Five Senses, Zero Sense
Every year, the Metro Manila Film Festival blesses us with movies that range from heartfelt dramas to horror films that make you want to personally apologize to your eyeballs. Buy Now, Die Later proudly belongs in the latter category—a movie so aggressively mediocre that you almost admire its commitment to chaos. Directed by Randolph Longjas, this horror anthology promises a Faustian thrill ride through greed, vanity, and demonic e-commerce. What it delivers instead is two hours of tonal confusion, soap-opera acting, and CGI that looks like it was borrowed from a Windows 98 screensaver.
The premise sounds promising on paper: a mysterious shopkeeper named Santi (TJ Trinidad) sells cursed items tied to the five senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Each item grants its owner their greatest desire, with predictably deadly results. It’s basically Black Mirror if Black Mirror had been rewritten by a mall kiosk salesperson.
Unfortunately, Buy Now, Die Later doesn’t understand the first rule of horror anthologies: the stories must either connect meaningfully or at least be entertaining while pretending to. Instead, we get a cinematic buffet of half-baked morality tales glued together by a villain who looks like he spends his weekends at cosplay conventions.
Segment 1: “Masid” (Sight) — A Picture Worth a Thousand Yawns
The first story introduces us to Odie (Vhong Navarro), a struggling photojournalist who dreams of fame, fortune, and better dialogue. After failing to capture a scandalous photo of a congressman and his mistress, he stumbles into Santi’s cursed curio shop and buys a camera that promises success. You can probably guess what happens next: everyone Odie photographs mysteriously dies, and his career skyrockets faster than your will to live plummets while watching this segment.
What might have been a creepy parable about voyeurism turns into a Lifetime movie about bad lighting. The kills are tame, the pacing glacial, and the scares about as frightening as a dead pixel. By the time Odie realizes the camera is possessing him, we realize we’ve been possessed by regret.
Vhong Navarro tries his best, but he’s fighting a script that treats foreshadowing like an optional feature. When his eyes finally get stabbed in the finale, it’s poetic justice—not for him, but for the audience who’s been longing for the sweet release of darkness.
Segment 2: “Dinig” (Hearing) — American Idol Meets The Exorcist
Next up is Chloe (Alex Gonzaga), a singer so tone-deaf she makes the StarSpangled Banner at karaoke sound like an exorcism. Her overbearing mother (Lotlot de Leon) drags her to Santi’s store, where she’s gifted a magic phone that makes her voice sound amazing. In return, she must never destroy it or answer unknown messages. Naturally, she does both—because if horror movies had sensible characters, they’d be documentaries.
Chloe skyrockets to stardom, the phone starts texting her cryptic death threats, and before long, everyone who wronged her ends up dead. Gonzaga’s performance oscillates between “soap opera breakdown” and “music video audition,” and somehow manages to miss both marks.
The moral lesson—don’t trust technology—is as subtle as a megaphone at a funeral. The segment ends with Chloe being run over by a car, which might be the film’s only genuinely satisfying moment. The soundtrack tries to make it tragic, but the audience can practically hear the collective sigh of relief.
Segment 3: “Sarap” (Taste) — Hell’s Kitchen, but Make It Cannibalism
In “Sarap,” Rayver Cruz plays Ato, a restaurant owner who goes from “guy who grills meat” to “guy who grills people” faster than you can say “Bon Appétit.” After consulting Santi, he receives a recipe book that turns him into a culinary success story—with the minor side effect of turning him into a serial killer chef.
It’s a concept that could’ve worked if handled with either subtlety or satire. Instead, it’s handled like a telenovela crossed with a cooking show from hell. The twist—that Ato’s secret ingredient is human meat—is telegraphed about five minutes in, but the film stretches it out like expired dough.
Watching him poison a family with cake is less shocking and more confusing. Why are they eating so much cake? Why is everyone in this movie allergic to common sense? And why does every horror anthology have to include at least one character who clearly deserves a Food Network spin-off?
At least this segment delivers some unintentional laughs. When Ato smugly declares that his customers “can’t get enough of his meat,” the movie accidentally becomes the funniest thing you’ll see all week.
Segment 4: “Halimuyak” (Smell) — Eau de Disaster
Enter John Lapus as Pippa, a flamboyant perfume addict who just wants to be loved—and ends up becoming a walking deodorant commercial from hell. After being humiliated on a date, Pippa buys a magical perfume that makes him irresistible to men. Naturally, he uses it like it’s body spray at a teenage disco, and soon his admirers turn into drooling zombies.
Lapus gives it his all, chewing the scenery like it owes him rent, but the tone is so uneven it’s hard to tell whether we’re supposed to laugh or cry—or spray Febreze. What starts as a queer empowerment fable quickly devolves into a perfume-induced apocalypse. By the time Pippa is running from a mob of handsome zombie suitors, you can almost smell the desperation through the screen.
This segment could’ve been campy fun, but it’s trapped between parody and self-serious horror. Instead, it feels like a rejected Twilight Zone episode sponsored by Bench cologne.
Segment 5: “Kanti” (Touch) — Keep Your Hands to Yourself
By this point, anyone still watching deserves hazard pay. The final story tries to tie everything together, focusing on Maita (Lotlot de Leon again), Chloe’s mother, who begs Santi to lift her daughter’s curse. Instead, she gets an anti-aging cream that literally makes her skin crawl.
There’s some potential here—a commentary on vanity, trauma, and the curse of beauty—but the execution is as wrinkled as Maita’s before-and-after shots. The CGI bugs crawling under her skin are laughably bad, and her eventual meltdown in a bar feels less like horror and more like a bachelorette party gone wrong.
By the time all the cursed characters reunite to fight Santi, the movie devolves into full-blown chaos. Everyone’s screaming, the Devil is monologuing, and the editing looks like it was done by a blender. When the shop finally burns down and Santi “dies,” the audience collectively checks the time, realizing they’ve aged ten years and are probably cursed too.
The Devil Wears Discount Wardrobe
TJ Trinidad’s Santi is supposed to be menacing—a smooth-talking Satan dealing in cursed trinkets. Instead, he looks like the manager of an underperforming mall boutique who’s about to upsell you a loyalty card. His makeup screams “Halloween clearance aisle,” and his dialogue is 50% vague threats, 50% “rules that will be broken in 10 minutes.”
He pops up in every story like a passive-aggressive customer service rep from hell. “Did you read the terms and conditions?” he practically asks. “No? Well, enjoy eternal damnation.”
The Real Curse: The Runtime
At over two hours, Buy Now, Die Later is a marathon of missed opportunities. The film tries to balance morality play, camp comedy, and supernatural horror—and fails at all three. Its five stories never truly connect, and the few attempts at emotional depth sink under the weight of melodrama and poor pacing.
The cinematography looks decent at times, but the script feels like it was stitched together during a caffeine high. Every twist is predictable, every scare is telegraphed, and every “moral lesson” is hammered home like a PowerPoint slide from Sunday school.
Final Verdict: A Five-Sense Failure
In the end, Buy Now, Die Later is less a horror anthology and more a cautionary tale about what happens when ambition exceeds execution. It’s like Goosebumps for adults who forgot how to have fun.
There’s a decent movie buried somewhere in this mess—a biting satire about greed and vanity—but it’s suffocated under bad writing, worse acting, and enough product-placement energy to power an infomercial.
Final Score: 1.5 out of 5 cursed trinkets.
Buy now if you must—but you’ll definitely die of boredom later.
