Silip: Daughters of Eve
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Movie Reviews of Silip: Daughters of Eve
Movie Review: essential PI bold
Summary: 5 Stars
In the Philippines, "bold" films are films that show a lot of skin. SILIP is one of the boldest of the bold. SILIP has nudity and violence galore. The opening scene, the real slaughter of a carabao (native water buffalo) with an ax, hints at what's coming. The dvd has both the original Tagalog version with English subtitles and a lame English dubbed version with a canned music soundtrack. The original with the Morricone-esque soundtrack is superior.
SILIP ("peeping" in Tagalog) is a difficult film to categorize. At first glance, it looks like exploitative drive-in fare. Then the film gets under your skin. Is it saying something about the church? Is it sexist? Look at the barren landscape and all the blue. Is the blue supposed to simulate night or some twisted Garden of Eden? What's with the carabao, dunes, and writhing nudity?
Other reviews have focused on the film's sex and violence. Both the violence and sex are jaw dropping, but the film's acerbic humor signals there's more in the film than just sex and violence. Check out the caricatured American tourist that tries to have sex with everything that moves. Then there's the scenes where everyone in town crowds around to watch the foreigner eat, and all the women in the family pile into one bed to sleep. Maybe my favorite is the ad-lib between the off screen friends Sarsi Emmanuelle and Maria Isobel Lopez. Sarsi chides Maria about not wearing panties, then grabs her shift and flashes the camera. The expression on Maria's face is priceless.
By the way, Sarsi Emmanuelle got her name from a Filipino soft-drink. She was one of the "soft drink beauties". The others were Pepsi Paloma and Coca Nicolas. The trio were in a flurry of racy Filipino flicks when restrictions were briefly relaxed at the end of the Marcos regime in the '80s. SNAKE SISTERS is one of the most notorious.
My main beef is the subtitles. There's plenty of Filipinos that speak English, but for some reason they got a Brit or Aussie who had to periodically interject "bloody" into the translation. For example, near the beginning an old woman is explaining to the Maria Isobel Lopez character that the villagers have sex all the time because there's no TV to provide an alternate form of entertainment. The subtitles translate this as the villagers being "bloody animals", an annoyingly condescending translation.
The sound track and cinematography are compelling. The actors are perhaps doing the best work of their respective careers.
Mondo Macabro is to be commended. I've been limping along with a VHS version, dubbed into English with Chinese subtitles. The dvd has some minor flaws, but is a vast improvement of the previous versions in circulation. The extras include an interview with Maria Isobel Lopez. She's articulate and still a stunner.
The market for Tagalog films outside the Philippines is miniscule. Mondo Macabro's SILIP is sure to become an out of print collectable. If you're a fan of off-beat Asian cinema, get it while you have the chance.
Movie Review: for viewers who want offbeat and bizarre
Summary: 5 Stars
The semi-low rating this product receives is due to the ignorance of the buyer. They read no description but were automatically engaged by the cover art. Talk about superficial.
This movie is indeed, unclassifiable as a whole. There are desert island scenes that are reminiscent to Jodorowsky's masterpieces(notably El Topo / Holy Mountain). I had never known of Pinky Violence, the sub-genre, to be outside of Japan, but Silip dares to go there, like other places the majority of people would rather not see or hear of. Quien Puede Matar a un Nino also comes to mind. These children are far more sinister than anything portrayed in the aforementioned "Who Can Kill a Child?" There's drama entwined with some hardcore sexploitation / sexual tension. The actors made a serious commitment to their work. On that not of seriousness - the dubbed version is very laughable. I had seen the voice-overed firstly, and walked away thinking it was a comedy. It became camp through the bastardization. On a second watch with subtitles... It is evident that this is extreme arthouse with a definite serious flare. I simply love this movie and it gets my 4 stars - actually 5, to balance out the 1 star rating of certain reviewers who have no right to cause a well done film look unappealing through the ratings system.
YES. There is violence in sex. Rape. Gang rape.
YES. There is what some my consider mild pedophilia.
YES. Innocents are sentenced to a horrible demise
YES. An Ox is graphically beat with an axe, then slaughtered within the intro.
Know these things before you purchase this DVD. Kudos, Mondo Macabro.
Movie Review: Amazing film
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this movie to be quite unerotic, but very thought-provoking despite the nudity, sexual subject matter, and graphic sex. This evaluation is borne out on both the good and bad reviews of this movie so it is worth stating up front. Those looking for a porn flick should look elsewhere.
The movie opens with the slaughter of an ox, called a carabao while onlooking children cry and beg Simon to let the ox live. Simon responds that all of them will be fed by the ox, and that they can protest as much as they want but they will discover soon enough how cruel life can be. This scene sets the feel for the movie: gritty, brutal, rough, and at the same time human.
