BUYBUST (2018)

 Under President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines has faced international criticism for its draconian drug war as waged by a thuggish, purportedly authoritarian leader. Filmmaker Erik Matti reportedly is a critic of the Duterte government, but his ambitious action film feels like an attempt to have it both ways about the drug war. Both sides, pro and anti-Duterte, can read what they want into it. One side can point to a gruesome orgy of excessive force and the film's peeling away of layers of police duplicity and corruption. The other may find confirmation in the film of a belief that the slum dwellers among whom the drug dealers flourish are little better than rabid animals. The desired effect may well be to call a plague down on both houses, crooks and cops alike.

 

Basically a cross between The Raid and The Warriors, the film follows an elite police unit into one of the worst slums in an attempt to capture a notorious druglord. New to the team is Nina Manigan (Anne Curtis), recently the sole survivor of a bungled earlier raid. In training for her new role she's undisciplined, determined to take the initiative when her instructors insist on her following orders. As you might expect, exactly those qualities the instructors deplore will come in very handy when this raid also falls apart and proves to be a trap set for the cops. Lured into a labyrinthine urban kill-box, the team must undertake a grim anabasis back the way they came, fighting their way through neighborhoods mobilized to kill them. Some of the slum dwellers are clearly drug-crazed; others hope to earn a bounty on the cops; others still simply hate cops for making their communities collateral damage in the drug war. Others yet are plainly terrorized into cooperating, or else too terrified to help the police.

The force is winnowed down to two as we near the climax: Manigan and the hulking, Diesel-esque and almost indestructible Yatco (Brandon Michael Vera). They fight with increasing savagery even when repeated stabs and slashes should have worn or bled them out. However implausibly, Manigan outlasts the valiant Yatco and against all odds manages to capture the druglord. Her confrontation with Biggie Chen (Arjo Atayde) leads to a perhaps-predictable all-you-thought-you-knew-was-wrong moment when the gangster informs on Manigan's superiors, who prove all too eager to silence Biggie and possibly Manigan as well. Meanwhile, the news media reports thirteen killed in the raid when audiences might find ten times that number a conservative estimate.

Whatever critical intent Matti had is probably undermined by his heroine's almost cartoonish resilience and her slightly unconvincing prowess as a killing machine -- Anne Curtis is a pop singer and variety-show hostess in real life, but then again Takeshi Kitano was a game show host once upon a time -- and also by his arbitrary, inconsistent treatment of the slum dwellers. He wants them to be seen as victims as monsters at the same time, but since we presumably want Manigan, who is not corrupt, to survive we presumably root for her to annihilate all the obstacles in her path. The violence goes way over the top at times as Yatco decapitates a female attacker with garden shears after smacking her in the face with a cactus and he and Manigan escape a mob thanks to a mass electrocution. If over-the-top action is all you're looking for then I can recommend BuyBust as a compelling compendium of carnage enhanced by excellent cinematography by Neil Derrick Bion. But as a commentary on the Duterte drug war it's too enthusiastic about its ghoulish work and too easily tempted to dehumanize the actual victims of the story to say anything meaningful beyond the obvious. Something is clearly very wrong in that country, but BuyBust may be more a symptom than a diagnosis.

1898 (...Los ultimos de Filipinas, 2016)

There's something about the Philippines, I guess, that makes foreign soldiers very reluctant to leave. The U.S. definitely overstayed its welcome there, but at least we didn't leave last-ditch fanatics behind when we decided to leave. When I was growing up, however, the world was fascinated by stories of Japanese soldiers holed up in the islands for up to thirty years after the end of World War II. There was precedent for this, on a more modest scale, after the 1898 war in which the U.S. "liberated" the Philippines from Spain. Despite that crushing defeat, a Spanish garrison held out at Baler, in eastern Luzon, for nearly a year, surrendering only in June 1899. The siege of Baler was the subject of a heroic war film in 1945, during the Franco dictatorship. Salvador Calvo's remake is far less celebratory.

The garrison is made up mostly of recent arrivals from Spain, few of whom have any real training. Our point-of-view character among these recruits is an aspiring artist who befriends the resident priest. While the soldiers can hold out for months with the ammo available, the important thing for the priest and his new protege is a plentiful supply of opium. One important thing the unit lacks is nutritious produce. Berberi breaks out, killing the original commander. The men continue to hold out, though at least one deserts.

