Patient X

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1482216/
A young boy and his mother runs through the forest in Philippines, acording to the Philippine folklore a vampire like creature lives there.
The young boy, Lukas Esguerra (Richard Gutierrez), sees his big brother being killed by these creatures called Aswang.
20 years later, Lukas works as a doctor and he gets a call that someone has captured the one who has killed his family.

Lukas sets out to the hospital, where one of the nurses - Betty (Miriam Quiambao) takes him into the cellar of the hospital.
Betty


and the doctor Alfred Molina (TJ Trinidad) tells him of a non human creature like nothing they have seen before. Lukas demands to see this monster, he needs to see who killed his family, what he sees in the cell deep down in the basement is not that kind of monster we suspect, but a young hot looking female.

Yam Laranas the director and co writer with Aloy Adlawan seems not to have made up their mind on what kind of movie they wanted to make in the first place.
It mixes drama with the classical western vampire stories, but these Aswangs ain´t exactly sure if they gonna bite or chew air infront of their victims.
The strenght of patient X is the development between Lukas and the female Aswang, Guada (Cristine Reyes). The movie is in 108 minutes but the version I watched was only in 86 minutes (plus 5 minutes of ending credits). The final result, the 86 minutes version atleast, becomes more of an occupied survival horror type of movie.

The weekness is that the actionscenes are really bad to be honest. They mostly shuffle around and grab the shirt then trying to kill their opponent; wheter it´s a human or an Aswang.
It also, according to the director, is a take on what would happen if we (humans) would be able to capture a Aswang. So what happens? Obviously a lot of pushing and grabbing.

Patient X tries to be scary, atleast I think it tries, but since it copies to much from western way of making vampire movies and that the leader of the Aswang looks more like Rob Zombie




it was hard to take it serious. However the acting is good at some parts (the more drama of the movie) specially between Lukas and Guada. May be that they both believed in the story more then I or that due to the fact Heart Evangelista
who was supposed to play the part of Guada left the shooting since she have seen a ghost and called for a priest to bless the setting.

It is allthough I didn´t like this movie an interresting take on the whole myth. It is also refreshing to see a ”new country" (I guess you haven´t seen that many Philippine horror movies either) doing their version on horror. I will give this a second view someday.

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Don´t worry, you didn´t kill her.
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Official Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0acRkgKJvy0

more info about Aswang or Asuwang as it´s called in Philippino
http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Aswang
http://aswangmovie.com/
http://aswangmovie.blogspot.com/

Alternative poster