The movie follows three psychologically damaged women through stories regarding their approaches towards sexuality and sexual trauma in their past. Tanya (played by Maria Isabel Lopez) suffers from extreme sexual repression and fear, while the other two find various sexual outlets. The story involves a great deal of religious repression misogyny, etc. It is not a movie for the faint of heart.
The cinematography is great and the acting ranges from extremely good to not very good. The story is thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
Movie Review: Boundaries are crossed, no limitations......
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow, is simply put when viewing this movie.... This is why Asian cinema is considered to be the most extreme genre of film making.... Not for the faint of heart if you love animals or respect the catholic religion... Possibly one of my favorite movies to come out of Asia... It is also a very steamy erotic movie with lots of sex on the beach and in a bamboo stick home....Movie Review: ...WHAT?
Summary: 4 Stars
Silip (Elwood Perez, 1985)
Those who know Japanese film are most likely familiar with pinku, or "pinky violence", the odd Japanese film subculture that combines the hardboiled crime film and the softcore erotica genre. (Gate of Flesh, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, is one of the best-known early pinkies.) Filipino filmmakers, caught in a combination of awe at the success of pinku films in Japan and stress at working in a repressive regime, developed bomba, a Filipino version of the pinky. Silip is by far the best-known bomba film outside the Philippines. For the most part, this is because the movie is likely to cause its hapless viewer to sit there staring at the screen, drooling and shaking, and every once in a while shouting "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" at the top of his lungs. Silip is what would happen if Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to make a porn film. Or, alternately, what would happen if the Dark Brothers teamed up with Ruggero Deodato to film Let Me Tell Ya 'bout Cannibal Chicks. (I rush to add, after making those comparisons, that Ron Jeremy does not appear anywhere in this film.)
Bomba queens Maria Isabel Lopez (a former Miss Philippines who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jessica Alba) and Sarsi Emmanuelle star here as childhood friends gone very separate ways. Emmanuelle plays Selda, who went off to the big city and has become a party girl, while Lopez is Tonya, who stayed, became a religious fanatic, and now preaches a decidedly anti-male message to the villagers, after coming to believe that all men are devils. She believes this because she got dumped by Simon (Mark Joseph), the town's most eligible bachelor. The fact that he's married doesn't stop him from behaving like it, anyway. Things go along in the village as normal, with Tonya preaching and Simon servicing, until Selda comes back into town with her rich American boyfriend. The two womens' personalities, which have grown so different, clash until events bring the two of them together. (Once you see the movie, you'll understand the deep, deep irony inherent in that phrase.)
I should warn you right off the bat that Silip is not a movie for the faint of heart in any way. If it's possible for something to offend your sensibilities, this movie most likely contains it somewhere. The film opens with Simon butchering an ox over the protestations of the village's children (the area is locked in a drought, and the villagers need to eat). Depending on how you feel about such things, the butchering of the ox is actually one of the tamer of the film's controversial scenes. Tonya's anti-male harangues are in no way hypocritical, and she practices what she preaches, including mortification of a shocking and memorable type; the climax of the film contains a scene that makes Gaspar Noe's infamous "extreme" rape in Irreversible look like child's play; the religious are sure to be offended (if they aren't by everything else) as the film's intentionally flip resolution (which traces right back to that oppressive regime I mentioned in the first paragraph). And that's just a few examples; this is a difficult movie to watch. That said, for a slapdash, low-budget movie (bomba films are, in technical terms, far closer to American porn than Japanese pinkies, which are sometimes directed by big names and have lavish budgets; again, viz. the aforementioned Gate of Flesh), it's astoundingly well-made. The constant Jodorowsky comparisons are warranted not only on the dadaist nature of the progression of events and the weird images, but also in what Elwood Perez managed to do with a bunch of non-professional actors and a few thousand dollars. Almost no one involved with this movie had any production credits at all; even the four principals (Emmanuelle, Lopez, Joseph, and Myra Manibog, playig a young village girl who's in love with Simon) were acting in, at most, their third movies. That amateurism does surface in some cases, but that almost gives the film more of a cinema verite feel than most bargain-basement films have (and that, of course, makes everything that happens all the more disturbing). The cinematography, even on the faded third-generation print that seems to have been the master for the recent DVD release, is gorgeous; even Philippine deserts are something to behold. (Who knew the Philippines even had deserts?)
I've seen a number of bad reviews of this film by people who seem to have somehow gotten the idea this is a lesbian porn film. And yeah, I'll grant you, if you're looking for Deep Inside Sarsi Emmanuelle, you're going to have to look elsewhere. This flick covers a whole lot of genres-- drama, avant-garde, black comedy, sexploitation, a smattering of horror, and maybe a half-dozen others-- but it's certainly not a porn film. Caveat emptor. If you know what you're getting, it's very hard to look away from the screen, even though you will almost certainly want to quite often. *** ½