Meanwhile, as the besieging Filipinos well know, Spain is negotiating a sale of the islands to the victorious U.S. to bring the war to a definitive close. Anticipating their next war with the Americans, the natives would like to end the siege with minimal fuss and hope to convince the Spaniards with up-to-date newspapers. The new commander dismisses all reports as fake news, contrived to trick them into surrendering. Eventually, our artist hero is sent out on a mission to get authentic news from Manila, the capital. He's promptly captured by a courteous Filipino commander who sends him on his way in the hope that the truth will set everyone free. The commander still won't believe and condemns the artist as a drug-addled traitor. Our hero will survive the siege, but his artistic ambitions end up one last casualty of a hopeless war.

The siege of Baler was something new to me, and that lent novelty to 1898. The siege was no Alamo and its conclusion -- the commander finally reads a piece of news he can't dismiss as fake -- is inescapably anticlimactic. The maiming of our artist hero serves as a symbolic catastrophe on top of the already pointless deaths during the siege. The film's real strength is its ensemble cast, led by Luis Tosar, Javier Gutierrez and Alvaro Cervantes as the artist. There's nothing really innovative here as far as battle films go, but for audiences outside the Spanish-speaking world 1898 provides a fresh look at the absurdity of imperialism and the folly of war.

HUK! (1956)

In 1944 the United States liberated the Philippines, two years after the Japanese liberated the archipelago from nearly 50 years of American rule, the U.S. having liberated the islands from centuries of Spanish rule back in 1898. The liberation stuck the last time, more or less; the U.S. granted the islands independence in 1946. But a peasant guerrilla army formed to fight the Japanese continued its fight against the new Philippine government and the Americans who still dominated much of the economy. These were the Huks, would-be agrarian reformers who predictably were dubbed communists by the Philippine government and the Americans. Sterling Silliphant wrote a novel about the uprising and adapted it into the screenplay for John Barnwell's film. In the film the Huks are plain and simple terrorists, though contemporaries would more likely call savages. When they attack American-run plantations they may as well be Native Americans raiding a pioneer home. It seems natural that they meet their nemesis in George Montgomery, a veteran of B westerns who worked frequently in the Philippines from this point forward. He and the producers of Huk! recognized that the islands gave you extra value for your B-movie dollar. They're able to stage some epic action scenes that play to Montgomery's strength as a do-your-own-stunts action hero.

In Huk! Montgomery is a Bogart-type reluctant hero, the estranged heir to a Philippine plantation who returns to the islands after the Huks kill his father. He reunites with his old buddy Bart Rogers (John Baer), who's been running the plantation with his wife Cindy (Mona Freeman). Greg Dickson (Montgomery) wants to sell out as soon as possible and resume his peripatetic lifestyle, but the Rogerses see his attitude as a betrayal of his father, if not of them. It doesn't help that Greg can't help flirting with Cindy. If she seems slightly more receptive toward that flirtation than she should, there's a reason for that. Bart was a POW for much of the war and was, how shall we say, damaged by the experience. There's a terribly uncomfortable scene as Mr. and Mrs. Rogers prepare for bed. They have separate beds, of course, but here that's a damning fact rather than a Code convention. Cindy torments herself and Bart by playing a lullaby on a music box that is clearly designed for children's use. Husband and wife both stare grimly at the ceiling before going to sleep.

Once you realize that Bart can't function fully as a man and a husband you know he's doomed. It doesn't help that he's gung ho about taking the fight to the Huks. The danger the Huks represent is really driven home to Greg for the first time when he and Cindy are attacked by one while they're out swimming. As he sees the destruction wrought on innocent civilians and childhood friends by the rebels he gains a sense of responsibility for the islands and his father's heritage, while Bart courts death on an escalating scale.

 

Huk! is above all an action movie and two big set pieces are its highlights. In the first, Bart powers a locomotive through a Huk blockade, with Greg joining the ride just in time to catch hell. The train must run a mad gauntlet through a man-made canyon of hay bales as Huks open fire from above. A cascade of bales rains down to block the track, some of them clobbering Greg as he tries to keep balance between cars and fire at the enemy. The train finally plows through a final barrier and derails, but the Philippine Army arrives to save our heroes. All along, Huk! has benefited from location photography, and the great thing about this scene, well-staged by Barnwell or his second unit, is that what you see is what you get. Everything is real but the death.

