Viva One is actually a sub-label with Vivamax (which means you can use your subscription to Vivamax to access Viva One film or series).

Viva One has less damning sex scenes than Vivamax potboilers. That’s because Viva One stars don’t appear in Vivamax factory films – though in this mayhem movie this May, a Vivamax star is making her Viva One debut in what should be a fully clothed character. That actor is Rose Van Ginkel whose last Vivamax engagement was in Stalker, a four-episide series streamed in February last year.

As if to make its latest offering fit for the summer get-away movies of this literally sizzling heat wave season, Viva One titles it as Sem Break whose storyline is about a getaway trip to a beach resort with a famous lighthouse (parola in Tagalog).

In real life, many coastal resorts are close to old lighthouses and the closest to Metro Manila is a beach resort in Calaca, Batangas. That’s where some scenes in the film were helmed by Roni S. Benaid, who specializes in directing horror movies. He did two last year, and both had names of women as titles: Mary Cherry Chua and Marita. The former top-billed (Ashley Diaz, a daughter character actor Joko Diaz, who also appeared in the film though not as a father of Ashley’s character). The latter was headlined by Rhen Escaño. Both movies were shown in cinemas, not streamed on Vivamax.

Sem Break is a youth horror story bannered by the loveteam of Krissha Viaje and Jerome Ponce, Aubrey Caraan, Hyacinth Collado, Gab Lagman and Keann Johnson as college schoolmates who decide during their semestral to do a get-away from the city by hanging out in a beach resort near a fabled Spanish-era lighthouse, which is no longer open to the public. The characters played by Viaje, Ponce, Caraan and Johnson escape from their quarters and do the so-called 3 AM challenge of sneaking into the forbidden lighthouse. They make fall it to the top of the light house but they seem to fall into a disorienting trance that made it supremely difficult for them to go down the spiral metal stairs. They feel like they were trapped in a labyrinth even if it is a narrow winding stairs that they are negotiating to get out of the lighthouse.

When they finally get out, they agreed among themselves that they wouldn’t talk about the terrifying experience to the two friends they left behind in their quarters.

But some malevolent spirits join them in the car and into their homes. And folklore has it that there are evil spirits who join the living who unknowingly messed up their dwelling place (which may be the peak of a light house).

Ginkel and child actor Dani Zee are among the cast that portray the spirit beings that go with the bunch of college students to the city. The beings cause mysterious, disturbing events in the college students’ lives.

Even if her role in Sem Break is despicable, Ginkel feels very good about finally getting assigned an asexual role. In fact, she has been picked to portray two other character roles in two other Viva Films projects one of which is The Elevator, now showing in theaters as a Kylie Versoza and Paulo Avelino topbiller.

Ginkel, 29, a Filipina-Dutch born in The Netherlands, boldly rejected 12 Viva assignments offered to her as far back as one-and-a-half years ago. Her last Vivamax movie was Stalker, streamed in 2022. it was the last straw that broke her back on being a skinflix star.

In November last year, she told PEP website reporter Jojo that her being offered sexy roles by Vivamax had begun to affect her mental health, her self-worth and self-confidence.

She actually started her career at Viva as a singer but before that, she was among the almost a dozen co-hosts of the German Moreno midnight show Walang Tulugan, which aired on GMA 7 in the early 2000s. Ginkel was there variously with the likes of Sanya Lopez, and her brother Jak Roberto who both stayed put at the Kapuso network and were eventually propelled to bigtime stardom.

Ginkel signed up with Viva Artists Agency and was made the lead vocalist of Viva Music’s Pop Girls from 2009 to 2017. That group included Nadine Lustre whom Viva built up into a fine actor by teaming her up with James Reid, an ABS-CBN discovery thru its reality show Pinoy Big Brother. Viva signed up the Fil-Australian after he came out of the contest.

As for Ginkel, she began to appear in Viva movies in 2014, and her first was in Talk Back and You’re Dead, topbilled by Lustre and Reid; ABNKKBSNPLako?! the bio-flm of the mysterious fiction writer Bob Ong, directed by Mark Meilly; and Diary ng Panget, also starring the Lustre-Reid loveteam.

Another Lustre film she appeared in was Indak. She also did Pakboys Takuza, a sex comedy directed by actor Al Tantay.

Her first Vivamax movie was Daryl Ong’s Gusto Kong Maging Porn Star. This was in 2020, and was followed by a string of support role appearances in the company’s sex-loaded outputs. In 2022, she was finally offered the title role in Kitty K7 in which she portrays a porn star online. She was teamed up with Marco Gallo who will eventually be yanked off from Vivamax and moved to Viva One as as Heaven Peralejo’s love interest. On the other hand, Ginkel was retained (detained?) in Vivamax for an even longer string of skinflix films. Her last was Stalker, a four-part sexy comedy-thriller series that reunited her with Wilbert Ross who was her leading man in Vivamax’s Boy Bastos in 2022.

The Ponce-Viaje love tandem was first introduced in Viva One’s Safe Skies, Archer series last year, with the older tandem of Heaven Peralejo and Marco Gallo launched in 2021 in the series Rain in España, adapted from a well-followed Wattpad novel on the Internet.

The Peralejo-Gallo loveteam is not anymore in Sem Break as it has been catapulted into movie stardom in Viva Films’ upcoming movie adaptation of the Stanley Chi novel Men are from QC, Women are from Alabang.

The actor bruited to get his grand turn in Sem Break is Gabby Lagman, 27, who has been with Viva for seven years. Last year, he was cast as the third wheel in the Viva movie Girlfriend Na Pwede Na starring real-life live-in lovers Kim Molina and Jerald Napoles.

In Sem Break, Lagman is paired with newcomer Hyacinth Collage, US-born-and-raised like Lagman.

The new loveteam is slated to banner Viva Studios TV adaptation ng University series Chasing In the Wild.

Sem Break begins streaming on Viva One on 10 May.