Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010) - full transcript

Karate-kicking midgets! Paper-mache monsters! Busty babes with blades! Filipino genre films of the '70s and '80s had it all. Boasting cheap labour, exotic scenery and non-existent health and safety regulations, the Philippines was a dreamland for exploitation filmmakers whose renegade productions were soon engulfing drive-in screens around the globe like a tidal schlock-wave! At last, the all-too-often overlooked world of drive-in filler from Manilla gets the Mark Hartley (NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD) treatment in Machete Maidens Unleashed! This is the ultimate insiders' account of a faraway backlot where stunt men came cheap, plot was obsolete and the make-up guy was packing heat! Machete Maidens Unleashed! features interviews with cult movie icons Roger Corman, Joe Dante, John Landis, Sid Haig, Eddie Romero and a large assembly of cast, crew and critics, each with a jaw-dropping story to tell about filmmaking with no budget, no scruples, no boundaries and - more often than not - no clothes. Strap yourselves in - and join us for a non-stop Filipino femme-fest, all the way from the jungles of the Pacific via the trash cans of the critics!

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Where is everybody going?

To the refreshment center.

It's everybody's favorite spot

for delicious, tasty food,

from a snack to a full meal.

Plus all the extras, including

gum, ice cream, candy.

Make your evening at this

drive-in even more enjoyable.

The refreshment stand

has everything

to make your visit

here a pleasant one.

Why not get something now?

This contains

70,000 feet of film,

reduced to the most terrifying

90 minutes every made.

We were giving the audience

what they wanted to see.

The most grotesque creations

we ever dared to show you

on screen!

We did not have stars,

so we had to exploit

the subject matter.

A tremendous social revolution

is taking place.

Here, for the first time,

is the story of that change.

And I fully accept

the statement

we were making

exploitation films.

Exploitation

really is about ballyhoo.

It's about marketing.

I have here the upchuck cup,

a little item passed out

by the management

to remind you that if you can't

take the current double bill

of horror films

called frenzy of blood,

that you'd better not come.

So in exploitation films,

if you're selling sex,

it's "the girls with

the biggest breasts,

"and the most beautiful teeth,

and the most luscious thighs,

and you can have them,

if you come to this theater!"

You know, I mean,

that's what they're saying.

It's sort of like,

"never before

have you seen material

so ripe for masturbation!"

A titillating motion picture

of a young girl looking

for fun and kicks.

The truth is,

exploitation implies

lower budget and second run.

One of the things

about low-budget is

you go where

it's cheapest to make movies,

and that is really where

the Philippines come in.

You've got jungles,

you've got girls

who you can exploit.

You've got everything,

and you get it cheap.

So many of these exploitation

films made there

were made for the United States,

Australia, and Europe.

These were Western-style Roger

corman tits and ass movies,

marcos said, "come on down.

I'll give you the army."

¶ Let's go ¶

¶ where the action is ¶

¶ come on, let's go ¶

¶ where the action is ¶

¶ I said one one, two two ¶

¶ three, four, five ¶

¶ come on, everybody, ¶

¶ let me know you're alive ¶

¶ seven, six, five, four ¶

¶ three, two, one ¶

¶ don't stop dancin'

if you're having fun ¶

¶ let's go ¶

¶ where the action is ¶

¶ come on, let's go ¶

¶ where the action is ¶

¶ let's go ¶

American movies that

were shot in the Philippines

in the '60s and '70s

and through to the '80s

were basically low-budget

drive-in movies.

American companies would come

into the Philippines

and use it as a backdrop.

They weren't sold as

Filipino movies.

They were sold as

jungle action movies,

and the fact that they were

shot in the Philippines

was kind of secondary.

And you'd think,

"are they Mexican?

What are they?"

Because they weren't Chinese,

they weren't Japanese.

And the Philippines appealed

in several ways.

First, it was inexpensive.

The cost of labor

was so affordable.

We could hire filipinos

for about 5 bucks a day.

They had

an amazing movie industry.

They had studios,

they had all the camera

equipment that we needed.

We shot with a Mitchell

that was so old

the serial number on it

was, like, six.

They had stunt people,

they had special effects,

demolition people.

They used to say,

"when you're hiring

a pyrotechnics crew,

just check their fingers.

Just make sure they've got

all their fingers."

It's probably a good sign.