 

The true climax of the film doesn't quite top the train scene but starts promisingly with the Huks swarming onto the water in outriggers to attack a ship carrying refugees out of the hot zone. The Huks have infiltrated a man onto the ship who sets off bombs in the boiler room, crippling the vessel as the rebels close in. Greg, Bart and a group of Filipino sailors have to fight off a boarding party as Cindy cowers with the women and children. There's plenty of good action here, but I couldn't help wondering what the ship's strategic value was to the Huks, given its mostly civilian passenger list. We see the Huk leader telling his men they need a victory after the debacle with the train, but the choice of target makes them look like no more than bloodthirsty terrorists rather than the land reformers they claim to be. But this is definitely the wrong place to learn about the motivations of the actual Huks, who here only play the role that quickly would be taken up by the Mau-Mau of Kenya: the spectre of Third World revolt and the revenge of the dark-skinned peoples. But leaving politics out of it, Huk! is the sort of film George Montgomery seems to have made a specialty of: a live-action realization of the violent exoticism of the period's men's-adventure magazines. On that he-man camp level, Huk! is grand undemanding entertainment.

METRO MANILA (2013)

Given its Anglo-Filipino pedigree, a certain generic feel to Metro Manila is probably inevitable. British director and co-writer Sean Ellis certainly gives the picture plenty of local Philippine color as his family of protagonists travels from the terraced rice paddies of the hill country to the squalor and tumult of the capital city. But the story that happens in Manila could happen in a lot of places.

Metro Manila initially seems too bad to be true. Oscar (Jake Macapagal) takes his family to the big city to earn money after their buyer back home cuts his price on rice. The Ramirez family come across like the sort of guileless yokels you'd see arriving in the big city in movies from 100 years ago. On their first day Oscar blows their wad paying the first month's rent to some guy who doesn't even own the building. Oscar has a knack for finding work that doesn't pay. One day's work ends with him getting a sandwich for his trouble and getting left behind to find his way home on foot. To help make ends meet and raise money so their eldest daughter can see a dentist, Oscar's wife Mai (Althea Vega) has to go to work as a bar girl. That means letting patrons grope her, or worse, so long as they keep buying drinks. It looks like things can only get worse.

 

The country and the city

Then Oscar gets a lucky break. He applies for work as a security guard and one of the guards, Ong (John Arcilla) recognizes Oscar as an Army veteran by a tattoo. The military experience surprised me since I'd think it would have left Oscar a more worldly-wise person, but in any event it helps him land a more steady job. Better still, Ong helps Oscar find a decent apartment, since the security company normally won't hire people from the shantytown where the Ramirezes were squatting. Finding a place for Oscar is easy, since it's a place Ong uses for trysts with his mistress. Now things look too good to be true, and of course they are.

 

Jake Macapagal (left) flinches as John Arcilla fires;

below, Althea Vega is Girl No. 40 (center)

Ong has to want something, doesn't he? In flashbacks, we've learned that he lost a partner during an attempted robbery. The security company transports money in strongboxes that can only be opened with specific keys; otherwise an ink spray will destroy the money inside. It turns out that Ong has kept the strongbox from that incident while reporting it stolen. The key is kept in a special locker in an area of headquarters where drivers like Ong and Oscar don't have access -- unless they're being debriefed after a robbery. Ong's plan is to stage a robbery so that he as the senior partner will have to be debriefed. He expects Oscar to sneak in and steal the needed key from the locker. Oscar understandably balks at the idea until Ong reminds him of everything he's done for him and informs him that the strongbox is in Oscar's new apartment, which Ong rented in Oscar's name in the first place just so he could frame Oscar if the rookie doesn't cooperate.

The best thing about Metro Manila is an element of randomness that emerges when Ong's master plan falls apart almost instantly, leaving Oscar holding the box without any likely access to the locker, since now he has to do the debriefing after the debacle. The worst thing about Metro Mania arguably is how Oscar, otherwise shown as a consistent sap, suddenly proves a tactical mastermind by managing to secure the key and save his family from shame and worse -- by this point Mai is being warned that she can only keep her bar job if she recruits her 9 year old daughter for the amusement of "special" customers. While Oscar pays a high price, his ability to outmaneuver and outwit everyone finally is a little too good to be true. Ellis eats his cake and has it, too, striking a bleak note -- the key to Oscar's success is that he doesn't base his ultimate plan on the "dream" of surviving -- while giving the family an implausible if bittersweet win. Still, in choosing Manila for his setting Ellis makes an admirable stab at social realism, grounding his story at a level of poverty we hardly see in American film, that arguably hardly exists in America. The actors come across well, at least as far as I can tell from listening to their Tagalog dialogue, with Arcilla as Ong clearly the best in class. While Metro Manila is essentially a cliche in exotic dress, its relatively unflinching look at poverty and corruption and its overall craftsmanship still make it worth a look from us.

