The Road

The dead are unquiet and the living are terrified in The Road, a powerfully atmospheric blend of ghostly encounters, horrific situations and missing-persons mysteries from the Philippine director Yam Laranas.

Director/co-writer/cinematographer, Yam Laranas, still delivers a maximum of suspense and horror, working wonders with a small budget.

Laranas does cultivate a mood of distinctive menace and mystery, not to mention a convoluted and ambitious chronology.

The film's three-pronged narrative does a fair job of laying a spooky groundwork for the revelatory emotional sadism that lies behind most acts of evil; it just takes a bit of clunky exposition to get there.

Yam Laranas doesn't leave it at that. In his low-budget, creepy thriller, he spells out why and how this particular path is so deadly, as well as what led to the crimes and supernatural horror that seem to frequent the place.

This low-budget shocker eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem.

For a spell, the film gets by on its unpretentious flair for atmosphere, even its disconcerting nonsensicality.

Filipino director Yam Laranas mixes atmospheric terror with outright shocks in his latest feature, THE ROAD. An unsolved missing persons case is re-opened when three teens disappear off of the same fateful road twelve years later. What the police will discover is more horrifying than anyone could have imagined, with a string of deaths spanning over two decades! Once Laranas has established his dark, oppressive mood, he never lets up, and follows through with a steady stream of haunting images that will chill you to the bone. The story unfolds in three seemingly unrelated stories, which have been carefully tied together in the end to reveal the sinister secret behind each of the mysterious deaths. Laranas takes a timely approach in introducing each new set of characters, allowing his talented cast to bond with the audience before they meet their inevitable demise. The end result is a well-told ghost story that easily stacks up against its Japanese equivalents JU-ON and RINGU in the terror department.

Choosing to go down this road will ultimately lead you to a destination of indifference. Well done psychological thriller with a satisfying story and some genuine chills. Slow moving at times and staying engaged becomes tedious. It's not that it's that bad of a film, I'm just saying it's not that great of one either.

The story--and the way it's told--is somewhat interesting, but ultimately for a ghost story, one expects it to be a little more thrilling. Script: 6/10 Cinematography: 6/10 Sound: 5/10 Acting: 5/10 Production: 4/10

A flat-out bore with very little redeeming qualities. I expect most horror films to be, at the very least, entertaining on some level. Even if the performances are underwhelming and the story thin. But The Road has no intention of such. I was constantly wondering about casting choices, editing decisions, and pacing issues which pulled me out of my suspension-of-disbelief. I really wanted to feel the tension Yam Laranas was desperately trying to convey. I wanted to feel the edge of my seat so bad I actually considered leaving the theater.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]