When the Franchise Should’ve Stayed in the Coffin
By the time you get to the tenth entry in a horror anthology series, you’d expect one of two things: either the filmmakers have achieved genre mastery, or they’ve given up entirely and are just throwing aswangs, ghosts, and tree spirits into a blender to see what happens. Shake, Rattle & Roll X gleefully chooses the latter.
This 2008 Filipino horror anthology — directed by Michael Tuviera and Topel Lee and produced by Regal Entertainment — is a cinematic buffet of chaos. It’s got killer nuns, pregnant demons, tree fairies, exploding aswangs, and about twenty too many screaming teenagers. It’s the highest-grossing entry in the series, which only proves that sometimes, box office success is the Devil’s favorite trick.
Watching it feels like surviving three different nightmares stitched together by sheer force of will — or by a producer who said, “We have Marian Rivera, Kim Chiu, and some leftover fake blood, let’s make art.”
Episode 1: Emergency — When Healthcare Meets Hellcare
The first story, Emergency, begins with two men running over a pregnant woman at night — because apparently, the film wanted to open with trauma and bad lighting. They rush her to a hospital where everyone acts like they’re trapped in a bad soap opera filmed during a brownout.
Radiologist Sarah (Roxanne Guinoo) examines the woman only to discover — gasp — the baby is dead. But plot twist: the woman is actually an aswang. Cue the screaming, stabbing, and at least one priest dramatically splashing holy water like he’s trying to put out a barbecue fire.
Soon, the hospital is crawling with flying monsters, and our heroes resort to electrocution, fire sprinklers, and questionable chemistry to survive. By the end, everyone’s dead except for a demon baby that apparently survived the climax just to wink at the camera like, “See you in Shake, Rattle & Roll XI.”
It’s all very The Exorcist meets Grey’s Anatomy, if both were shot in an abandoned community college. There’s blood, there’s slime, there’s theology — but mostly there’s confusion.
Still, there’s an odd charm in how seriously everyone takes it. When Dr. Ignacio yells, “She’s not human!” it’s less a revelation and more a cry for help from the audience.
Episode 2: Class Picture — School Spirit, But Make It Murder
Next up is Class Picture, the obligatory haunted-school story — because if there’s one thing the Shake, Rattle & Rollseries loves, it’s punishing students for higher education.
Kim Chiu and Gerald Anderson lead a group of college kids forced to stay on campus for the weekend (the true horror). They find an old class photo from 1898 featuring a creepy nun, Sister Maria Belonia (Jean Garcia, clearly enjoying herself), who terrorizes anyone dumb enough to make eye contact with her picture.
The episode’s message is clear: never look too long at history, or it’ll kill you.
As their friends vanish one by one, our heroes slowly realize that Belonia was a disciplinary nun who took corporal punishment way too literally. Now she’s a vengeful spirit trying to “complete her class photo” by murdering coeds — proving that ghost teachers are even worse than living ones.
The story ends with Joy (Chiu) confronting the nun with the help of the spirits of Belonia’s old victims. Together they tear up the cursed photo and send Belonia back to ghost detention.
It’s a story with genuine potential — if only it weren’t bogged down by enough screaming to qualify as an ASMR channel for the damned. Every scene is accompanied by a violin shriek, a jump scare, and at least one student running through hallways lit like a karaoke bar.
Still, credit where it’s due: Jean Garcia’s ghost nun is terrifying. If she showed up in your nightmares, you’d probably graduate on time just to make her stop haunting you.
Episode 3: Nieves the Engkanto Slayer — Buffy, but Make It Barangay
By the time we get to Nieves the Engkanto Slayer, you can feel the filmmakers collectively deciding, “Screw it, let’s just make a fantasy action-comedy.”
Marian Rivera stars as Nieves, a cheerful yet deadly slayer of engkanto (Filipino nature spirits with a bad temper and even worse fashion sense). She’s retired from monster hunting, living with her hot engkanto husband Adonis (Pekto, whose name alone is its own joke). But when tree spirits start murdering townsfolk, Nieves grabs her sword, her attitude, and her eyeliner and heads back into battle.
This segment is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer filtered through local folklore and a soap-opera lens. There are sparkly special effects, flying fireballs, and dialogue so melodramatic it could curdle milk.
Diana Zubiri plays Acacia, the vengeful engkanto queen, with the energy of someone who knows she’s in a silly movie but refuses to waste good eyeliner. There’s also a kid sidekick, Junie (Robert Villar), who won an award for this role — presumably for managing to say his lines with a straight face.
Eventually, Nieves kills Acacia with a fireball slingshot, rescues her husband, and saves the town. Cue upbeat music, slow-motion cheering, and a collective sigh of relief from the audience, who’ve just survived an hour of sparkly chaos.
This segment is fun in a “we ran out of budget but not enthusiasm” sort of way. It’s campy, ridiculous, and probably the only part of the film that knows exactly what it is: a fantasy telenovela that accidentally wandered into a horror festival.
The Problem: Three Films, Zero Cohesion
The anthology format should be a blessing — three stories, three chances to scare us. Instead, Shake, Rattle & Roll X feels like being trapped in a haunted buffet: everything looks different, but it all tastes vaguely the same and leaves you queasy.
Each segment has its own tone: Emergency tries for gritty body horror, Class Picture goes for ghostly Gothic, and Nievesaims for action-comedy. The result? Whiplash. It’s like watching The Exorcist, The Conjuring, and Power Rangers: Forest Spirits back-to-back, directed by three people who’ve never met.
The writing is patchy, the pacing schizophrenic, and the acting oscillates between “commendably sincere” and “school play on Red Bull.”
Also, the runtime. Nearly two hours long. That’s right — this anthology dares you to stay conscious through more screaming, crying, and supernatural slime than any human deserves.
The Good, the Bad, and the Utterly Bewildering
The Good:
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Jean Garcia’s terrifying nun.
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Marian Rivera’s charm, even while fighting glowing fairies.
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The production design in Emergency, which makes every hospital corridor look like a waiting room in purgatory.
The Bad:
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The dialogue. (“We must bless the sprinkler system!” is not the triumphant line the writers thought it was.)
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The CGI, which looks like it was rendered on a Nokia 3310.
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The sound effects, which seem to have been stolen from a haunted car wash.
The Bewildering:
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The baby in Emergency that survives holy water to deliver a final jump scare.
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The inexplicable Chavacano phrase “No me mires fijamente,” which somehow triggers more deaths than a chainsaw.
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Pekto as a seductive nature spirit. Truly, cinema has gone too far.
Final Thoughts: Shake, Rattle & Regret
Shake, Rattle & Roll X isn’t the worst horror anthology ever made — it’s just aggressively medium. It’s the cinematic equivalent of reheated sinigang: familiar, a little sour, and somehow comforting even when it’s bad for you.
But hey, it’s part of a beloved franchise. It’s campy, earnest, and proof that Filipinos can find joy even in the ridiculous. You might not be scared, but you’ll definitely be entertained — or at least too confused to change the channel.
Grade: C– (for “Creepy, Confusing, and Campy”)
If horror anthologies are supposed to thrill and chill, Shake, Rattle & Roll X mostly shakes and occasionally rattles, but by the end, all it really does is roll — over, exhausted, into its own grave.
Still, if you ever wanted to see an aswang fight a defibrillator, a nun murder students through a JPEG, and Marian Rivera karate-kick a fairy queen, congratulations. Your oddly specific wish has finally been granted.
