The Shake, Rattle, And Roll horror omnibus has been one of the most successful franchises in Filipino cinema. The series premiered in 1985 with episodes directed by three prominent local directors: Emmanuel Borlaza, Peque Gallaga, and Ishmael Bernal. Borlaza, who specialized in romantic melodramas, directed the Spirit Of The Glass episode, in which a group of friends play with an ouija board and become possessed by spirits from the Spanish colonial period. Gallaga did the episode Manananggal, about a creature from lower Philippine mythology which appears as a beautiful woman by day and transforms into a flying cannibal monster at night. Gallaga went on to direct other horror films such as Tiyanak and Sa Piling Ng Aswang. Ishmael Bernal, the preeminent social critic and chronicler of the Filipino bourgeoisie, did Pridyider (The Refrigerator), the story of a Filipino family that moves into a house in a middle-class neighborhood and finds itself terrorized by... a refrigerator. The eighth incarnation of Shake, Rattle, And Roll opened at the 2005 Metro Manila film festival, and in a field dominated by fantasy epics, proved to be the most profitable entry. The three episodes were directed by Uro de la Cruz (who had written the Manananggal episode in the original SRR), Richard Somes, and Rico Maria Ilarde. Ilarde’s episode, Aquarium, is the story of an upwardly-mobile family which moves into a condominium and is promptly terrorized by... an aquarium. Inevitably it has been compared to Pridyider, although Ilarde is less interested in making a social statement. The young couple (Ogie Alcasid and Ara Mina) are having problems - he spends too much time at work and has whispered phone calls at odd hours, leading his wife to suspect that he is having an affair. Their young son finds an aquarium apparently abandoned by the previous tenants, and insists on using it. Naturally, strange things begin to happen. The wife gets surprise visits from a spooky old woman who warns her of the dire consequences of using the aquarium; in the usual horror movie fashion, the warning is not obeyed. Then again, if warnings were followed in horror movies, there would be no horror movies. Aquarium is not particularly scary, but it is good popcorn fun and Ilarde displays his technical proficiency at the genre. Comic relief is provided by fashion model turned actress Wilma Doesn’t as the family’s loquacious housemaid.