugh: a flashback scene with the characters as elementary students (yet played as the same actors) was played completely straight, and the absurdity of it all got me. But scenes like this are rare in a film that doesn't really seem to be trying.
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