Batch '81

$10.00

Mike De Leon, 1982, Philippines, 100min

Complementing Kispmata’s horrific vision of a ruling, paternalistic family despot, Mike De Leon’s Batch '81 expands its critique to include tomorrow’s tyrants. Freshman Sid Lucero (Mark Gil, in his breakout performance), desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over the course of a gruelling initiation process, he goes through every humiliation to please his “masters” — even as their treatment veers into increasingly fascistic, cult-like territory. Overt echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter abound in De Leon’s claustrophobic college drama: a film that subverts expectation by casting college life in a sinister blood-red light.

Mike De Leon, 1982, Philippines, 100min

Complementing Kispmata’s horrific vision of a ruling, paternalistic family despot, Mike De Leon’s Batch '81 expands its critique to include tomorrow’s tyrants. Freshman Sid Lucero (Mark Gil, in his breakout performance), desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over the course of a gruelling initiation process, he goes through every humiliation to please his “masters” — even as their treatment veers into increasingly fascistic, cult-like territory. Overt echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter abound in De Leon’s claustrophobic college drama: a film that subverts expectation by casting college life in a sinister blood-red light.