DARNA! THE RETURN (...ang pagbabalik, 1994)

This is what some people probably think superhero movies should still look like. It certainly looked primitive compared to the most contemporary American attempt at the genre, Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever, but given how the genre has evolved under the influence of Bryan Singer, Christopher Nolan, and the corporate mind of Marvel Studios, the similarities of the superhero films of 1994 look more significant than the differences -- and that's not a rip on Joel Schumacher, no matter how deserving of one he is. His Batman films, however overblown in scale, were retreats from the darker "operatic" vision of Tim Burton, reflecting Schumacher's own more colorful and positive experience of comics. Despite all the choking or chortling over the nipples on men's costumes, they were more innocent films, more in keeping with a default archetype of superhero movies. Darna ang pagbabalik is that archetype in simpler and perhaps purer form.

Co-directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes, it's the most recent feature film about the Philippines' most popular superheroine, though there have been two TV series about the character since then, most recently in 2009. Created in 1950 by writer Mars Ravelo, who always gets a proprietary credit, and artist Nestor Redondo, Darna is a cross between Wonder Woman and the original Captain Marvel -- let's split the difference and say she's the Philippines' Mary Marvel. Rather than go into recently digested detail from the internet, I'll stick to what our movie tells us about Darna. She has a Shazam-type relationship with a young woman named Narda who becomes Darna when she pops a magic stone in her mouth and yells Darna's name. Darna has superhuman strength and the power of flight. How powerful she is exactly is hard to say, though at the climax of this film she pulls off a super-feat worthy of Superman or once-and-future TV star The Flash. She can change back to Narda by shouting that name, at which point Narda coughs up the magic stone. One suspects that many Darna stories involve Narda losing the stone somehow -- she loses it twice in this picture -- much as Billy and Mary Batson tended to get their mouths gagged so they couldn't say "Shazam." That may be the only way to give the villains a fighting chance.

The follow-up to a 1991 film, "The Return" opens with a flood forcing the people of Narda's village to flee to Manila while Darna (the heroically endowed Anjanette Abayari) beats up some mercenary-looking guys for the government. After the fight and the transformation, Narda is mesmerized by a snake and clobbered by a woman in a turban who steals the magic stone. The trauma reduces Narda to a childlike state, forcing her younger brother Ding to look after her in the big city.

The turbaned woman has set up shop there as well. She is Dr. Adan (Cherie Gil), a kind of televangelist prophesying the destruction of Manila by a terrible flood from which the faithful will be saved in a kind of rapture. She has a corps of backup dancers (but no dance music) and a turban that sometimes seems to have a life of its own. She is also, if I understood correctly, the daughter of Darna's arch-enemy Valentina, a gorgon-haired snake woman currently in a withered state. She needs the energy from the magic stone to keep from deteriorating further, and when Ding steals it after crashing one of Adan's live sermons, Valentina withers further, with the aid of early CGI, into little more than a pink wrinkled worm. It looks ludicrous yet there's some genuine naive pathos in Adan's wailing grief over her mom's pitiful state.

The re-powered Darna takes on a criminal gang in league with Adan's cult, but Narda eventually loses the stone again so Valentina can be re-energized. This sets up the big showdown as Darna goes hand to hand with her old foe before saving Manila from a tidal wave. As I said, "The Return" is an old-school superhero movie, so the tidal wave does not hit. The filmmakers lacked the budget to stage such a disaster, and the thought of letting it happen probably never occurred to them. No "destruction porn" here. The nearest thing to porn of any kind is the close attention often paid to Darna's cleavage.

The effects are a mixed bag, reflecting the filmmakers' willingness to try for authentic comic-book action. Darna flies via process shots, occasional crane work and crude traveling mattes, though the directors do one clever thing without effects to sell her flying. They stage several scenes on top of buildings, from Darna landing after a joyride with Ding to her fights with the gangsters and Valentina. Doing this gets Darna high up where she belongs, and that's somewhat of a reasonable substitute for more convincing flight scenes. Abayari definitely looks good in a Darna costume, though her action-hero skills are nothing special by modern standards. I doubt she learned any martial arts for this role. It was more important to strike the right superhero poses, particularly for the flying scenes. The music is generic superhero stuff of the period, or just before, with a main theme influenced more by John Williams's Superman march than by Danny Elfman's Batman or Darkman music. By 21st century standards it looks and sounds like kiddie fare, but probably no one ever thought of it being anything else. Its redeeming quality is its enthusiasm; that willingness to try, even with inadequate means, rather than not make an all-out superhero movie, is key. It helps this kind of movie to have an over-the-top villain, and Cherie Gil saves the day in this respect in a role that seems intended partly as a send-up of real-life counterparts of Dr. Adan and the people who believe in them. In other words, there was probably something for all ages to enjoy. Depending on how weary you've grown of the scale and sophistication of American superhero movies, you may be won over by Darna's primitive charm. On the other hand, the Mars Ravelo estate could be sitting on a gold mine if they can think of a way to go global with Darna, while Warner Bros. struggles to finally put Wonder Woman on the big screen for the first time. But if going global with Darna means "Nolanizing" her in some way, it might be better to leave well enough alone.

