There’s a saying that goes, ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat’. And while I could question the origin of the aphorism in terms of cruelty to animals, we all know it refers to how, quite often, there’s more than one way to do something successfully. It’s the result that counts in a movie genre such as horror that holds, as there are schools within the genre and diverse ways to execute a horror film. It’s a matter of predilection, taste, and school of attack one subscribes to.

Mallari is a historical fiction/horror film selected for this year’s Metro Manila Festival. A Mentorque production, it has the added luster of having been picked up by Warner for distribution abroad. Taking its cue from the historical data about Juan Severino Mallari, a Filipino Catholic priest during the early 19th century, who is our first documented serial killer, the film’s screenplay then makes a wild sci-fi/fantasy jump and offers us three Mallari whose time travel via astral projections. 

There’s the original Juan Severino from 1812, a Mallari from 1946 who films documentaries of the post-World War II era, and a present-day Mallari who’s a doctor searching for a cure for his fiancé - a cure for a sickness she’ll succumb to in the future. In his first horror outing, Piolo Pascual plays all three Mallari’s. 

Ok, you can stop scratching your head in confusion. The Netflix limited series Bodies, a British indie effort, had four time frames. It was a detective story, and what Bodies used as a premise was the same corpse showing up in these four specific temporal junctions - of which one was even set in the future, in 2050. It worked stupendously, so there is precedent for pulling off this concept. 

Director Derick Cabrido takes on this time travel/psychological horror drama, and remember what I said about different attacks on creating a horror film? In this film, Cabrido isn’t the type to go for slow burn or subtlety. He’s more of a sledgehammer, bomb-you-with-napalm type of director, attacking all fronts from the start.

The film opens in 1812 with a grisly murder. As we’re introduced to the other Mallaris, each scene is immediately accompanied by a jump scare introduced by an over-loud, over-obvious musical score and sound effects. It’s like Cabrido is leaving no doubt that a scene of horror is coming up. And as if controlled by some algorithm, you can safely say that there’ll be jump scares every five minutes.

What motivates the first Mallari? The answer provided is to dispel an alleged curse on his ailing mother. Gloria Diaz, JC Santos, Elisse Joson, and Janella Salvador provide support, but this is Piolo’s show throughout. I found him most successful as the 1946 Mallari. 

If there is a School of Hard Knocks, Cabrido would like to introduce us to the School of Loud Knocks. I’m certain it’ll work with an audience ready to flock to a Piolo movie or just eager to be scared out of their seats during the Festival. Midway, the film does pick up, and there are more organic scary scenes that truly work and aren’t being force-fed to us through the soundtrack. It may just be me and how I appreciate more subtlety in dishing out horror, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a slower-burn approach. 

"Mallari" is an official entry for the 2023 Metro Manila Film Festival. It opens on Christmas Day.