Thank you to Star Cinema’s Maria Leonora Teresa for the closure!

It suddenly now makes sense to me! I’ve always had this song that kept ringing out from childhood memories in my head that sort of went “maria-nora-teresaaannnaaaaa”. All I knew about it is the melody that accompanies it and that it came from a 1970s movie where Tirso Cruz III sang it to Nora Aunor.

And then Star Cinema’s horror film Maria Leonora Teresa comes out and the dots are connected (including me finding out I didn’t get the names quite right)! Maria Leonora Theresa is the name of a doll Tirso gives to Nora which their fans at the time got so kilig over; what they regarded as the then 1970s love team’s “adopted daughter”.

The 2014 film, however, has nothing to do with Nora Aunor’s doll Maria Leonora Theresa (the third name spelled with an “h” unlike its counterpart in the movie title). According to Wikipedia, the plot goes like this:

After a tragic incident during their field trip, three parents, Faith (Calzado), Julio (Marudo), and Stella (Sta. Maria) mourned the deaths of their respective daughters, Maria, Leonora, and Teresa.To help cope with their loss, a psychiatrist named Manolo (Villanueva) offers them life-sized dolls to look after, but the situation only worsens when the toys appear to be brought to life by a sinister force.

Not really the most original of plots, of course. In fact, there were a lot of those sorts of horror movies back in the 1970s, the very era when the original Maria Leonora Theresa (with an “h”) came out on film. Dolls, for that matter, particularly those types portrayed in MLT, and the one Pip gave to Guy in 1972 are particularly creepy so not surprisingly, I didn’t really grow up surrounded by these.

For that matter, I’m not really convinced that a shrink, in his right mind, would prescribe dolls to grieving parents as a form of therapy. I mean, just putting on my armchair psychoanalyst hat, I would’ve thought that the best way to deal with grief is to move on as you put in the hard mental work of putting the memory of the loved one you had lost in a healthy place within your psyche.

Then again, this is a horror flick, where a simple plot or premise can be stretched into two hours of the old familiar formulaic rapid-editing-induced screams. Well, at least someone got something out of it. I’ve finally gained closure on that formerly mysterious tune ringing in my head! 🙂