Rage

Some women just can't catch a break. Not days before her marriage to the seemingly charming Jake, Luisa is brutally raped by Eric, a police investigator who, staggeringly drunk at the time, thought she was a hooker he'd paid to bang, until she changed her mind at the last minute and fought him off. Luisa goes through with the ceremony, but the wedding night? Still traumatized by the rape, she finds out who and what her husband REALLY is, when he then proceeds to rape her, too!

Convinced that he's being cuckolded by her "secret lover", Jake constantly beats and mistreats her for her absences from work and from home. But what she's really been doing is trying to find her rapist. Eventually, she does find Eric, with every intention of killing him in revenge for ruining her life. But the story THEN takes a left turn you don't expect, and Eric and Luisa end up together. In order to make amends for what he did to her, Eric plans on making sure that Jake never bothers her again...but Luisa never thought that would include murder.

And you'd think that Eric taking out the evil Jake would be the end of the story. WRONG! The thing is, however, if you've seen enough dramas like this, then you won't be at all surprised when you guess what twists the story will take, and you turn out to be 100% correct! For what it is, the performances are pretty good, and Maricel Soriano is a sympathetic, if somewhat wishy-washy heroine as Luisa, but that IS the way the role was written. (Plus, it was the 1990's),

Talk about potboilers, this one definitely blows the lid off. Having lived in the Philippines and gotten used to movies and TV over there, I know how popular Filipino soap operas are, and this could have easily covered several episodes of one. If you're familiar with 'telenovelas', this is very similar in tone and style, so you know about what to expect. Otherwise, you'll probably want to skip it.