GRITTY social realist urban dramas may get the respect and the awards at international film festivals, but it?s that other Philippine cinema that wins the true fanboy (and fangirl) love: the one peopled by midget superspies, wooden Indians come to life, mestiza vampires, anorexic Rambos, blind karate masters, fake cowboys, gay superheroes, and a host of underfed and underpaid stunt extras.
Yes, we?re talking about the world of Pinoy exploitation films.
Made on shoestring budgets for a fast buck, mostly (but not always) by hacks, these Z-grade flicks nevertheless captured something ? perhaps the raw, chaotic energy of contemporary Pinoy culture ? so much so that they?ve built up a devoted cult following over the years.
The late ?60s to the early ?80s were the golden years for Pinoy exploitation films. Before the advent of multiplexes and the consolidation of production resources in the hands of just a few multimedia conglomerates, small-time independent hustlers could still book enough theatres to turn a profit on the likes of ?The Pig, Boss,? Ramon Zamora?s take-off on Bruce Lee?s break-out hit ?The Big Boss? (and conclusive proof that we were early adopters of the ?Bruceploitation? trend ? this was released the year before Lee?s death). Or on ?Dirty Hari? (aray!), a Roberto Gonzales quickie which added karate to the Magnum-toting-tough-cop routine.
The American drive-in theater market was also thriving at the time, allowing producers and directors like Cirio Santiago, Eddie Romero and others to find financing for the countless B-features shot in the Philippines and featuring the likes of Pam Grier, Chuck Norris and the late David Carradine. Filipino crews churned out dozens of Vietnam War movies, women in prison movies, post-apocalyptic action epics and other grindhouse fare.
Rightly enshrined as one of the weirdest films of all time is ?For Y?ur Height Only,? starring creepy midget Weng Weng as a diminutive superspy who?s also ?a sex machine for all the chicks.? Dubbed in English by non-Tagalog speakers who might have been on drugs at the time, ?For Y?ur Height Only? has become a psychotronic video classic and, for better or for worse, probably as well-known an exemplar of the Filipino film abroad as anything by Brocka or Bernal.
National Artist for Film Gerry de Leon would probably squirm in his tomb if he knew that today he is perhaps better known abroad for his brace of mid-?60s vampire flicks ?Kulay Dugo ang Gabi? and ?Ibulong Mo sa Hangin? than for the 30 or 40 classic Tagalog films he made, including ?El Filibusterismo? and ?Ang Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo.? (They?re easier to get on DVD too).
Cesar Montano would probably also like to be remembered for his role in ?The Great Raid? rather than his breakout film ?Machete,? where he plays a Baguio wood carving of a cigar store Indian who?s mysteriously brought to life by a lovesick Rita Avila. (Never mind that ?Machete? is, like, a hundred times more entertaining than ?The Great Raid.?)
And Rey Malonzo would probably rather forget that he started his career as ?Bruce Ly? (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lai and Lee Bruce were already taken).
So how come nobody makes movies like ?Chopsuey Met Big Time Papa? anymore? For one thing, both Ramon Zamora and Weng Weng are dead. As are many of the leading lights of the golden age of Pinoy exploitation: Chiquito, Roberto Gonzales, producer and director Cirio Santiago, to name just a few.
The small mom-and-pop production outfits that made a lot of these movies are also history, squeezed out from one side by the emergence of the big studios and from the other by the slow creeping death of the Tagalog movie theatre.
Gone, but not quite forgotten.
Thanks to the Internet and the efforts of obsessive fanboys and girls ? many of them outside the Philippines ? these films are beginning to get some kind of recognition (?respect? may be too strong a word).
Quentin Tarantino, for one, has openly acknowledged his cinematic debt to a number of Pinoy exploitation movies even as he combines grindhouse aesthetics with A-list Hollywood production values.
A recent international film festival actually held a screening of the camp midnight movie classic ?Temptation Island,? perhaps a signal of wider acceptance of Pinoy cult cinema.
It is on the worldwide web, however, where these movies continue to live a preternatural half-life, as downloadable torrents, or legal online DVD purchases, and enshrined as the content of lovingly constructed websites and blogs, ripe for rediscovery.
? A good place to start is http://andrewleavold.blogspot. com/, a weblog maintained by Australian Andrew Leavold, who runs a video rental place in Brisbane where one can presumably find many of these films, and who actually made a documentary titled ?The Search for Weng Weng.? The film follows him as he retraces the tiny footsteps of the ?For Y?ur Height Only? star from his birthplace in Baclaran to his final resting place at the Pasay cemetery. Leavold?s blog contains a wealth of information on Tagalog movies, including extensive filmographies of Dolphy, Fernando Poe, Tony Ferrer, Roberto Gonzales, Ramon Zamora and others, as well as a mouth-watering archive of cult Tagalog movies. Leavold?s obsessive attention to the minutiae of even the most obscure films should put us natives to shame.
? Thankfully, we have a local counterpart in http://video48.blogspot.com/. Maintained by one Simon Santos, the site offers a somewhat more balanced view of Philippine cinema, including as it does more mainstream films and fewer of the more extreme type (although it has its share of Pinoy movie arcana, offering for instance, proof of the existence of a 1987 bold film actually titled ?Diligin ng Suka ang Uhaw na Lumpia?). It also covers Tagalog komiks and other aspects of Filipino popular culture, with an equally obsessive attention to detail. With a wealth of archival material including news items, photographs, movie posters and scanned artwork, video48 is a true labor of fanboy love.
