Altar

NOTE: Updated without Watermark.

It’s the story of Anton, an ex-boxer who wakes up in an airless room, seemingly without any sense of direction or purpose. A fateful breeze wafts into the room; a tabloid newspaper opens to a specific page: “Help wanted.” He ends up watching a dilapidated old house in the lonelier outskirts of Metro Manila.

Anton is a former boxer who retired upon accidentally killing an opponent in the ring during a prizefight in the U.S. Returning to the Philippines, he finds himself destitute and jobless. He is hired by a mysterious foreman named Erning who assigns him and a companion named Lope to renovate a lone, decrepit house on a hill at the outskirts of Metro Manila. While working in relative isolation in the house, an apparition of a ghostly child appears to Anton seeking his help to release her from the clutches of a demonic-looking entity dressed in a cloak and mask, who enslaves the little girl inside the second-story room of the house. Despite specific instructions not to open the locked basement door of the house, the mischievous Lope’s insatiable curiosity leads him to do the exact opposite. He inspects the contents of that peculiar cellar of the home. Standing against a corner wall of the room, he finds a large antique wooden altar on top of which is the carved bust of a strange dark woman, eyes shut, seemingly in peaceful prayer. One creepy event leads to another. The men make the acquaintance of a pair of pretty maids, Angie and Giselle, who work for one of the neighborhood’s other households. Anton and Angie quickly develop a budding romance and he solicits her help to unlock the ghostly house’s strange and dark mystery. Little does Anton know that his arrival in the house was never sheer coincidence, but the deliberate, nefarious plan of a mysterious figure doing the bidding of a truly terrifying and evil force. Bloodcurdling events occur, one after the other, till all these snowball towards a violent climax.

Director: Rico Maria Ilarde
Writers: Rico Maria Ilarde (screenplay), Mammu Chua (screenplay)
Stars: Zanjoe Marudo, Nor Domingo, Dimples Romana, Dido de la Paz, Krista Miller, Raul Morit, Anna Marie Faybyshev, Katya Guerrero, Ranny Comia, Eduardo Torralba, Johnny Bam, Mildred Formanez