Nastiness is Serbis’ stock and trade, its action set in a decaying Filipino porn theater (named “Family”) where overflowing toilets flood bathroom floors, the peeling walls resemble flaking skin, and the rear end of one resident boasts a silver dollar-sized boil that – upon being harshly treated with an empty beer bottle – oozes a thin stream of puss down the gentleman’s ass cheek. Plus, the theater, earning its revenue from double bills of tattered X-rated gems with titles like “Seedling,” primarily stays afloat by functioning as a venue for gay cruising and the subsequent sex which takes place, explicitly, in the theater’s murky aisles. The film is not, to be sure, a tourist-board commercial for the Filipino city of Angeles. Nonetheless, there is method behind director Brillante Mendoza’s filthy madness, his goals at once sensory and thematic in nature. Guided by curiosity about his uniquely decrepit environment and its barely subsisting protagonists, the theater-operating Pineda clan, while at the same time subtly casting its portrait as indicative of the third-world condition, it’s a scraggly, messy, often aimless, and yet consistently amusing and engaging work of black comedy-cum-social-realism.
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