Death Force (1978)

aka Vengeance is Mine

aka Fighting Mad

aka The Force

Doug Russell (James Iglehart) and his war buddies Morelli (Carmen Argenziano) and McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy) are planning on using their return trip from Vietnam via Manila to at least get something out of the war for themselves with a bit of drug smuggling.

Doug, a usually very straight guy, really only wants to do this one time and then get back to his girlfriend Maria (Jayne Kennedy) and their little son. His partners, on the other hand, are in the drug business for the long run. Because they are not just pushers but also assholes (and because McGee has the hots for Maria and has no moral compunctions against anything, ever), they decide to just murder Doug. Knifing him and throwing him into the ocean doesn’t kill our hero, however. Thanks to a twist of fate/the script gods, he washes up wounded on a small island only populated by two Japanese soldiers who have been purposefully stranded here since the end of the war. Unlike your typical Japanese army throwbacks of the movies, these two are very well aware the war is ended, but still continue defending their island against whoever goes there.

Doug, however, they help and want to keep. They are rather old by now, after all, and a young, strong helper like the American would be rather useful. After various cultural misunderstandings – turns out goading guys like these with tales of and Americanised Japan does not lead to joy and happiness and Americans of Colour don’t really hold much with slavery – the officer type of the two Japanese (played by Filipino actors, obviously) takes a bit of a shine to Doug and teaches him a weird B-movie version of the code of the Samurai, as well as some awesome sword fighting techniques.

While this is going on, we regularly pop in with Morelli and McGee, who work their way up the ladder of Los Angeles crime one burned down house and murder at a time. McGee also attempts to put his very special kind of moves on Maria, but she knows a slime ball when she sees one and repeatedly rebuffs him. Because he’s just that kind of guy, he then stealthily torpedoes her career as a singer, to somehow get her into his bed by virtue of economical pressure. Maria still doesn’t bite, and McGee becomes increasingly more of a physical danger to her.

Fortunately, Doug does eventually make his way back home and goes on a bit of vengeance rampage with his newfound sword fighting prowess.

I am as often down on the movies of Filipino low budget maestro Cirio H. Santiago as I am up. His blaxploitation (and Japaneseholdoutsploitation, and so on) epic – nearly two hours long in the complete “director’s” cut I watched – Death Force however is nothing anyone who likes 70s exploitation fare could possibly sneeze at. Sure, the movie’s structure is a bit rough, and its running time perhaps a bit too epic for its own good, yet it is also stuffed full of awesome elements that come together to form a very special kind of crazy. Santiago certainly doesn’t stint on exploitational values for a second: when you’re not watching McGee and Morelli making their violent career, you get scenes of Doug getting taught a highly dubious version of already highly dubious warrior philosophy by an actor (Jo Mari Avellana?) who puts his all into being fake-Japanese in a way that transcends the offensive so effectively, it turns beautiful.

I also found myself pleasantly surprised by the sequences concerning Maria’s suffering that take on an appropriately Catholic quality and allow her to show a strength of character you don’t usually get from The Girl in this kind of affair. That Kennedy’s portrayal of McGee is quite so perfectly vile – even Morelli seems put out by some of his behaviour - does enhance that aspect even more, for standing up to this jerk takes quite a bit of personality. All of this also provides the hope for a reunion between Maria and Doug with a certain degree of emotional heft, so much so I found myself mentally cheering at the sappy family reunion montage Santiago of course is not ashamed to provide. And good for him.

The film’s action starts out competent and relatively straightforward and increases in intensity and general weirdness once Doug hits Los Angeles, cutting his way through the gang of his former friends, Iglehart always making as good an impression in his fight scenes as he does in the rest of the film. Particularly the final battle is a bit of a paradise for the friend of decapitation, as well, so our timeless lack of good taste is well provided for as well.

Finally, there’s a “what the fuck” to end all “what the fuck” endings that left even me speechless for once.

Add all of this up, and Death Force turns out to be one of Santiago’s masterpieces.

