The Filipino horror fest “The Road” has a minimal plot — and even that isn’t especially original — but its director/co-writer/cinematographer, Yam Laranas, still delivers a maximum of suspense and horror, working wonders with a small budget.
The three-part chiller opens in 2008, after the promotion of a local cop, who is besieged by a woman to help find her two young daughters, who vanished 10 years earlier, along with a boy. The story flashes back to 1998, and then 1988, to explain who is doing what to whom — and why.
In the first part, the three teens get lost on a deserted, maze-like country road and encounter a driverless car and a bloodied woman with a plastic bag tied around her head. (It’s a motif that Laranas will use several more times.) In the next part, two other girls, driving on the same road, are kidnapped by a backwoods boy, who chains and tortures them. Part three explores the boy’s childhood with his disturbed parents.
“The Road” takes several horror genres and melds them into a creepy, stylishly photographed story that will keep horror buffs revved up from start to finish.