Bruka Queen Of Horror (1975)

1975 – Bruka (Emperor Films International)

[Philippines release date 18th July 1975; a Hong Kong-Filipino co-production, export title “Bruka Queen Of Evil”]

Director Albert Yu [Yu Chik-Lim*] [local credits also list Felix Villar] Producer Jimmy L. Pascual [Hong Kong Movie Database also credits Jimmy with Screenplay] Dialogue Yuen Shiao Po Cameraman Leung Kwok Kuen [Frank Leung Kwok-Kuen*] Music Chow Fu Liang Editor Lee Yam Hai In Charge of Production Fely Pascual Production Manager Vic Kwong Martial Arts Intructors [not listed in credits but credited on the Hong Kong Movie Database] Brandy Yuen Jan-Yeung, Yuen Bun, Corey Yuen Kwai Assistant Director David Yau [Yau Ming*] Interpreter Teddy Chiu [as Tedmund Chiu] Special Effects Michael Fung Makeup Artist Soledad Mauricio Wardrobe Romana Tablate Setting Maurio Carmona Props Ng Chau Lights Chui Kwok Kuen Electrician Tiburcio Pacia Stills Wong Tit Huang 

Cast Alex Lung [Alex Lung Ji-Fei*] (Hong Pin), Rosemarie Gil (Manda), Etang Discher [as "Etang Ditched"] (Carol Pak, aka Bruka), Sandra de Veyra (Louisa), Yukio Someno (Jungle Fighter), Anthony Lee [Anthony Lee Miu-Hung*] (Hermit?), Michael Kwan [Kwan Wai-Lun*], Charlie Davao (Manda's First Victim), Connie Angeles (Sacrificial Virgin), Darius Razon (Young Man With Guitar), Tintoy (Waiter), Matimtiman Cruz (Bar Owner), Roldan Rodrigo, Bruno Punzalan (Drunk Bald Thug), Greg Lozano, Ramon D’Salva (Monk), Pedro Faustino, Alfonso Carvajal (Mr Tong), Eileen Montinola, Ben Manalo, Michael de Mesa (Restaurant Patron), Rocco Montalban (Mr Tong's Guard), Kristina Kasten, Sancho Tesalona (Bald Restaurant Thug), Eddie Nicart, Jimmy Cruz, Gigi Vellasenor

HORROR/KUNG FU

*alternate spelling on the Hong Kong Movie Database

Review by Andrew Leavold

Back in 1974, a Filipino producer named Jimmy L. Pascual ended his two-year run of Hong Kong-based kung fu productions and brought his film outfit to the Philippines to make a film called Devil Woman. Essentially a chop-sockey cashing in on the kung fu craze like Pascual’s previous films (The Bloody Fists [1972], The Awaken Punch [1973] amongst others), Devil Woman is a rudimentary revenge saga with fantastic elements and snake motif, a familiar ingredient in Asian horror. Despite the regulation atrocious dubbing and wooden dialogue, Rosemarie Gil is positively regal as the snake-haired queen seeking revenge on the townsfolk for burning her parents alive, and the film was a minor hit, even receiving a theatrical run in the US, and has retained a small fanatical cult following thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s regular screenings.

For years, fans of Devil Woman saw posters for a film called Bruka Queen Of Evil featuring Rosemarie Gil’s distinctive coiffure and assumed it was one of Devil Woman’s numerous export titles. When a trailer finally appeared, the Devil Woman herself, Manda the Snakewoman, was indeed in the film – but with entirely different footage of bats, walking trees, and an army of Little People. Was this the Filipino cut of Devil Woman for the local market merely redubbed and resold, or an entirely different film? Alas, no version of Bruka could be found, even amongst the most intrepid of Asian collectors. 

