To dismiss Zombadings 1: Paratin sa Shokot si Remington (Kill Remington With Fear) as a lowbrow indie film is to miss the point of it completely, because it is not, and it is also to say that one has not seen it clearly and properly. Jade Castro has put a lot of thought into the story and hard work into its filming and it shows. Our hero is Remington, who works in the morning and slacks at night and his mother is a policewoman, his father a resident bum. During a visit to the cemetery when he was a kid, Remington had a curse cast onto him by a gay man he had upset by his incessant teasing. The curse, the gay man grudgingly says, will turn Remington when he grows up a gay man. Fifteen years later, he is afflicted by constant nightmares involving a mysterious, BDSM-clad man while his town in Lucban is afflicted with mysterious murders involving gay men. As the curse predicted, Remington, slowly but without question, becomes gay. What surprises me about Zombadings is how it is presented: as a film that can easily be regarded as a slapstick film about being gays, a film that you can dismiss merely to entertain, and of course you can do that and there is nothing wrong with doing so, but of course there is more to it than that. If one looks
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at it closely, this is a film that has been conceived with a definite idea of what the writers wanted shown, a film its creators wanted to be more than just entertainment, and on these scores they succeeded. Using traditional methods of comedy, and at certain parts traditional methods of Filipino storytelling, they deliver their message, the “moral” or the story, if you will, camouflaged by precise timing and self-depreciating humor. As it happens, they are so well placed one might not notice that it is there at all. There is one powerful scene however that veers away from these methods and delivers the “moral” of the story headon, and the scene in this: Daniel Fernando’s character is pontificating about the ramifications homosexuality brings forth to the nation, where he basically says that gay men are the vermin of society. The viewer, however, does not get to hear the rest of what he has to say as there in the background are the sounds of a marching band, and in these his acrimonious soliloquy is drowned.
Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remingtong is not at all an anti-gay film, but uses the justifications for anti-gayness as foundations upon which the “moral” of the story is grafted (the murders, the teasing). All objective accounts considered, this is a film that one has to see regardless of their sexual orientation, because although this film centers around the theme of homosexuality on the surface, at its very core it is a film about love and acceptance and empowerment, a battle cry against those who say it is wrong to be who you are.