Stryker (1983)

The apocalypse has come and gone, and the survivor fashion goes for leather, hot pants and big hair. Dune buggies are back en vogue, as usual. Large parts of wherever this film is set are dominated by the evil pocket empire of evil Kardis (Mike Lane). It’s one of those warrior and slave castes affairs Spartan fans fantasize about, controlled by Kardis’s rationing out of whatever water his “warriors” can steal.

But water is very scarce indeed. Things become heated indeed when Kardis learns of a hidden spring of fresh water under the control of a people with a decided number of warrior women, though not exactly the numbers or the arms to fight off a guy who even manages to field (and fuel) three tanks. Ironically, Delha (Andria Savio), the woman whose actions inform Kardis of the existence of the water, was trying to make a pact with the nicer, gentler warlord in the area, one Trun (Ken Metcalfe), exactly to protect her people – whom she didn’t ask about any of this – from Kardis.

Eventually, Kardis’s arch enemy Stryker (Steve Sandor), a former leading man in Trun’s group turned embittered wanderer of the wasteland by the death of his wife or girlfriend by Kardis’s hands (one of which Stryker later managed to hack off), will get in the bad guy’s way and grumpily do some good.

As long-time imaginary readers of this blog know, I’m not too fond of most of the films of Filipino exploitation king Cirio H. Santiago. They rather tend to drag for my tastes, and Santiago’s treatment of the more exploitative elements tends to the unpleasant.

So colour me surprised when I actually enjoyed myself with this Mad Max-alike quite a bit. Obviously, I could have survived rather well without the sexual violence in form of an aborted-by-Stryker-hulking-out rape scene, but the rest of the film is actually rather neat, and the film is certainly one of Santiago’s better ones.

It moves somewhat sprightly, even, or rather, it fills its, ahem, minimalist plot with more than enough cool stuff and fun incident to turn into a very enjoyable genre entry. There’s hardly a minute going by without some cheep yet cheerful action bit, filmed with experienced eye and hand, or an atmospheric shot of the same three sand dunes.

In a surprise turn, there are even some clever touches to the writing. Stryker (the film, not the man) shows an unexpected interest in the politics of its post-apocalypse, actually building a working idea of how Kardis’s evil empire works, how Trun’s differs from that in theory, and how that theory might look rather less exciting in practice. These aren’t realistic political bodies in any way, shape, or form, of course, but as metaphorical stand-ins for certain great powers from the viewpoint of a filmmaker coming from the sort of place these powers really rather like to misuse for their own agendas, they’re surprisingly effective.

Not surprising in this context, Santiago and/or writers Howard R. Cohen and Leonard Hermes  have some actually plausible ideas on how difficult it would be for a small power with some valuable resources to find a more powerful ally that would actually not rob them of their independence. Admittedly, the film does wave this away with a pretty classic hand of god moment in the end, but this is not really the sort of subtext you typically find in Santiago’s filmography – as far as I’ve dug into it, obviously, so I may very well be missing something here - and it’s actually organically integrated with all the beautiful nonsense of leather-clad people killing each other in the dust.

If there’s one thing that isn’t quite up to my standards – low as they may be - in cheap post-apocalypse flicks about Stryker, it is the film’s general lack of the sort of crazy stuff most other films of the genre are full of. Sure, there are the usual genre standards of silliness when it comes to fashion, but otherwise, the craziest element of the film is the unexplained tribe of little people (I hope that’s still the non-offensive term, otherwise please someone correct me) wearing cut-rate jawa robes who will eventually fight on the side of our heroes. And that’s obviously not particularly crazy for this sort of thing.

But that’s a minor complaint in a genuinely entertaining and surprisingly clever movie.

In short: Dune Warriors (1991)

Welcome to drought plagued post-apocalyptia. A scouting party of decidedly evil warlord William (Luke Askew) takes the small, peaceful village of Chinley (who knows how it is spelled?) that is a water-y paradise in the desert, waiting for William to come and complete the invasion. Val (Jillian McWhirter), the daughter of one of the village elders, knows it’ll be over with any idea of democracy or non-slavery once William takes over, so she sneaks out into the desert to find warriors to get rid of the scouts and fight William.