Antiamericanism was

rampant all over the world,

and we had liberated

the Philippines

from Japanese occupation,

so the Philippines was a place

that still really

appreciated American culture.

That was very significant,

I think.

The Philippines

was the wild east

as opposed to the wild west.

There was kind of a lawlessness

about the whole thing.

You were aware

that this was a gun-happy,

very dangerous society.

The makeup man had a .45.

The airline policy

was that, you know,

you won't have your guns on your

person while we were in the air.

So they were collecting

the passengers' handguns.

And you're thinking

to yourself, I mean,

"is something

going to break out?

Why is everyone armed?

Somebody had a gunfight

in the lobby

while some of my people

were there,

but that apparently those things

were kind of common.

Human life was cheap,

film was cheap.

It was a great place

to make a picture.

The period of the b movies

in the '70s, '80s,

maybe starting even from

the late '60s, you know,

is one of the sadly obscure

periods in philippine cinema.

Eddie romero is

definitely the guy that created

this kind of Filipino

exploitation movie genre.

I'm not exactly a pioneer

in that area.

Although probably the first

Filipino who entered that film.

He began writing at a very,

very early age

and he came to the attention

of Gerry de Leon.

Gerry was considered

one of the best directors

we had in the Philippines.

Gerry de Leon was the master,

Eddie romero was the faithful,

and, you know,

very gifted apprentice.

And from there

I am quite sure, you know,

the collaboration

started to happen.

It started with

an American g.I.

Who had been stationed

in the Philippines

and he stayed on.

He loved living there.

His name was Kane Lynn.

We got to talking,

and he wanted to know

if we could get together on

production in the Philippines.

It was just the perfect set

of conditions

to start something like this,

and to his credit,

Eddie romero seized it.

Kane Lynn, Eddie romero,

and irwin pizor's company,

hemisphere pictures,

was the first company to make

real American co-productions

in the Philippines.

They were making war films

like raiders of Leyte Gulf,

the walls of hell.

Will the American agent

reveal the plans

for general MacArthur's return

to the Philippines?

The war films

were not popular here,

and they could barely sell them.

I said, look,

I think you ought to get

involved with horror films.

Forget about these war films.

Well, Kane said,

"I have an old horror picture."

I saw it, and I was knocked out.

I said, "it's a great movie."

Terror is a man was a spin on

the island of doctor Moreau.

He knew that the forbidden

secrets he uncovered

were against the laws of nature.

It's a not very subtle one,

but what de Leon brings to it

is sort of visceral feeling

of the pain that this creature

that's being created

out of animals feels.

These shots

were always striking.

The way they were lit,

the way they were framed,

the way they were composed.

Although it's just

an exploitation movie,

exploitation subject,

you really do feel something

for this poor creature

that's midway between

man and monster.

Hemisphere put a gimmick

in where this bell goes off...

A special warning bell

has been installed

to protect the faint-hearted.

When the bell rings,

we suggest they close their eyes

and not open them

until it rings again.

And God knows where

they picked up that footage.

It does look like someone

cutting into meat.

I said to Eddie,

"it looked very realistic."

He said, "oh, we shaved a pig

and then cut into him."

Kane Lynn changed the title

to blood creature,

and it went through the roof,

and they realized horror

pictures were the answer.

We learned especially

in the small towns

of the United States,

horror films were

practically a staple.

Visit one of the most

mysterious corners of the world,

where unbelievably cruel,

barbaric customs

are still practiced.

The blood island series

were really just American

drive-in movies

with a bit of action,

the suggestion of a bit of sex,

some horror happening somewhere,

the weird rubber-faced monster

coming at you.

What sold the blood island

movies to American audiences

was the blood, breasts,

and beasts.

The three "b" s.

The kind of elements

people wanted

that went to the drive-ins.

They went in the car

with a girlfriend to make out,

and every now and then

they'd hear a scream, look up,

and they'd see something

kind of lurid happening,

and then they'd go back

to their snogging.

And I think that's how

these movies are structured.

If you went to see a film called

brides of blood,

and you came out

complaining about, you know,

the fact that it

was a cheesy movie

with some naked Filipino girls

being eaten by a monster,

I mean, who would have listened

to you, you know?

What did you expect?

It seems that some

living organisms on this island

are undergoing

drastic mutations.

There were kind of

good invention of stories

to begin with.

Gerry and I tried

to flesh them out a little more,

but that was very limited

on account of the nature

of the market.

