WE WANT to advice the guardians of our morality and the manangs out there not to watch “Scorpio Nights 3” now streaming on Vivamax as it will surely scandalize them.
It opens with Mark Anthony Fernandez, wounded and full of blood and carrying a gun, crawling out of a van.
Then it cuts to Gold Aceron having a threesome in bed with two totally naked women.
Throughout the movie, you’ll see graphic sex scenes with both female and male frontal nudity, including a scene where lead actress Christine Bermas gives a blowjob to an erect man’s organ. If the MTRCB would see this, they'd go berserk.
This is a homage to Peque Gallaga who did the original “Scorpio Nights” and as some sort of tribute, it features Peque’s assistant, Lore Reyes, in an acting role as the professor of Gold in the college where he is taking up engineering.
They retain the core story of a man, Mark Anthony as Drake, and his partner, Christine as Pinay, moving to a room in the ground floor of an aksesorya (same setting as the original).
A horny student, Gold as Matt, lives upstairs and becomes a peeping Tom who ogles at them while they’re making love each time Drake comes home from work at night.
The remake is written by Roy Iglesias and directed by Law Fajardo and they’ve taken a lot of liberty in retelling the story.
First, to update it, Christine (in the role originally played by Anna Marie Gutierrez) is now not a mere stay at home wifey but a cam girl who services foreign clients.
Gold (previously played by Daniel Fernando) is now a band member who even gets to sing a couple of songs while accompanying himself on the guitar and keyboards.
It’s the role of Mark Anthony which is expanded the most.
In the first film, Orestes Ojeda is a security guard and we know nothing else about him.
Here, Mark works as a bodyguard to a top lawyer, Julio Diaz, and he even figures in an action scene when he fights back at their tormentors led by Lander Vera Perez.
The biggest change is in the ending, which is the total opposite of the original.
We won’t reveal what happened exactly as it would be a spoiler, but Peque loyalists will surely be taken by surprise by the way this new movie is concluded.
Mark Anthony is extremely good in that final sequence, standing out as the bitter cuckolded husband.
We wish he’d be given more demanding dramatic roles and enough of that kind of villanous roles he played in “Deception”, “Kaliwaan” and “Doblado”.
The question now is: which is the better film, the original or the remake?
Honestly, we don’t want to make any comparisons. Law Fajardo’s film has more nudity, more unabashed sex scenes, more violence and it’s beautifully photographed with an involving musical score.
But we have to confess that we were more emotionally affected by Peque’s film which is a compelling seminal piece of erotica that also makes a biting social commentary on the poverty of urban dwellers living in very crowded, squalid conditions that look like a deadend where there is no escape and no bright future waiting for any of them.
Also, Daniel Fernando makes a more credible stud than Gold Aceron, who, in all fairness, is quite good.
But he looks so “totoy” on screen, with him so vertically challenged that it’s difficult to believe that women will find him so irresistible that they keep on seducing him.
But we’re glad that after making all those BL shows where he made love to men, he finally gets the chance to do steamy love scenes with various women this time.