She’s in luck, too, for fleeing one of those Filipino post-apocalypse movie mainstay groups of angry little persons, she is saved by Michael (David Carradine), who just happens to be William’s arch enemy, even though he isn’t telling that yet. Michael helps Val find the usual bunch of fighters – there’s her new love interest Dorian (Blake Boyd), his friend, the self-declared “scoundrel” John (Rick Hill), who were running a scam in the fine sport of motorcycle jousting, John’s friend, martial artist Ricardo (Dante Varona), and shotgun toting Miranda (Maria Isabel Lopez). Not the magnificent seven, but they’ll have to do.

So soon enough, things will explode, people will be shot, knifed and sworded (technical term), David Carradine’s legs and Maria Isabel Lopez’s breasts will be shown off, and peasants will be trained as warriors. To mix the Seven Samurai formula up somewhat, this village does have its very own traitors.

I often grump about the films directed by Filipino exploitation film king Cirio H. Santiago because I find most of them even more boring than they are shoddy – the capital sin in low budget cinema – but from time to time, I find one I actually enjoy watching.

Dune Warriors does have it rather easy to conquer me (I suspect William would be jealous if I were a village), for if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Seven Samurai style films. Not that anyone would confuse Santiago’s approach to the material with Kurosawa or Sturges or Sayles, but it’s a perfectly fine scaffold to hang one’s action scenes on, and a straightforward structure for a plot. Quite unexpectedly for Santiago the director (I generally respect his work as a producer quite a bit more), he doesn’t mess up the traditional structure, but keeps so close to it this is actually a Santiago film I’d call tight. At the very least, the film moves from one fight to the next with pleasant pace, not getting bogged down in bad comedy, or distracted scenes full of nothing.

Santiago still doesn’t like to move his camera much, it seems, yet this time around, the film isn’t killed by the nailed-down camera set-up of doom, and the action sequences are actually edited together from of so many different shots, I suspect you could make three other Santiago films from them. It’s not pretty but it’s dynamic enough to make the action scenes actually entertaining, with many a stunt double throwing himself backwards, random explosions, David Carradine posing with his sword while wearing boots and no trousers, copious blood squibs whenever somebody thought about using them, and a rusty assortment of cars, motorcycles and – of course - dune buggies. It’s not deep, either, but Dune Warriors sure as heck is fun to watch.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,in short,post-apocalypse,cirio h. santiago,david carradine,rick hill,luke askew,blake boyd,jillian mcwhirter

Nam Angels (1989)

Remember the Vietnam War, when a handful of buff Americans slaughtered hundreds of Filipinos pretending to be Vietnamese standing in a row and doing backflips when getting shot by an assault rifle? By 1989, only a handful of Italian and Filipino exploitation filmmakers still did (most of whom were in bed with Roger Corman, I assume). Even the Philippines' finest in form of Cirio H. Santiago had his problems coming up with new twists in the tale of how some 'roided guy got his people out (a lot like Moses, but with an assault rifle, generally).

But hey, what's this lying around in the costume department? A handful of jeans jackets with the Hells Angels logo on them? It's exploitation movie gold is what it is! This, or something quite like it must have gone on in Santiago's mind when he came up with this one.

Just two weeks before finally being allowed to get home, manly man solider Calhoun (Brad Johnson) and his trusty lasso - yes, he's from West Texas - finds two of his platoon members taken prisoner by a former SS/Foreign Legion guy named Chard (Vernon Wells) who has gone all Colonel Kurtz as the living god of some formerly godforsaken North Vietnamese tribe. It's a particularly dangerous area completely under control of Chard's men and the North Vietnamese forces, and while Calhoun's superiors aren't going to hinder him from going on a manly rescue expedition, there's not much they can do to help him, especially because getting in and out quickly seems to be rather important to the whole thing. So Calhoun does the logical thing, goes into the next bar, sees the only (US) Hells Angels in Vietnam beat up some Special Forces soldiers and get themselves arrested, and offers them a get out of jail free card as well as the gold treasure Chard has assembled if they help him. For reason of later plot complications, our hero doesn't mention the whole "free my buddies" aspect of the plan instead of offering them the gold for their help in freeing the prisoners. Oh well. Anyhow, there will be many explosions, shooting and biking before the film is over.

