Silip: Daughters of Eve

The movie opens with one of the major characters, Simon Kalabaw (played by Mark Joseph), clobbering a buffalo over the head with a poleax in the presence of distressed, crying children. The butcher pounds away until the animal collapses, slits its throat, eviscerates it, and decapitates it.

After this extremely disturbing scene, the movie unfolds to portray the lives of several people in a small Philippine village, played by a cast of talented actors. Tonya, played by Maria Isabel Lopez, is a chaste woman and a fill-in for the town's ill Catholic priest; she is the substitute "teacher" who inculcates in her pupils abstinence and purity, and who warns the girls of the dangers of yielding to their sexual desires for men, whom she calls devils. Selda (Sarsi Emmanuelle) is her antithesis, a woman who relishes and indulges in carnal pleasures. Simon, the icon of masculinity, is revered by Selda; by his girlfriend (Myra Manibog), who can't tame his waywardness; and by Tonya herself, who struggles to repress her desire for him because of her religious beliefs. Even Pia (Pia Zabale), a girl of about twelve, is obsessed with Simon.

Silip is filled to the brim with nudity and simulated (though convincingly realistic and highly erotic) sex; both Maria Isabel's and Sarsi's graceful feminine forms are a delight to behold. The violence in the movie is fierce and visceral, requiring a strong stomach on the part of the viewer.

But the movie does more than aim for cheap, exploitative thrills. It effectively underscores how the church pointlessly exerts too much effort on condemning sex instead of addressing far more important realities such as the selfishness, cruelty, and barbarousness inherent in humanity. Few are exempt from committing atrocities in this film.

The cinematography is excellent, the camera adeptly conveying the arid, barren quality of the sandy settings as well as a quiet, voyeuristic feel in many of the scenes. The widescreen picture is surprisingly good. Colors are realistic though somewhat soft, and detail is impressive for an aged film that has clearly degraded with time--as dust, specks, and scratches will confirm. However, these flaws are not significantly distracting. What is a little more intrusive are a pair of fixed cloudy spots in a few scenes and a dark-blue cast in a couple of scenes that appear to take place in the daytime. Fortunately these instances are brief. The two-channel sound is clear and unexceptional. Audio options include Tagalog with English subtitles and English dubbed. The latter is not at all worth considering.

There is a second disc with extras that include the following:
An essay titled "Silip and Filipino Bold Cinema"
An interview with the film director, Elwood Perez
An interview with the still lovely Maria Isabel Lopez
An interview with the art director, Alberto Santos
Cast and crew biographies
Mondo Macabro movie trailers

In short, this is a unique, well-shot film with intensely erotic moments and truly disturbing violence. It makes a clear statement about the dark side of the human soul and stays with the viewer well after it is over.

I am a true fan of movies that shock (both visual and subject matter) and this movie delivers. When there is a movie that causes me to look away, I must give it reconition. This surely is not for the faint of heart or easily offended. It is 'wrong' on so many levels - brutal animal violence, violence involving children, rape and sexuality. I must disagree with the editorial reviews relating this to the Asian 'Pink' movies, I believe this movie has created it's own genre. This is closer in style of the great 'Cannibal Holocaust' and other of the erotic/shockers of the seventies.

Please do not get me wrong, the movie is not just a shocker, it is a great story with some good acting. The shocking scenes are relevent to the storyline and not just put in to create shock.

I hate the cover and believe it does not do the movie justice. That is a scene in the movie, but makes it appear as a cheesy '70s erotica, not the darker, brutal movie that it truley is.

You will either love or hate this movie, I personally do believe that there will not be an inbetween viewer.

5 stars for the movie overall, I did deduct one for the inacurate subtitles (using words and phrase that you know are not 'native') and the scenes filmed with a dirty camera lense.

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. *** 

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