DVR Diary: THE EVIL WITHIN (1970)

Always a weaker rival to Turner Classic Movies, the Fox Movie Channel more or less gave up on the competition earlier this year when it began showing contemporary movies with commercials in prime time. From early morning to mid-afternoon, however, FMC still shows the old stuff commercial-free, and if anything they've delved deeper into their library than before to broadcast obscure oddities. For example, here's a Filipino-directed crime melodrama shot in India and starring one of the subcontinent's biggest stars, the late Dev Anand, alongside future blaxploitation actor and S.W.A.T. star Rod Perry, who sings the picture's title song. Directed by Lamberto V. Avellana, The Evil Within's first reel promises more craziness than the picture ultimately delivers. We follow a stocky fellow known only as "The Fat Man" on a series of fatal rounds. Without preliminaries, we open with him stabbing someone. In short order he leaves a trail of bloody bodies in his wake. He may be an implausible fighter but he's a charismatic attacker, often screaming before he strikes. If he's the antagonist we may be on to something -- but eight minutes into the picture, he's shot in the back and killed in perfunctory manner by the minions of Hakim, a more ordinary figure who now settles into the primary villain role. The Fat Man was a Syndicate enforcer and his death signals a power play for control of the opium racket. That brings in Anand (playing "Dev") and Perry (playing "Rob"), the latter having survived a rare non-fatal encounter with the Fat Man during that brief, glorious rampage. One powerful clan runs the drug trade, buying the opium from the mountain tribes and shipping it out to the wider world. The clan is riven by family feuds, and for a while it looks like our heroes will play the Red Harvest game of playing criminals against each other. The crooks need little prodding in this direction, their rivalries ultimately complicated by a lesbian love triangle that leaves Dev himself in a shotgun-toting rage by the end of the show.

It's hard to keep track of the villains in this one; just as Hakim abruptly eliminated the Fat Man, so he, too, is dispatched with little ceremony midway through the picture, after cajoling Dev's girlfriend of the moment into betraying him by promising her money so she can go to England. Without a strong core villain or a coherent menace of some kind it's hard to hold interest in this sort of story, and it doesn't help that Avellana brings very little energy to the action. In his defense, Fox Movie ran the movie "formatted to fit your screen," possibly subverting his compositions, but the story itself moves sluggishly. If this English-language picture was intended to put Anand over globally, it didn't work. The actor was fluent in English, earning a college degree in English lit, but his delivery is blandly urbane, almost more philosophical than witty, and he was probably too old for his action-romance role by this time. This film is Perry's on-screen debut and he provides little more than -- excuse the expression -- color. His presence may have made the film more marketable during the Seventies, but IMDB doesn't indicate if the film was ever released in American theaters. One interesting aspect of his role is the throwaway acknowledgment that Rob is a Muslim; challenged to swear an oath on his presumed Christian faith, he tells a tribesman that he's of the faith that "looks to the desert."  More colorful are the locations used, especially the luxurious fortress where the film's final act takes place, but Avellana never manages to make the action live up to the setting. All the materials are here for an exotic, eccentric spectacle, and it isn't hard to envision a Bollywood director, a blaxploitation specialist or any number of other Filipino filmmakers making more of it than this crew does. Still, the fact that The Evil Within played on American cable television is remarkable, and it reminds us that Fox Movie Channel is still worth watching -- or at least its schedule is, on the chance of discovering something as extraordinary as it is obscure.

INSIANG (1976)

To most American movie fans, the Philippines is a place where American exploitation filmmakers went back in the Seventies and Eighties to shoot cheap and get the most for their money. By that standard, even Apocalypse Now was an exploitation film. Most of us have seen films shot in the Philippines, but not an actual Philippine film. We may even have seen films by Filipino directors like Eddie Romero or Cirio H. Santiago, but such works seem tailored more for the global grindhouse market than for Filipino audiences. Less common are films in the islands' native languages, aimed specifically if not exclusively for native audiences. DVD and streaming media make these more available now, and it was on Netflix that I first encountered the work of Lino Brocka, the man widely regarded as the Philippines' greatest director. Insiang is considered one of his best films, and it has a place in national film industry as the first Philippine film to play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Cineastes would have recognized a kind of neorealist melodrama, with a story reminiscent (to me) of James M. Cain, enlivened by the colorful, tawdry novelty of the slum setting and the intensity of the lead performers.