Despite its particularly stupid/genius set-up, Nam Angels is one of the better namsploitation movies you can waste your time on. I was a bit surprised by that, because director Cirio H. Santiago's films often tend to waste perfectly great exploitation ideas on perfectly boring execution. Nam Angels, however, does include everything one could wish for in an exploitation film of its genre, gets to the point of shooting and explosions without pretending too long anyone cares about its characters, and never looks back once it's gotten going. In fact, the film seems hell-bent on including as many awesome/ridiculous bits and pieces as possible, so we're not just getting a film about Hells Angels led by a lasso-swinging super soldier from Texas biking through the Vietnamese jungle aka the countryside of the Philippines, causing backflipping and explosions wherever they (oh so stealthily) ride, that treats the silly set-up with all the seriousness of an epic, but also one that does its low-budget best to have variety in its action scenes. Would you believe some of the action scenes even show people using tactics like flanking?

Of course, Nam Angels does also include the genre-mandated exploding huts, a white bad guy with copious appetite for the scenery, utterly random nudity, cursing, hilariously "poignant" moments - all presented with an actual sense of breathless excitement that is as atypical for the often drab namsploitation film as it is for Santiago's body of work.

Nam Angels is a lovely piece of exploitation cinema that may have not a single clever idea in its head, but sure wants its audience to have a good, mass-slaughter-filled, time with all the dumb ideas it has. For me, it succeeds admirably at this.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,action,war,cirio santiago,brad johnson,vernon wells,reviews

Firecracker (1981)

Martial arts expert Susanne Carter (Jillian Kesner) travels to the Philippines to find out what happened to her sister Bonnie who suddenly disappeared without a trace.

The guys working in the bar over which Bonnie lived point Susanne in the direction of drug kingpin Erik (Ken Metcalfe), of whose connection with Bonnie's disappearance they seem quite sure. Susanne agrees with the boys, and decides to get close to Erik's operation by charming and hitting her way into the heart of his main henchman, white boy afro and 'stache wearing martial artist Chuck Donner (Darby Hinton). Because that's not enough for a movie plot, there's also a sub-plot about Erik trying to outwit his drug middle-man Grip (Vic Diaz), and another one concerning an undercover police woman (Chanda Romero) who is quite under cover with Erik. Plus some stuff about Erik's hobby, the Arena of Death (guess what happens there), but all these threads are so loosely connected they only belong together because they just happen to include the same characters as the other plot lines.

So, if you're looking for a tightly constructed thriller, or even just a film that makes a lot of sense, Cirio H. Santiago's Firecracker will probably disappoint you. If you, on the other hand, are going into the movie to enjoy a series of pretty disconnected, yet increasingly strange and awesome, scenes of grindhouse imagination, you've come to the right place.

Firecracker does, as you'd expect from a Filipino movie made for the international market, feature a lot of mildly okay fight scenes, choreographed with more imagination than the fights in a comparable US film would be, but looking a bit limp if compared to films from Hong Kong or Japan. Kesner isn't exactly a great screen martial artist, but she's enthusiastic enough and does a pretty good glare; she's also from time to time doubled by a guy wearing a really bad wig, which is always a plus.

On the acting side the film is all over the place. Kesner is at times grindhouse movie good - she does "angry and going to do violence to you" quite well - at other times nearly comically wooden. The scenes between her and Darby Hinton that are supposed to suggest their feelings of mutual attraction are so horrible they can't help but be amusing; it's not too often one has the possibility to study the mating habits of two pieces of wood. Good old Vic Diaz, on the other hand, has fun stealing every scene he's in by good old fashioned scenery-chewing of the kind that always makes me want to applaud and throw my underwear at the screen.

It's not just my underwear that's flying in the film, though. Once Santiago has decided that a female fighter going about her vengeance work earnestly and fully clothed isn't interesting enough, he inserts two totally random would-be rapists who chase Susanne (who has suddenly lost her badassitude for five minutes - I suspect nudonite, kryptonite's lesser brother) around a bit, only pausing to gorily dispatch of a helpful cop. During that chase, Susanne just happens to lose one piece of clothing after the other, until she ends the whole thing (suddenly regaining her power of fight) in one of those always classy moments of bare-breasted fighting. That whole scene is so lazily written and so randomly sleazy, the only possible reactions one could have are either outrage or hysterical giggling; as is my morally decrepit wont, I giggled.