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover a copy of Bruka Queen Of Evil last month [NOTE: I originally wrote this way back in May 2011] in my post box. Ten minutes later, I can confirm Bruka is no Devil Woman. Although made by the same production team and with many of the original’s cast, its immediate sequel Bruka is an entirely different creature. A quantum improvement on Devil Woman, the film throws open Manda’s own personal narrative, giving her both a legacy and a destiny, and adds a new protagonist’s magical quest against a seemingly improbable array of oddities. 

Bruka begins as Devil Woman ends, with Manda engulfed in flames as she falls over a cliff. Miraculously she survives and wakes in a cave next to a white-haired hag and a cadre of predatory and aggressively sexual dwarves. “I’m your grandmother,” the hag Bruka declares, and to prove the point, unfurls her fifteen-foot snake body. She then shows Manda flashbacks to her birth in a crystal ball, revealing Manda’s mother to have chosen a mortal husband over her reptilian heritage. Manda’s so happy at the family reunion, she literally dances for joy! Surrounding her is a brand-new arsenal for her protection: bats, rock creatures, tree-men, and shape-shifting dwarves into snakes. Veteran contrabida Charlie Davao is the test case, a poor villager who sees a figure under a sheet in his yard. It turns out to be a wooden cross covered in reptiles who almost drown him in venom. And with that, the Devil Woman sequel has already shape-shifted itself to the next level of weirdness. 

Grandma Bruka now gives her granddaughter a special gift – a black stone which turns her head full of angry snakes into human hair for as long as she keeps the stone in her mouth. To test the theory, she goes for a jungle stroll and kisses the first unfortunate hippie with a guitar (singer Darius Razon) who stumbles upon her. Spitting out the stone, the snakes pounce. Exssssscellent! In Bruka, Manda is no longer killing simply for revenge, and is instead awakening her true inner evil, and exploiting her outward normalcy to indulge her more primal, destructive instincts. In short: Evil has a new Mestiza and gloriously patrician Queen.

As Bruka unfolds, Manda faces a new antagonist in the shape of poor and intensely angry Chinese Hong Pin (Pascual’s kung fu kicking regular Alex Lung). He loses his bar job after saving a bumbling waiter (comedian Tintoy) from a beating from some brawling thugs (led by an old SOS Daredevil, Sancho Tesalona); desperate to look after his ailing mother and younger sister, he takes on the dangerous task of rescuing Louisa (Sandra de Veyra), the daughter of rich gangster Mr Tong (Alfonso Carvajal), from Manda's clutches. In an eerily effective sequence he walks into a village obliterated by Manda’s snake scourge, bodies strewn everywhere covered in flies and bite marks, and he helps bury the bodies alongside a priest (Ramon D’Salva) and his hunchbacked assistant. The forest is full of peril, warns the hunchback, and Hong Pin must seek a hermit’s help. And as if on cue, Bruka’s dwarves burst into the church, dissolve into snakes and cover the priest and cripple. With the hermit’s favourite rope-belt-turned-into-a-pole trick, Hong Pin makes his way through hostile territory, through all manner of creatures - and those include knocking out Yukio Someno and his mutant pig-man, and kicking a rock monster right in the stones! - to the cave containing Louisa and her virginal companions, all ready to be sacrificed to the Snake Queens’ insidious blood cult. 

As with Devil Woman, where Rosemarie Gil's daughter Cherie makes her first screen appearance as Manda's daughter, her son Michael de Mesa - youngest boy to her rocker husband Eddie Mesa - appears in the restaurant scene trying at first to seduce her, before tucking into a plate of live snakes. Another first is the earliest known screen credit for future director "Teddy Page"/"Irvin Johnson" etc under his real name Tedmund Chiu.  

