Filipino comedy Kontrabida Academy (now on Netflix) merges two genres, the high-concept YA fantasy and the meta-satire. Writer/director Chris Martinez previously explored the latter subject matter with his screenplay for 2011’s critically acclaimed The Woman in the Septic Tank, which lampooned awards-bait independent films; this time, he has his satirical sights on the teleserye, or Philippine soap opera. Both films feature central performances by ubiquitous Filipino comedian, TV host and actor Eugene Domingo, here playing the nasty antagonist in a teleserye that can zap viewers through their TVs into a world where they attend a school that spits out evil-villain grads, and who recruits a young woman from the real world to star alongside her in the show in the TV world, or something. If that concept sounds like it’s been drawn and quartered or strapped into an iron maiden, well, you’d be right on with that assessment.
The Gist: I’ll be blunt: Gigi’s (Barbie Forteza) life sucks butt. She has a lousy assistant manager job at a Korean grill in a mall, working for a boss (Jonathan Tadioan) who gives her the work of two employees and chews her out for her efforts. Her boyfriend of seven years, Abet (Yasser Marta), is chilly and disinterested, and the extra helmet for his moped has been smelling like another person’s perfume lately, hmm. And she goes home to her wannabe-influencer mother (Carmina Villaroel) who orders so many knockoff fashion goods for her crappy unboxing videos, the debt she’s accrued finds creditors shaking her down in the form of tough-looking goons banging on the front door and making threats. Is that preferable to getting 300 spam phone calls from collection agencies? I dunno, but hey, at least when it comes to predatory loans, she shops local.
Gigi’s luck takes a slight turn when she wins a raffle for a new TV at her work Christmas party. She somehow gets the new 64-incher home on Abet’s moped, which should be a precarious scene about on par with Alana Haim piloting a truck down the San Fernando Valley hills in Licorice Pizza, but Kontrabida isn’t interested in such logistical challenges. No, it just cuts to Gigi firing up the new flatscreen and watching a weird show called Land of the Oppressed, a terrible-wig soap opera about a terribly wigged woman named Mauricia (Domingo) who marries a feeble old rich man in a terrible wig, and then proceeds to bulldozer-bully everyone in sight. It’s a classic Cinderella situation, where Mauricia’s daughter Mimi (Xyriel Manabat) evil-stepsisters poor Mirinisa (Ysabel Ortega) into subservience, e.g., forcing her to scrub the grossest toilets this side of Woodstock ’99.
After an interminable amount of time in the glossy, digital world of Land of the Oppressed, we get back to Gigi, who has the worst day ev-arr: she stares down her cretin boss, staves off the goons at her door and catches Abet smooching someone else. She plops down in front of the TV and is shocked to see the fourth wall being utterly demolished. Mauricia talks directly at her, drawing her into the world that I guess is sort of a layer behind the fiction of Land of the Oppressed, where Mauricia is the grand poobah of a school for villainy called Kontrabida Academy. There, one can, say, major in “revenge studies” and minor in slander, and learn about “alienating hairstyles” and how to properly face-slap and insult people. Mauricia wants Gigi to take over the Mimi role in the series. Gigi agrees, and, channeling her real-life frustration, excels in the cruelty arts. In goes Gigi, and out comes Gia, freshly made-over in visage and attitude. She will straighten out the jerks in her life now that she’s a rhymes-with-tortured-elevator-pitch, which I think is how this movie originated.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Kontrabida Academy is sorta the dual-realities stuff from The Matrix crossed with the flat, digital color palette and Harry Potter-derivative boarding school from Wicked. Although it mostly serves to remind one how unimpressed we were with chintzy high-concept Netflix slop The School for Good and Evil.
Performance Worth Watching: Domingo – who strikes me as roughly the Filipino Melissa McCarthy – hams it up in a central role that theoretically should anchor the movie, if it weren’t so unwieldy.
Memorable Dialogue: Mauricia boils down the main concept to Gigi: “Those are the only things that matter now – hero and villain. And right from the start, I knew which side you were on.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Kontrabida opens with a bromide of the streaming era: A flash-forward that theoretically hooks you so you don’t get bored with what should logically be the opening scene. It plays as if someone deep into post-production took a note from a Netflix suit and dropped in the scene at the last minute – and frankly, it’s not even that good of a scene. Please don’t get bored and go watch something else! is the implied message here. And you might not get bored and go watch something else at that point. You might give it a good solid 20 minutes and then get bored and go watch something else. Which, to be frank, is about 15 minutes more than this movie deserves.
Not that there isn’t potential in the core idea, a meta-commentary on the cornball tropes of soaps, which could work if it was fashioned as a sharp satire with crisp dialogue and fully realized characters. But Martinez’s attempt to mashup genres is a classic case of trying to do too much, as Gigi transforms from a meek young woman to a scenery-gnashing villain who uses her newfound assertiveness to push back against the jerks in her life, which makes her… not… really… a villain? Despite her fresh scowl and spike heels? And once the problems in her life are cleaned up at about the halfway point, the story remembers that the original intent was for her to star in the show-within-the-movie, which opens the door for self-aware critical commentary of popular escapist TV cheeze.
Which is to say, Kontrabida Academy struggles mightily to hang together as a focused narrative, foregoing sustained dramatic tension and drive for what’s best described as a whole buncha stuff. The Land of the Oppressed sequences loiter on the screen far too long (paging the editor), sapping the story’s momentum. And it’s as if the movie suddenly realizes there’s no real stakes as it gets down to the wire, so it haphazardly tosses in a new love interest for Gigi/Gia, and a conflict that attempts to bring together too many ideas and narrative strands. The screenplay reads more like a series pilot cut into two episodes. It’s overthought unto incoherence.
Our Call: Oh, and it’s derivative of far too many better things too. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.