I giggled even more during Firecracker's other big sleaze scene, the sex scene between Kesner and Hinton. That scene may begin with a depressed Kesner saying "hold me" to the man least likely to react appropriately (he is clearly a sociopath, after all), but then decides tragic romance is when two people slowly cut each other's clothes off with knives. Needless to say, it's one of the great love scenes in cinema, made even better by the fact that Kesner will soon enough poke Hinton's eyes out with a pair of sticks.

Nearly as awesome as these two scenes is the music by Nonong Buencamino. Buencamino's minimalist disco noise funk wouldn't be out of place on a No Wave compilation, and provides a film full of weird moments with another layer of strangeness.

Firecracker is a film that shows all the best elements of its director/writer/producer Cirio H. Santiago's work. It has all the mediocre fighting, the sloppiness, the off-key acting, and the ridiculously awesome or awesomely ridiculous ideas that can make Santiago's movies so much fun without the boredom that destroys some of them.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,reviews,martial arts,exploitation,cirio h. santiago,jillian kesner,darby hinton,ken metcalfe,vic diaz,chanda romero

In short: Demon of Paradise (1987)

Hawaii. A couple of dynamite fishers awakens an ancient fish-person with their antics. The fish guy does not approve of their ecological dubious methods and kills them, and - now that he's awake - decides to pop up from time to time to kill other people, usually by pawing at them from the water.

The local herpetologist Annie (Kathryn Witt) is soon convinced that the murders and disappearances are being committed by a prehistoric amphibian. Her attempts at convincing Keefer (William Steis and a cowboy hat), the local chief of police of her theory aren't too successful. Keefer falls in love with her, but not her brains, and continues to think the killer is a simple human serial killer. And Keefer's got to know, seeing that he once was "the High Sheriff of Reno", and lost his job there when he couldn't catch a serial killer (yup, that's the film's main attempt at character psychology).

Keefer does at least care about people getting murdered, which is more than can be said of the mayor of AmityCahill (Laura Banks), a local hotelier who uses the newfound monster mania to improve her business and cart more tourists into her place. As is traditional in films like this, she, like the guys who sold the dynamite to the explosive fishermen, will be sorry later on.

One cannot overstate the importance of Cirio H. Santiago as a producer of Philippines-made exploitation movies for the US market and as a partner in crime of Roger Corman; one also cannot overstate how painfully boring the movies Santiago directed himself were. There are a few exceptions to the latter statement, like the mad and wonderful TNT Jackson, but the larger part of Santiago's output suffers from the man's frightful ability to turn perfectly fun exploitation ideas (vampire hookers, for Cthulhu's sake!) into slow-moving abominations (Vampire Hookers, for Cthulhu's sake!).

Demon of Paradise was supposedly shot in Hawaii, but the omnipresence of Filipinos before and behind the camera suggests a shooting location a bit closer to Santiago's home. And Hawaii looked quite different in Lost, too.

Anyway, as my attempts to avoid talking about the actual movie at hand might hint at, Demon is one of Santiago's truly bad movies, if "bad" is the correct term to use for a film that you could very successfully sell as medication for most forms of insomnia. As is to be expected, the film's boring from beginning to end, with boring-bad acting (Steis's hat might be the most charismatic actor on screen), a boring and draggy script, a boring monster in a bad yet boring suit that is involved in intensely lackluster (and boring) murders, boring sub-plots with more boring characters, boring dancing, a boring scene of monster versus helicopter (resulting in a boring explosion) and even boring nudity. Whenever a scene threatens to become mildly exciting, Santiago applies his awesome skill at entertainment prevention by doing some insane stunt of directorial self-sabotage, like, just for instance, intercutting a fisher fighting against the monster's attempts at pulling his whole boat under (it sounds more exciting than it looks anyway, to be honest) with some folkloric "Hawaiian dancing".