Pascual’s immediate Philippines output for his Emperor Films International included another starring role for Lung, Dragons Never Die (1974), released in the US on a double bill with Devil Woman, and three Tagalog horror films released in 1975 alone for the local market (Isinumpa, Pagsapit Ng Dilim and Pandemonium: Lupa, Langit At Impiyerno). But if there was ever destined to be Filipino Lords Of The Rings with evil, fondling, River-Dancing hobbits, Batmen with huge bat wings and nasty bat claws, and bleeding trees, this is the one film to rule them all. Those with a snake phobia, BEWARE; those with eyebrows ready to be raised and a keenly-honed appreciation of the absurd, enjoy, and I’ll see you at Ermita’s all-dwarf bar Hobbit House for after-movie rum cocktails.

A rare contemporary newspaper review (and, as predicted, not very complimentary)...

The Grand Rapids Press, 3rd October 1978, p.20

Review from The Bloody Pit Of Horror blog: "While it's occasionally bogged down by the kung fu scenes, the pacing is a lot brisker, it manages to weave the plot threads together in a more streamlined and cohesive manner and it's filled with memorably insane bits and cheap-o monster creations to boggle your mind."

Review from the Cool Ass Cinema blog: "The kung foolery continues in BRUKA, QUEEN OF EVIL, the infinitely entertaining, unjustly obscure HK-Filipino co-pro sequel to DEVIL WOMAN. Doubling up on the snakes and piling up as many demented ideas as its near 100 minutes will allow, BRUKA throws that film's serious tone right in the garbage. In its place is this tale of vengeful Ophidio-females that embraces pure nuttiness with its menagerie of majestically rock-bottom creatures including giant stone monsters; angry midgets; a walking killer tree you could've made in your backyard; and a bat man that looks like a stunt guy in thermal underwear with kites glued to his arms. Yes, staples of the best bad cinema has to offer are all present and accounted for. Fans of wacky Asian cinema will be riveted; all others--especially Ophidiophobics--will be repelled. Fangs for the good time, nonetheless."

Alex Lung (Hong Pin)

Rosemarie Gil (Manda)

Etang Discher (Carol Pak, aka Bruka)

Sandra de Veyra (Louisa)

Yukio Someno (Jungle Fighter)

Anthony Lee (Hermit?)

Michael Kwan 

Charlie Davao (Manda's First Victim)

Connie Angeles (left - Sacrificial Virgin)

Darius Razon (Young Man With Guitar)

Tintoy (Waiter)

Matimtiman Cruz (Bar Owner)

Roldan Rodrigo

Bruno Punzalan (far left - Drunk Bald Thug)

Greg Lozano

Ramon D’Salva (Monk)

Pedro Faustino

Alfonso Carvajal (Mr Tong)

Eileen Montinola

Ben Manalo

Michael de Mesa (Restaurant Patron)

Rocco Montalban (Mr Tong's Guard)

Kristina Kasten

Sancho Tesalona (Bald Restaurant Thug)

Eddie Nicart

Jimmy Cruz

Gigi Vellasenor

THEATRICAL

HONG KONG - released worldwide by producer Jimmy Pasquale's Emperor Films International; Hong Kong release date 18th June 1975 [according to the Hong Kong Movie Database]

USA - screens around the country from July 1976.

HAWAII - premieres at the Hawaii and Kaimuki theatres on 25th August 1976, then screens around the islands as part of kung fu double bills until at least 1981.

GUAM - screened at the Johnston Theatre in Agana from May 1st to 7th 1977.

CAMBODIA - mentioned screening in the countryside as early as February 1975.

- mp4s [feature in Mandarin with English subtitles, trailer dubbed into English]

Sleeping Dragon (1975)

1975 – Sleeping Dragon (Sultan Films/Emperor Films International)

[A Filipino-Hong Kong co-production filmed in the Philippines, Philippines release date 24th April 1975]

Directors Ishmael Bernal, Jimmy L. Pascual Story Ophelia San Juan Screenplay Wilfred D. Nolledo Producers Ophelia San Juan, Elizabeth Pascual Executive Producer Jimmy L. Pascual Cinematography Chris Chang Music Lucio D. San Pedro