Hilda Koronel as Insiang.
Below, director Lino Brocka exploits local signage
in an almost Antonionian moment.

Insiang (Hilda Koronel) is a laundress and breadwinner for an extended family that contracts rapidly as her mother Tonya (Mona Lisa) drives most of her relations and in-laws away. Tonya is angry because her husband left her for another woman. She resents and distrusts anyone else's sexuality unless it happens to be dedicated to her. She grows ever more repressively vigilant toward Insiang's boyfriends while growing pathetically attached to Dado the butcher (Ruel Vernal), a much younger man and a local tough guy whose real interest in Insiang is obvous to just about everyone. Insiang yearns to break free of Tonya, but the feckless young men of her neighborhood, on whom she's expected to depend, are a feckless lot. Bebot, an auto mechanic (Rez Cortez), seems promising but fears Dado's jealousy, knowing the big man's interest in the girl. Inevitably, Dado forces himself on Insiang, boasting to his buddies of his conquest of mother and daughter while telling Insiang, after the initial rape, that it's her, not Tonya, that he really loves.

Insiang has finally had enough. She finally goads Bebot into eloping with her, but that goes no further than a one-night stand in a miserable hotel. Inevitably she returns home, where she tells Dado straight up that she wants revenge. He thinks that she wants Bebot to pay for running out on her, but Insiang has a greater offense than that to avenge. She'll manipulate her two oppressors, Tonya and Dado, into destroying each other, buttering up the butcher while provoking her mother with exaggerated accounts of his disdain for the older woman. She flaunts Dado's desire for her until Tonya snaps and stabs him to death. With Tonya in jail, Insiang is free at last, but she feels compelled to see her mother and tell her the truth -- that she had meant for Tonya to kill Dado. She wants reconciliation if not forgiveness, but Tonya puts on a stone face until Insiang departs in tears -- and then the mother's own tears flow at last.

Mona Lisa as Tonya confronts her daughter at home (above)
and perhaps for the last time (below)

I'll need to see more Brocka movies -- Netflix has at least one more -- before I can judge his talent apart from the visceral vitality of the Tondo slum locations used for Insiang. But he clearly brings a strong sense of place to his work that gratifies my impulse for virtual tourism, as well as a social consciousness that is literary rather than political -- a sensibility to the constraints Insiang's economic and family circumstances impose on her. Most importantly, he has a way with actors that draws powerhouse performances from Koronel and Lisa as the feuding daughter and mother. They make Insiang a primal tale of intergenerational sexual jealousy underscored by the younger woman's revulsion at her mother's neediness and the older's deeper fears and resentments. The drama is occasionally heavyhanded, especially when punctuated by a score with a soap opera's subtlety, but the lead actresses do all they can to keep things real. The squalid setting makes the story powerfully plausible, and while it doesn't exactly show the country's best face, the country's promotion of the film notwithstanding, I'd recommend Insiang as anybody's first true Philippine film. You may know already that Filipino filmmakers can blow things up real good, but now you know they can do more than that.

BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA (1973)

How could you go wrong with a women-in-prison film with Pam Grier in the Philippines -- especially when you've got violent revolutionary action, plenty of naked shower action and lesbian innuendo, Vic Diaz and Sid Haig as gangsters, and the all-important gimmick of Grier and blonde fellow-amazon Margaret Markov chained together on the lam in a distaff variation on The Defiant Ones? Here's how.

Problem number one is that, if you're going to do Defiant Ones in drag, you've got to do some race-baiting. But by making the white prisoner Karen a left-wing revolutionary director Eddie Romero and a story team that included the young Jonathan Demme pretty much throw away any opportunity to stir up intense conflict between the chained women. The script tries to make class an issue for one scene as black prisoner Lee mocks Karen's revolutionary commitment as the playacting of a spoiled rich girl, but this movie never unleashes the all-out hate or the bonding personal revelations the Defiant Ones gimmick needs to work. The most we get once the defiant duo break loose is that Karen wants to go one way to reunite with her revolutionary comrades (and boyfriend Ernesto) who ambushed their prison van in mid-transfer in the first place, while Lee wants to go where the $40,000 she stole from sleazy pimp Vic (Diaz) is stashed. It's okay that they end up going Lee's way, since you're probably anticipating that the money is going to end up with the cash-starved revolutionaries thanks to some political awakening on Lee's part. But a lot of stuff that you might expect to see happen here -- just because in many cases it's the obvious play for an exploitation film -- doesn't.

