WE’VE SEEN Vivamax latest movie released via streaming, “Taya”, and just like most of other Vivamax flicks shown recently, the material is very dark, a potent mix of sex and violence.
If you’re just after the sex scenes, you won’t be disappointed as they have nudity and bedscenes galore.
You can see Sean de Guzman’s naked butt in several scenes and you’d see the bare boobies of the three wild and wicked actresses featured in the movie: AJ Raval, Angela Khang and Gela Cuenca.
Sean is shown having individual sex scenes with each of them, some of which are just imagined. And in the climax, he is shown an orgy with all three of them simultaneously pleasuring him in bed in wild abandon.
It’s definitely soft porn and they’re just lucky that the censors can’t get their hands on streaming platforms, so such scenes are shown these days without any KJ cuts at all.
Voyeurs hungry for local stars (not the foreign porn stars they easily see for free on the internet) will surely have a heyday in satisfying their libido.
If you’re after violence, you also won’t feel frustrated as it has several torture scenes and murders.
There’s someone brutally killed in a parking lot by syndicate henchmen and a university professor is coldbloodedly killed by a gunman right inside his car.
The ending is a literal bloodbath, with someone’s head slit and you’d see blood spurting copiously from the cut on the victim’s neck. The director himself, Roman Perez Jr., portrays a killer here.
In one scene, he plays a jealous husband who shoots to death his wife’s lover, then his own unfaithful wife herself.
In all fairness to him, he succeeds in accomplishing the movie’s intentions in dishing out erotic and bloody scenes.
In the story, Sean plays Sixto, a student who’s overstaying in college because of continually failing grades.
His poor mom is having a hard time working her ass off in their province so he can get a degree in Manila, while he occupies himself by fantasizing on women while constantly pleasuring himself.
Later, he bets in an online game where the prize is a beautiful young lady.
He wins and gets a sexy woman, Nanette (AJ Raval), as his prize.
Actually, she is not the woman that he betted on but he accepts her anyway, since she’s already in the hotel room he rented for the occasion.
He quickly falls in love with her and offers to help her escape from the clutches of the syndicate that’s controlling her.
He takes her to a ramshackle hut surrounded by beautiful mountain scenery and the petite couple are seen making love in every other sequence.
But we all know one cannot survive on sex alone. Sean cannot find a job and they don’t even have money to buy fuel for their gas stove.
He just wants to have sex all the time, so it’s not surprising when he comes home one day and AJ is already gone.
From the start, it’s easy to guess that Sean is doomed as the lead character. He is a good for nothing guy and he doesn’t even elicit the viewer’s sympathy.
As one of the girls told him (who earlier also made the right observation on how women are treated as mere sex objects): “Cute ka pa naman, kaso, tanga ka.”
Honestly, how can you root or cheer for someone uninteresting and who is clearly a dumbass. When he gets the fate he surely deserves, we can only say: “Suffer! You idiot!”
In fairness to the movie, it’s better crafted than some of the Vivamax releases we’ve seen lately.
The cinematography is fine and the scenes of Sean and AJ making love inside a “kulambo” is an obvious tribute to Peque Gallaga’s “Scorpio Nights”.
The production design is also exceptional and the use of hiphop music in a number of scenes helps in sustaining our interest that easily easily wanes because we cannot sympathize with the characters.
As for the actors, at least, they’re all game when it comes to disrobing, which is what counts the most in this kind of movie.
While we’re at it, we wish Vivamax would show more films that will help lift up our spirits in this time of the pandemic.
Most of the films they've shown are onerously themed and only succeed in weighing us down instead of entertaining us.
For instance, we saw three of their films where the lead characters are, disturbingly, all sleazy psychotic killers: “Silab”, “Death of a Girlfriend” and “The Other Wife”. Does everyone have to be a nutcase?
In “Nerisa”, the lead actor gives his wife away to his drinking buddies for them to rape her, so she in turn, justifiably kills all of them. Earlier, the wife was also raped by a depraved law enforcer.
The movie ends leaving you not with an enjoyable but a very negative feeling, definitely something you won’t cherish in these times when we want to forget our troubles about the deadly virus and its pesky variants.