Cast Raymond Lui [Shing-Gung] (Ricardo "Carding" Lung Guevarra), Lotis Key (Maria Linda), Eddie Garcia (Don Andres), Charlie Davao, Chan Ling-Wai, Lou Salvador Jr (Carding's Filipino Friend), Johnny Delgado (Carding's Filipino Friend), Joe de Castro (Carding’s Filipino Friend), Maricru del Gallego, Greg Lozano, Lee Chiu, Lau Jun-Fai, Danny Chow Yun-Gin [as Chow Kin], Lau Chong, Carlos Padilla Jr, Lucita Soriano, Tony Carreon [as Tony Carrion], Jose Garcia, Jose Villafranca, Alfonso Carvajal, Paolo Baron, Philip Coo, Jun Garcia, Paquito Salcedo, SOS Daredevils, Bayanihan Philippine Dance Co & Rondalla, Georgie Quizon, Manok, Penggot

KUNG FU/PERIOD DRAMA

NOTES by Andrew Leavold: I have been searching for two decades for a copy of this film and am yet to find trace of a single film print, video tape or digital transfer. If anyone can help me out, I would be immensely grateful!

A co-production between Jimmy L. Pascual’s Emperor Films International, a Filipino producer based in Hong Kong from the early Seventies until around the time of this release, and Filipino company Sultan Films credited to Ophelia San Juan – a writer turned producer (Ophelia San Juan Productions) – and Elizabeth Pascual, believed to be a Philippines-based relative of Jimmy’s. From all evidence available, it was Sultan Films’ only production; within the year, Jimmy Pascual had returned to the Philippines and his Emperor Films concentrated on the local market.

Sleeping Dragon is remarkable as co-director Ishmael Bernal’s solitary export title – the future National Artist had already helmed a number of critically-acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful films in various genres (action, comedy, fantasy). Although Bernal shares screen credit with Emperor Films’ Jimmy L. Pascual, we can only assume that Pascual’s directorial input was minimal, and the glowing Pilipino Express review reprinted below fails to even mention Pascual once.

From its historical sweep and attention to detail, Emperor Films clearly had high hopes for international sales, yet I can find very little evidence of theatrical releases outside of the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Pascual’s familiar hunting grounds (the Filipino diaspora in Hawaii, Guam, and the Continental US). Perhaps the kung fu market was on the decline; and although the subject must have held considerable appeal to its Chinese-Filipino producers and co-director, maybe the film was too “Filipino” for a global audience. Sleeping Dragon was certainly a disappointment for Jimmy Pascual, and one of the main reasons why he left Hong Kong and made smaller films for a Tagalog audience. 

 

ISHMAEL BERNAL on Sleeping Dragon: “Tapos naligaw ‘yong [then you have the lost] Sleeping Dragon, another high point in my ‘distinguished career’ as an observer of social situations. It starred Raymond Liu, a Chinese kung fu actor, and Lotis Key, who was also into martial arts back then. It was a script by Wilfriedo Nolledo and I did not understand it at all. I went through this thing blindly. There was this Hong Kong fight instructor who would take over – since the movie is a series of fights – and I would sit and go to sleep most of the time because I cannot direct a kung fu fight scene.” [from his autobiography Pro Bernal Anti Bernal edited by Angelia Stuart-Santiago, ABS-CBN Publishing, Quezon City, 2017, p. 101]

 

T.D. Agcaoili, “Sleeping Dragon Has Its Historical Values”, Pilipino Express, April 1975, pp.29-30 [exact date unknown]

The Wilfredo D. Nolledo screenplay of Ophelia San Juan’s story, Sleeping Dragon, has been translated into an outstanding film by Director Ishmael Bernal with artistic evocations of the historical period – 1603 – in which the story, that of the events that lead to the first Parian or Chinese rebellion in the Philippines, occurred.

Yet, aside from its historical values, Sleeping Dragon utilizes popular materials such as kung fu and arnis de mano, and also romantic love, to reach a mass-oriented entertainment level. And by this method, presumably, put across to a wider audience some political values that belong more to a Rizal novel than to a standard Filipino movie.

