With Batch’81, Mike de Leon takes virulence up a notch. He films the initiation of would-be members of an elite student fraternity reserved for the sons of the country’s leaders. A path paved with sadism, humiliations, obscene staging (from the Milgram experiment in the Nazi cabarets) and, to finish, a blood bath. In the lineage of two monstrous films, Salò and Clockwork Orange, the filmmaker enragedly details the organisation of this small-scale manufacture of inhumanity, pulling on the taut thread stretched between the appetite for virile comradeship and small groups of fascists. Even more horrifying, he captures the state of a society in which a caste’s ambition for power makes it desirable to renounce the last shred of dignity. AR
Restored print