Romero's movie smacks of having been put together ad hoc of parts that don't quite fit together, right down to the trailer whose narrator clearly thinks that he's promoting a movie called "Women in Chains." Black Mama spends its first reels setting up the sapphic hell of a prison to which Lee and Karen are condemned. The warden (Laurie Burton) and head matron (Lynn Borden) are clearly lovers, but the warden's lust is too voracious for one woman. She has a peephole to observer her charges showering while she masturbates. She offers the more attractive prisoners privileges in return for sexual favors. Lee turns her down ("I just don't like to be forced.") while Karen accepts (off-screen) out of revolutionary necessity. That creates resentment in Lee (if not jealousy; the two newbies seemed to be checking each other out as they arrived) because when Karen gets taken off a work detail it means more work for Lee. And that leads to their first battle, a feeble food fight that unfortunately sets the tone for their struggles throughout the picture.

Romero has no clue how to make these two big girls seem powerful. He has Pam Grier at his disposal and makes her look weak. Neither of the women -- who would soon be cast together as gladiators, for crying out loud -- seems capable her of much more than impotent slapping and scratching. Romero seems not to have gotten the news that he was in the 1970s, the era of the superwoman, and his cluelessness cripples Black Mama, White Mama. He should have Grier and Markov running amok through the island, fighting each other and all comers, but once they are set loose by Ernesto's bungled rescue attempt (during which our heroines kill the warden and the rebels kill the matron) Romero seems to go out of his way to find distractions from the stars' story.

It's okay to introduce Vic and his gangsters, since it's his money Lee is after and Diaz's scenes hit just the right note of sleaze. Diaz, the international face of Filipino exploitation, actually rules it quite nicely as he calmly supervises the electrode torture of a prostitute while receiving a pedicure from a topless floozy. To clarify what I mean by sleaze: if a woman takes off her top in a scene, it's erotic; if she starts the scene topless, it's sleaze. Anyway, we expect to see Vic's men on a collision course with Ernesto's rebels, but in mid-film Romero introduces more characters, not to complicate things, but to pad out the movie. We get some Filipino cops who are out to get Vic's money if not Vic himself -- but to keep a low profile they subcontract the pursuit of the escaped women to Ruben (Sid Haig), an American criminal and all-around cowboy-for-hire who ends up being, along with the cops, the comedy relief of the picture.

The funniest thing about Haig here, however, are his costumes. Still, you might be interested in what might happen when Ruben catches up with the girls -- but remember what I wrote above about what you expect to happen. Ruben and the cops largely exist in their own closed-off universe within the main film. They mostly interact with each other, as when Ruben catches the cops tailing him and forces them to drop trou so he can (for some reason) inspect their penises. The only character from the main story whom Ruben encounters is Ernesto, and the rebels kill him and his men in a fight over bloodhounds before Ruben comes anywhere close to Lee and Karen. Haig's presence comes across as a big waste of our time.

Overall, Black Mama, White Mama is a case of too many cooks and not enough confidence in the stars or the main story of the film. Too often, Lee and Karen's adventures are played for laughs, as when they mug a couple of nuns and somehow (while still shackled together) manage to don their habits for a reel or so. Eddie Romero has made some interesting horror films, but he seems like the wrong man for the job this time, when a Jack Hill or (to use local talent) a Cirio H. Santiago would have gone for the jugular every time. This is a film I've wanted to see for a long time, and now that the Albany Public Library has acquired it in a stash of blaxploitation pictures it proves to be a big disappointment. Some of my regular readers may feel that a film like this was hopeless from the start, but I want to make clear that what disappoints me most about Black Mama, White Mama is that it fails as an exploitation film. It should have been more violent and more sleazy as well as more feminist and more coherent. Just about everyone involved has done better, and I feel a need now to find the proof of that.

And here's the trailer for Women in Ch-- I mean Black Mama, White Mama, uploaded to YouTube by oldiestrailers.

DEATH FORCE (aka Fighting Mad, 1978)

Cirio H. Santiago's trash epiphany from 1978 is not to be confused, by using its re-release title, with Jonathan Demme's film from two years earlier. The Philippine film made little impression Stateside under its original label, but was put back in theaters in 1982 to exploit co-producer Leon Isaac Kennedy's success in Penitentiary and his wife and co-producer Jayne Kennedy's recent Playboy magazine layout. The print advertising for "Fighting Mad" inevitably fudged the details a little, giving the unwary reader the impression that Mr. Kennedy (originally billed only as "Leon Isaac") is the hero of the picture when he's actually one of the villains.

