Somebody
get this woman a box of industrial strength Arm & Hammer. She just can’t get that musty malevolent
spirit out of her refrigerator. Yes, she
has a demonic appliance. Evil takes many
forms, so just go with it when Rico Maria Ilarde’s The Fridge (trailer
here) screens
tonight during the 2013 New York Asian Film Festival.
After
years in America, Tina has returned to her old family home in the Philippines,
hoping to discover what happened to her parents. Nobody wants to talk about, so it must have
been awful. The house looks spooky from
the street, but it is pretty cozy on the inside, aside from that hulking, ugly-looking
refrigerator. Turns out the appliance
has an attitude to match.
Trying
to start a new life, Tina crosses paths with James, an old torch-carrying
elementary school friend at the grocery store and asks the electrician to come
check out her buggy wiring shortly thereafter.
If that sounds like a way too convenient coincidence, bear in mind this
is a film about a killer refrigerator.
Your pedantry is neither useful nor welcome here.
Of
course, the fridge with its supernatural tentacles (sort of a cross between
Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors
and Cthulhu) starts racking up a respectable body count, in spectacularly
bloody fashion. However, most of its
victims sort of have it coming, E.C. Comics style. (Maybe not the neighbor’s cat, but it was
disposable anyway.)
One
of the crazier things about Fridge is
its horror movie mechanics are way better than one would expect. Sure, on some level it is cognizant how
ludicrous the story truly is. Nonetheless,
Ilarde sets the mood nicely and Andi Eigenmann and JM de Guzman play it
scrupulously straight as Tina and James.
Never winking at the camera, they act like it is pretty dreadful to have
a possessed refrigerator in your kitchen, as it most certainly would be.
But
wait, there’s more—two of the country’s top actors lend their prestige to the
picture. Joel Torre soldiers through
like a good sport as Tina’s long suffering father and Ronnie Lazaro delivers a
stiff shot of badassery as retired Det. Albay, styling an eye-patch and a
triple-barreled shotgun.
