Batch ’81

Director Mike De Leon’s angriest and most direct film mounts a bold challenge to Ferdinand Marcos’s rule of the Philippines through martial law, asking hard questions about masculinity, indoctrination, free will, and the banality of evil. College freshman Sid Lucero (Mark Gil) desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over the course of a grueling initiation process, he goes through every humiliation to please his “masters”—even as their treatment veers into increasingly fascistic, cultlike 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 expectations by casting university life in a sinister, blood-red light.

Starring Mark Gil, Sandy Andolong, Ward Luarca