It’s clear Chito Rono enjoyed himself immensely in finding an actor-producer like ER who willingly gave in to all his cinematic whims. His “Boy Golden” is totally different from all his past films and from other local gangster films in the past. Chito had fun even with the period production design, the costumes, the neon lights, in building colorful sets that seem strange then peppering it with red as blood spurts continuously in the violent action scenes.
The film version is a fictional account on the life of 60s gangster Arturo Porcuna or Boy Golden, who’s just been released from prison and now out to take revenge on Razon (John Estrada). Razon earlier raped and killed his sister and also decimated his members in Bahala Na Gang, which Boy used to lead as Boy Anino. He now tags himself as Boy Golden (it’s not explained how he got this alias) and hooks up with Marla De Guzman (KC Concepcion), a dancer who's also seeking revenge after she was raped by Razon.
From the opening scene showing Boy Golden killing kingpin Joem Bascon and his men in a bar while dancing to the tune of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes”, you know you shouldn’t take the movie that seriously, what with that cartoonish doddering old man shown walking through the bar oblivious to all the shooting going on around him. This is followed by a lavish musical sequence in a cabaret showing sequinned dancing girls to introduce us to Marla D.
In another set piece, tough guys break out into song singing Elvis’ “Hound Dog” before a big shootout in the streets that ends with the Bahala Na Gang members clad in white outfits doing parkour on rooftops. Chito aims to create not a realistic but a stylized flamboyant world of criminals who have been lionized in various films on them by the local film industry through the years.
Even the name of some of the characters are out of this world, like Roi Vinzon as Tecla (who meets his death in the most unexpected way from a most unexpected killer) and Baron Geisler as Datu Putla (whose face is covered with white makeup to make him look deathly pale). Putla meets one of the grisliest death scenes in local cinema. Dick Israel’s Boy Bungal also figures in a great scene, where KC Concepcion engages with a Chinese girl in an extended over-the-top fight scene in an opium-gambling den, while Boy Golden slashes both his wrists and we see his blood trickling down into the white basins below. Then we’re even offered an unexpected love story between old folks, Eddie Garcia and Gloria Sevilla, who both give exceptional performances in such relatively short roles.
Quite well crafted, Carlo Mendoza’s cinematography manages to project a colorful exciting but campy world combined with a score that mixes opera music with piano concertos. Jeorge Estregan is incredibly well photographed here, with no pores or creases on his face at all. KC Concepcion also excels as the ass-kicking, gun-toting Marla, a total departure from the sweet girl-next-door kind of roles she used to play in her past movies. They get splendid support from a uniformly fine supporting cast.
If we’d nitpick, we’d wish the film can be trimmed down as it runs for over two hours and drags toward the end, especially at the epilogue when it suddenly moralizes to stress to us that “crime does not pay”. It’s as if they got scared that the MTRCB might not pass it if it doesn’t show that the story has such redeeming moral values. It feels like an honest to goodness copout.
