Spoilers abound. You have been warned!

Wag Kang Lilingon (The Philippines, 2006)

Wag Kang Lilingon (Don’t Look Back) is two films for the price of one, tied together at the end by a clever plot twist. The twist is the best part of the movie, and it’s kind of a shame you have to sit through both films before you get to it, but such is life. The second movie, Salamin, is much better than the first, Uyayi.

Uyayi centers on Melissa, a heavily made-up young nurse who works the night shift at one of those typical decrepit Asian horror movie hospitals. The mortality rate of the hospital has shot up recently, and Melissa suspects foul play on the part of a rude doctor. She and her reporter boyfriend James concoct a plan to get him admitted so they can do some investigating. Their investigation turns up ghosts, and lots of them. But then Melissa discovers that James was once admitted to the psychiatric ward at the same hospital, and wonders if maybe he has some ulterior motives for wanting to be admitted again.

Of course he’s not. The big, totally predictable twist in Uyayi is that Melissa is nuttier than your Grandma’s fruit cake and is going around killing the crap out of the hospital’s clientele for some unspecified reason.

In the second movie, Salamin, Angel, her little sister Nina and their sick mother move into a huge, old house (that actually looks pretty cool). The rent is incredibly cheap, maybe because the electricity doesn’t work, but the landlord claims nothing else is wrong with the house, and especially that no one ever died there. Angel and Nina find a mirror in the basement and play a game involving a candle, asking the mirror to show them their future husbands. The mirror does not oblige, but it does open a portal to the afterlife and the future, so ghosts from both the past and future start wandering into the house. In an apparently unrelated incident, Angel learns that the landlord is a big fat liar, and that a woman was attacked by intruders in their house and raped and murdered. Then the intruders come back for Angel, and little Nina has to watch her mom and her sister be killed.

Nina grows up to be a nurse, changes her name to Melissa, and starts killing people in a misguided attempt to regain her dead family.

Wag Kang Lilingon’s main problem is that some of the plot is obscure to the point of not making sense. It’s never quite explained how Melissa’s murders keep her mother’s and sister’s spirits with her. Nor is it made clear how the mirror is letting in spirits from other times, or what that has to do with what happens to Angel and her mother. In one scene, a hospital patient clearly sees some of the resident ghosts, and he appears to die of fright, so how was Melissa responsible for his death? I’m all for a little mystery, but it’s frustrating not to be told basic stuff like that (even beyond the usual cinematic silliness; like how the cops can’t connect a dozen hospital murders to Melissa, or why people keep living in an obviously haunted house).

That said, the movie has some nicely creepy aspects. Uyayi is shot with a greenish camera filter, so all the footage looks like a horror video game. The hospital ghosts are seriously weird: one looks like Heath Ledger’s Joker after being locked up in Arkham Asylum for ten years; another is a naked black man with a scary leer. Salamin has a poltergeist scene that is well-done, culminating in the appearance of another creepy ghost.

Salamin is slowly paced, and you have to wonder why it’s taking so long to get through apparently irrelevant stuff before you reach the end.

The acting is decent, though Anne Curtis, who plays Melissa, needs to lay off the eye shadow and rouge- she’s pretty enough without it.

Recommend-o-meter: The ending is pretty neat, but you have to sit through two hours of mediocrity to get there. If you read this whole review, you can skip the movie entirely since you already know the ending.