In this case, however, Sleeping Dragon is not a standard Filipino movie. It is Philippine cinema that rightly belongs to the concept of culture that the New Society is energetically developing in all the arts, more eminently in music, the dance and theatrical stage than in the mass medium of the cinema, which is more complex as an art form.

Briefly, the story of Sleeping Dragon concerns the struggles of a Crisostomo Ibarra-Elias synthesis of a Chinese-Filipino hero, Ricardo Lung Gueverra (Raymond Lui) to relieve the oppression suffered by Chinese and Filipinos from the Spanish colonizers during the first century of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines through heavy taxation and forced labor. There is a love story, a triangle actually, between Carding (as Lung is called in the story) and Maria Linda (Lotis Key), daughter of a Laguna town alcade, and the Spanish alguacil mayor Don Andres (Eddie Garcia). Maria Linda is the antithesis of the proverbial Maria Clara: she is headstrong, wilful and, allegedly typical of the “indios” that the early Spanish colonizers encountered – not demure, and far from being subservient to the politics of their elders.

Sleeping Dragon is well-researched into the history of the Parian rebellion of 1603: there are the Three Mandarins who came to Manila from Cathay, ostensibly to look for the fabled Mountain of Gold (Paracale, possibly) but were suspected by the Spanish governor, Acuna, of espying on the fortifications and Spanish defenses in Intramuros, and the Chinese Governor Eng Kang who counted the number of his adherents to the fight for justice and freedom by the quantity of needles handed secretly to him by the Chinese residents of Manila and surrounding provinces.

The film also notably presents, side by side with kung fu, the Philippines’ own martial arts, the kali system of fighting. This is eminently and, we have to admit it, gloriously presented in Sleeping Dragon by a trio of Filipino actors, Johnny Delgado, Lou Salvador Jr and the late Joe de Castro. Delgado uses a prototype of the modern Batangueno knife, and he uses this weapon adroitly. Salvador practiced the art of arnis fighting, according to the credits, under Ernesto Presas, a sergeant in the Philippine Air Force who took time out to train Salvador in the intricacies of the ornate and lethal art, De Castro employs a pair of tui-fa (handle), a weapon introduced in the Philippines by the early Okinawan-Japanese settlers.

The Filipino system of martial arts supports the kung fu of Lui, and the sequences of fighting that punctuate the romantic and political dramatic situations in Sleeping Dragon point to a colorful Philippine past that might well revive the interest in Oriental martial arts, this time specifically on the Philippine kali system.

Sleeping Dragon is also notable for its original musical scoring, including the main title music that is symphonic, organic to the theme of the picture, and Filipino in idiom, composed and directed by Lucio D. San Pedro.

But the overall excellent quality of Sleeping Dragon, which involves a mixed group of Filipino, Hong Kong and Japanese players and technicians, can be easily attributed to the persipicacious direction of Ishmael Bernal, who handles crowd scenes effectively and whose training in the nouvelle vague cinema of the French is put into intelligent use in this entertaining, yet artistic, film.


 

 

 

Raymond Lui [Shing-Gung] (Ricardo "Carding" Lung Guevarra)

Lotis Key (Maria Linda)

Eddie Garcia (Don Andres)

Charlie Davao

Chan Ling-Wai

 

 

THEATRICAL

PHILIPPINES – 24th April 1975

HONG KONG - date unknown

 

GUAM – 9th to 15th April 1976 (Hafa Adai 2, Tamuning); December 1976 (Cinema, Tamuning, as the second feature to a Jimmy Wang Yu film) 

HAWAII – 4th August 1976 (two weeks at the Hawaii Theatre in Pauahi and the Kam Drive-In); November 1976

USA - 29th June 1976 (Tampa, Florida); March 1977 and June 1978 (Miami)

 

 

 

 

- Trailer (mp4)