I rest my case.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,in short,horror,cirio h. santiago

TNT Jackson (1974)

Diana "TNT" Jackson (Jeannie Bell) comes to "Hong Kong" to look for her brother Stag/Stack (Stack-o-lee?). She doesn't know yet that he has been killed in a drug deal gone very bad. With the help of friendly, two-fisted bar owner Joe (played by beloved - or so the Internet tells me - Filipino comedian Chiquito; not doing any comedy), TNT finds out the truth about her brother soon enough.

The young woman swears vengeance on the killers of Stag, planning to do some punishing with her superior martial arts. Her plans are made easier to accomplish by a few helpful factors: firstly, the drug cartel TNT is after is not as united amongst themselves as it should be. Someone has begun to attack their deliveries and make off with the product. Secondly, Charlie (Stan Shaw), a high-ranking member of the cartel who also just happens to be the killer of TNT's brother shows a lot of interest in her. And thirdly, a female government agent (Pat Anderson), has managed to penetrate the inner circle of the gang.

Looks as if the vengeance business isn't as lonely and difficult as people say.

I've got my reasons for usually being quite hard on the films Filipino exploitation mega-producer Cirio H. Santiago directed himself, namely that the man's directorial style is terribly bland, and that his ability to make the most boring movies out of perfect exploitation ideas is maddening to the extreme. Because of these dubious tendencies, I go into Santiago's films with a large amount of trepidation, quite certain the director will be able to ruin even the best of set-ups through a special brand of wilful apathy only paralleled in certain late period Santo movies.

So it comes as something of a surprise that Santiago's TNT Jackson left me enjoying myself quite a bit. As was often the case with Santiago's movies, TNT was co-produced with Roger Corman for the American's New World Pictures, and therefore made with a large eye on the US market, with Santiago's native Philippines a secondary concern that could be satisfied with a local star like Chiquito in a secondary role.

Obviously, TNT's attempts at crossing the blaxploitation film with a very US American version of the martial arts film (that is to say, a version that mostly lacks people in front of or behind the camera even vaguely acquainted with the basic concepts of fighting on screen) do not add up to a "good" film of any kind, even before you have witnessed this film's particular idiosyncrasies, but they do end up being pretty enjoyable through sheer persistence.

This time around, Santiago actually manages to completely avoid his most debilitating weakness, the love for long and painful - often painfully long - scenes of filler. Being Santiago, he goes even one step further and seems to just have decided to throw any pretence of a coherent plot out of the window. The whole film is just a massive conglomeration of stuff that just happens to vaguely centre around TNT's vengeance, but never comes together as anything I'd call a story.

It's all bizarre dialogue, ridiculously choreographed fights during which clearly no bodily contact is ever made (cleverly emphasised by the lack of any exaggerated sound effects - we don't want people to think anyone's trying to hide his or her lack of martial arts skills here, right?), a heroine played by a woman who looks even more ridiculous in a fight than anyone else here (which is quite an achievement, once you have seen Stan Shaw waggle his legs, or, as the film calls it, "fight") with a stunt double who looks nothing like her (but can do acrobatics, hooray!), random naked fu, random moments of Chiquito being likeable and being the only competent person on screen (even his few fights look sort of believable!), and so on, and so forth. All this random stuff is presented without even the slightest attempt at making it gel dramatically. In place of all that high-falutin' logic and emotional depth, Santiago sets random, silly crap. But this once, the director/producer also seems to have realized this amount of silly crap needs to be presented with complete earnestness to be charming instead of annoying, and proceeds accordingly.

It's a laugh a minute, but I found myself laughing with the film, and not at it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,blaxploitation,martial arts,jeannie bell,chiquito,stan shaw,cirio h. santiago,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: They Thought He Was Dead. They Were Wrong.

Pandorum (2009): The critical consensus about this film seems to be that it is pretty bad, but I don't agree with that. It certainly isn't a very good film or one that works well as the piece of SF/horror it is meant to be, but it mixes a pretty cool set-up with the awesomely stupid and the just plain stupid with such enthusiasm and earnestness that I couldn't help but have an hour and a half of fun with it. It's also great to see the extras from John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (a film that works for me on the same level as Pandorum does, now that I think of it) are still getting work.