(Check out that double-bill to the left. Cirio H. Santiago and Sonny Chiba on the same program for one price! Too bad I was too young back then.)

The real hero is played by James Iglehart, who may be best known to American cult film fans for his appearances in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and The Seven Minutes. He plays Doug Russell, a Vietnam vet wrapping up his tour of duty with a side project that involves smuggling contraband in coffins. It's not drugs, but gold, and it means a big score for Doug and his accomplices, Morelli and Magee (Leon Isaac). But Morelli, a veteran criminal for whom 'Nam was a vacation, figures that the payoff splits easier two ways than three. As he pitches it to Magee:

Morelli: That man's going back to a wife and kid. He ain't ready for what we're getting into. You could be going home to that lady. He could be just another war casualty.

Magee: You asking me to kill one of my own kind?

Morelli: Oh, don't give me that brother shit. The only brother's the man on the dollar bill -- and he ain't black.

It's a pretty convincing argument. One moment Doug's sunning himself on the deck of their boat, and the next he gets stabbed, gets his throat cut, and gets dumped into the ocean. For Morelli and Magee it's on to LA, where they wage a two-man mad-dog war on the organized crime establishment, quickly muscling their way to the top while Magee tries to make his move on the allegedly widowed Mrs. Russell (J. Kennedy), a struggling nightclub singer. Hear her sing and you'll see what I mean by "struggling."

Meanwhile, Doug washes ashore barely alive on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. Now, what might you find in such a place at this time in history? That's right: Japanese soldiers who don't know that World War II is over. Their unit is down to one officer and one kvetching enlisted man. Rather than kill the enemy on sight they endeavor to nurse him back to health in the hope that he'll make a Man Friday for them. Both men happen to know English, though of course they can't have kept track on changes in the idiom.

Doug [reviving from delirium]: Those mother-humpers...

Officer: You said that in your sleep. What does that mean?

Doug: Nothing...some 'friends' of mine....

Enlisted Man: Hmmm, they do that to you? They ain't no friends. We your friends. We mother-humpers!

Discipline's broken down on Occupied Island, as the poor grunt Ichikawa back-talks to his superior all the time. He tells his commander that, had they stayed in Japan, he'd be a general by now, but the commander comes back by noting that by now he'd be Emperor. All the officer really has left is the personal discipline of the samurai, which he improbably imparts to the recovering Doug. As our hero regains his strength, the Japanese teaches him some martial arts and shows him how to chop coconuts with a sword. With this comes a moral lesson: "It's not for you to learn how to fight," the officer says, "but learn how to live."

"Where I came from, learning how to fight was learning how to live," Doug replies. So while the Japs have fatalistically reconciled themselves to spending the rest of their lives on the island, Doug lets himself get captured by the Philippine Navy. Before you know it he's back in LA, still carrying the samurai sword his mentor gave him, i.e. armed for payback. Now it's his turn to wage a one-man guerrilla war on Morelli and Magee, who prove much less effective now that they command scores of goons than they were on the offensive. While Morelli instigated the whole affair, Magee ends up the final antagonist, holed up in a heavily guarded Mexican compound with Doug's wife and son held hostage as our hero blazes a trail of severed heads toward the final showdown.

Santiago is a master chef of cinematic junk food. He keeps things going at a good clip throughout, constantly intercutting between the villains' conquest of LA, Magee's menacing courtship of the now-jobless Mrs. Russell, and Doug's samurai training. He makes sure that not too much time passes without some action or bloodshed, and he knows to save the best (or worst) for last. He knows that the one thing that can top an hour's worth of machine-gun mayhem is some serious head-cutting. The effects are awful, of course, but Santiago builds enough momentum to get you caught up in the spirit of the exercise. When you're ready to see heads roll, heads will roll. What more can you ask from exploitation cinema? In this case, I have to give the Filipino filmmakers credit for a perhaps-unusually sympathetic portrayal of Japanese soldiers, and for an idiosyncratically sentimental soundtrack featuring a love theme sung by J. Kennedy and a cute motif for our Japanese friends.

Mill Creek Entertainment presents the film as Fighting Mad (with an obviously spliced-in title card a la Death Proof) in its 50-film Martial Arts box set. As you can see, the presentation leaves a bit to be desired, and it's a bit of a stretch to call this a martial arts film (or at least to put it alongside kung fu and ninja movies), but somehow this seems like the way that Death Force was meant to be seen. I wouldn't mind seeing a properly-restored DVD, but I can safely recommend this item to fans of Seventies trash as is.