Movie Details
| Title: | Silip | |
| Director: | Elwood Perez | |
| Year: | 1985 | |
| Genre: | Sexploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.19.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.19.07 | DVD | With the holidays coming up, it may be the perfect opportunity to look at your loved one and share your tender feelings toward him or her with the gift of raw and untamed Asian Erotica. Lucky for you, the fine folks at Mondo Macabro have heard the call and brought Silip: Daughters of Eve to region one Filipino softcore fans worldwide! Tonya is a coming-of-age girl in a remote village caught between her religious body-guilt and delirious lust for the local buffalo-killer. We know he's a buffalo-killer because we see him do it in the first two minutes of the film. The first scene of this movie is basically a dare to stay in the theater. Little kids are crying, begging this dude to leave the poor desert cow alone as he thwacks the beast repeatedly in the head with the blunt end of his axe. Hollow thuds pound in between the cries and wails of children for a few minutes as the water buffalo falls and twitches and grunts its last breath of hot sandy air. It's enough to make Cannibal Holocaust fans question humanity. From there it's basically a soft-core skin flick that slowly but surely sinks into deranged extremes of depravity and craziness involving Tonya's Americanized slut sister, rape, accidental murder, killer-kid group decapitation, more rape, and a pinch of burning. To be completely honest, most of this movie was too screechy dramatic for me. So much of the movie is women yelling at women, women yelling at men, and women yelling at kids. All three subjects get the same argument: Men are the devil, don't have sex. After a while you'd think they'd get it but since two naked ladies are on the cover, we know they never will. Instead, Tonya fights her urges by rubbing salt into her stuff and hot sand into a kid's stuff. The buffalo killer screws whoever's around, and the kids... well, the kids kill a guy and cut off his head. I'd say all that yelling didn't quite sink in. I liked the more bizarre elements and the women are beautiful and often naked; I just wish I didn't have to sit through 125 minutes of melodrama to see them. If you are in the mood however, there's plenty to like and I do feel the film grows stronger as it plays out. The climax (heh heh) of the picture is absolutely nuts and the sex seems to get dirtier as it goes on which keeps a bare level of interest in the body-rubbing monotony. I suppose there's a certain intensity and "boldness" to the film but it didn't suit my tastes in pacing or plot enough for me to wholeheartedly enjoy it. Incidentally, the new Mondo Macabro DVD release of the film has a second disc containing 10-30 minute interviews with the director, star and art director (maybe recorded in a shopping mall, I'm not sure) as well as an essay on sexy time Filipino Bold Cinema that gives some semblance of cultural context and significance to the film. This helps a bit but mostly it made me curious about the state that Filipino cinema had to be in order to embrace something as extreme as this. It's probably on some other Mondo Macabro disc already but I bet there's a pretty decent doc in the Filipino cinema explosion of the 70s and 80s and Imelda Marcos' rabid film fanaticism and the Manila Film Center to be made. Get on it, someone! So if you're in the mood for some sex and violence this Turkey Day and like brown skin and exotic desert locales, give this one a shot. Just have a sudoku or online bill paying to do during the scenes in between sordid sex and shocking violence. |