Just don't expect something clever from the poor film.

 

Vampire Hookers (1978): You'd think that a movie featuring geriatric John Carradine as a poetry reciting master vampire and his three frequently naked vampire brides, as well as Vic Diaz and a ten minute plus four-person sex scene (without Carradine and Diaz, don't worry) would be a highly entertaining experience, but you would be wrong. This Cirio H. Santiago film is supposed to be a comedy, and therefore singularly unfunny for anyone without a preference for vampire fart jokes or the type of humour that is based on the inability of our male protagonists to identify transvestites.

Worst of all is how the (in theory relatively short) film drags and shuffles its feet for most of its running time, as if nobody was bothering to actually try and make it fun, and Santiago instead went for making it just long enough to be sellable. And just don't get me started on the painful sex scene (of doom).

At least I will always have this piece of wisdom the film shared with me: "Coffins are for being laid to rest, not for being laid".

 

The Cut (2008): This South Korean film about a group of medical students learning that autopsies can be much more dangerous than one would expect and that their elder generation has more than one corpse hidden in their cellars is well-acted, slickly directed, yet still not all that interesting a film. While the characters are a bit more complex than they first appear to be, the film is a bit thin and most certainly not deserving of nearly two hours of running time. Everything about The Cut is decisively conventional, and therefore just not all that interesting.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,filipino movies,south korean movies,horror,sf,comedy,in short,cirio h. santiago

In short: Wheels of Fire (1985)

A man called Trace (Gary Watkins) drives through the post-apocalyptic wasteland stalking his sister Arlie (Lynda Wiesmeier) and disapproves of her choice of boyfriends.

One day full of car crashes and random violence, the siblings are seperated. Without Trace knowing, Arlie is caught by the men of the evil post-apocalyptic warlord Scourge (Joe Mari Avellana), who will proceed to make her a naked car ornament, rape her, hit her and rape her again for the rest of the movie.

When they are not mistreating women, Scourge's men attack convoys of a group trying to establish a new order. Those guys are known under the unpleasant sounding name of The Ownership, and their love of order is the antithesis to Scourge's lifestyle, so the gangleader is trying to provoke them into a fight he knows he won't be able to win. No, I don't get it either.

While all this is going on, Trace drives randomly around, teams up with bounty hunter Stinger (Laura Banks) and her trained falcon and the mind-reading Spike (Linda Grovenor), fights Morlocks, roasts some cannibals and cynically leaves some people who are trying to build a rocketship. Neither he nor we know anything about them, so don't ask me why that's supposed to be a big thing.

When Trace finally realizes that Scourge has Arlie in his hands, he does the usual one-man hero bit.

Even compared with the Italian films which make up large parts of the genre, Wheels of Fire is an at times nasty piece of work. There's a bit too much care and love going into the depiction of Lynda's ordeal for comfort. I'm quite sure that it's all just meant as an excuse to show us some breasts, yet I can't help but feel that this goal could have been achieved in a less unhealthy way or with less enthusiasm for the girl's humiliation. Although I am talking about a film that thinks it prudent for its supposed hero to repeatedly use a flamethrower and shoot fleeing people in the back for no good reason, so it is probably a lost cause in any case.

It would be easier to overlook Wheels of Fire's dubious ethics if there were much else noteworthy about it, but the film doesn't seem all that interested in being interesting.

Director Cirio H. Santiago was of course an old hand (as producer as well as director) in the exploitation business, but he usually wasn't the most energetic of directors. His handling of the non-script stays flavorless and as meandering as the non-plot. It's done clean enough for a point-and-shoot film, it is just never stylish or charming or as full of pure dumb excitement as many other films of its sub-genre are.

The action is relatively solid in its cheap way, but again neither mad nor silly enough to keep the jaded viewer too interested.

There are a handful of moments which reach the proper height of dumb fun I want from my silly Mad Max variants - the Morlock sequence with its chittering blueskins is stupid enough to be charming, and the final battle is at least enthusiastic.

I can't wholeheartedly recommend Wheels of Fire to anyone but the hardened cult movie veteran (you know who you are), yet I have to admit that I stayed vaguely entertained by the comfy rhythms and genre tropes the film rather mindlessly repeats between its ethical failures, even if neither my heart nor my mind were exactly convinced by them. In other words: I have seen worse.

 

Technorati-Tags: filipino movies,post-apocalypse,action,cirio h. santiago,in short

The Blood Drinkers (1964)

aka Kulay Dugo Ang Gabi

(I watched the dubbed-by-local-talent, re-cut version of the film made for the American market. Sense and nonsense of the original might be quite a bit different.)

A certain Dr. Marco (Ronald Remy as a proto-Telly Savalas) and his entourage come to a small Filipino country community. As he is wearing a cape and sunglasses and his people consist of the equally cape-wearing assistant Tanya (future Darna Eva Montes), a hunchbacked gentleman and a murderous little person, it is quite obvious these must be vampires.

They have come for a reason - Marco's great love Katrina (Amalia Fuentes with a blond wig) has some not closer defined illness and needs lots of blood and the heart of her lost twin sister Charito (Amalia Fuentes without the wig) to recover.

Their mother, who is now under the vampire's spell, had once given away Charito to a poor family for mysterious reasons that are never spelt out.

Now, most vampires would just abduct Charito and be done with it, but Dr. Marco sets a rather complicated plan in motion, beginning with the murder and vampirization of the young woman's foster-parents. Nothing about the plan does much good of course, and only alerts the local priest and the awesomely hairdo-ed city boy Victor de la Cruz (Eddie Fernandez) to the evil one's plans.

This is a weird one, and I feel quite lacking in context to put the film in its proper place.

The Blood Drinkers has a certain affinity with Mexican horror of the same time with its mixture of gothic horror tropes and aesthetics with a rural pop (look at the fashion) and pulp sensibility, but also adds quite a bit more Catholicism than the Mexican films do, leading to a splendid friction between disparate elements.

The Blood Drinkers was inevitably produced by Cirio H. Santiago and directed by Gerardo de Leon (both of Blood Island fame and infamy, well and dozens of other exploitation films), and both men keep to their either slap-dash or just cost-conscious approaches to their respective fields. Instead of silly little things like complicated camera-setups or framing (although that doesn't work out too bad here), the visual star of the film is the decision to film large parts of it in black and white that was later on tinted, mostly in quite striking red and blue tones. This lends the film a mood of unreality which fits its rather illogical plot-progression and jumpy editing perfectly, lending the air of a dream to flaws that were probably based on mere incompetence or lack of funds.

"Competence" isn't the word that comes to mind when talking about the movie's narrative either. It's not just that it doesn't make much sense, but also that the dramatic emphasis is put on the wrong scenes or on the shoulders of a frankly ridiculous looking rubber bat (supposedly a much beloved element of the American producers), it's also that parts of the narrative are just plain strange. For example, the characters seem to be able to see the tint their scenes are presented in (red of course being the colour of evil here) and comment on it. And why is the scene in there in which Marco and Katrina are shortly healed from their vampirism by a little prayer of the priest, only to be cursed again by the Christian god in a display of what I can only describe as pure asshattedness? I can't help but use the old "dream-logic" explanation again.

Among its other wonders, the film also features some rather surprising hints of SM in the relationship between Marco and Tanya, when we learn that she isn't just kinda sweet on her boss and jealous of his eternal beloved, but that some of the feelings seem to be reciprocated. At least he whips her and then sucks the resulting wounds in a very sexual way.

The only thing I found myself really disapproving about the film was the disappointingly weak ending that more or less consists of the vampire disappearing and the priest explaining that evil is eternal. It's rather shameful for a film promising a final confrontation between a horde of vampires, our young heroes, the police and a Catholic procession, but what can you do?

Now, is it a "good" film? Most probably not. However, it is one of the cases where all flaws of a film come together in such an interesting way that it becomes exactly the sort of dream-like experience I'm after in my movie-watching, while at the same time offering a valuable look at a Filipino horror film from the early 60s.

 

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