So as simple of

characterization as we can.

It's create a situation

that's very tense,

make sure that people don't have

too much dialogue to say,

because these

probably weren't great actors

and they might get it wrong.

Better go away now.

You are making me

uncomfortable again.

John Ashley was kind of

a teen heartthrob

throughout the mid to late '50s.

A romantic idol among people

who didn't know any better.

Married to Deborah walley,

they divorced.

His way of getting over

the divorce in the late '60s

was to take a job

in the Philippines

doing brides of blood.

It was exotic for him.

He loved the people.

He loved the excitement.

Well you've got to admit,

he's got style.

John was a lover, you know?

He had quite a few

escapades here.

I had a shirt made for him,

and all his girlfriends

were embroidered on the shirt.

A lot of embroidery.

Ashley ended up

becoming a producer

on his own there

with Eddie romero.

He was a charming person.

He was very easy

to get along with.

He had great sensitivity

for the personalities

of other people.

He was a good friend.

Kane came to me

'cause I was doing their

advertising and marketing,

and he said, "brides of blood.

"We want to have marketing.

We've got wedding

and engagement rings."

Female patrons who showed up

to see the movie

got cheap plastic wedding rings

because apparently they were

marrying a monster in the film.

Genuine synthetic wedding

and engagement set free.

And I had the catchline:

"Here comes the bride with a

non-human creature by her side!"

And then

mad doctor of blood island

had green blood

that was handed out to everyone.

I invented this idea

of the oath of green blood.

You had to take it

before you could see the movie.

I join the order of

green blood with an open mind,

and through this liquid's powers

am now prepared to safely view

the unnatural green-blooded ones

without fear of contamination.

The green blood potion has been

known to passionately affect

some people after drinking it.

I said, "well, look,

before we give these out,

I should test it."

Well, I took it,

I had a stomach ache

the whole night.

The mad doctor of blood island,

with his supernatural beings,

caught up in the rampage

of gory brutality.

I thought

mad doctor of blood island

was the best of the three

blood island pictures.

There's at least one scene

where someone's intestines

are ripped out

in glorious detail.

The monster in that film

is particularly awful.

It looks like papier-mache.

There's a tendency to overuse

zooming the zoom lens,

and I haven't found anybody

that likes it except myself.

There were really no rules

as to what kind of films

they were making and what they

could get away with,

so I think they were testing

the boundaries.

I know they came close

to pushing the envelope.

A lot of what they did

became the standard

for low, low-budget

horror films.

The mpaa, the ratings board,

didn't see these films.

They could care less.

So little kids

were going to see

monsters raping women

staked to poles.

Beast of blood

was the third film,

and it was the least horrific

of the three.

In the world

of the gruesome and grotesque,

comes your

most horrifying meeting

with nerve-chilling fear.

It had a lot of nudity

that Celeste yarnall

did in one scene.

That was supposed

to never be seen by anyone

other than the Japanese market,

which for me at the time

seemed so far away.

Of course now, with DVDs,

it's all over the world,

and I'm, "did I do that?"

I guess I did.

You'll see an orgy

of bloody terror,

as a mad fiend

transplants human heads.

Good morning, don Ramon.

I hope you slept well?

The head can talk

to doctor lorca.

The day may come soon, lorca.

Hence the famous line, "lorca,"

because that head

is going to get lorca

if it's the last thing he does.

The conditions were incredibly

primitive on that picture.

They went back and back

into the jungle.

I had just found out

that I was pregnant,

and I tried to confide in them

that some of these things

were going to be

a little bit rough on me.

I'm supposed to drop down

and be enveloped by quicksand.

Well the head stuntman

had a rifle over his shoulder,

and when he leaned over

to pull me out,

the rifle swung

over his shoulder

and split open my face.

That picture made a fortune.

They found this formula,

and they stepped it up.

They brought it up

to a new level of extremity

and it worked in their favor.

I did well,

but I get a little tired

of them after a while.

I think everyone's affection

for those movies

is based in dollars.

Sam sherman,

the guy who urged hemisphere

to get into making horror films,

ultimately lost patience

with them,

because they did make

horror films.

They just kept making the same

one over and over again.

Eddie romero

was planning a picture

called

the beast of the yellow night

as a follow up

to beast of blood,

and it was a very complex,

faustian story.

He suffers the cruelest curse

ever placed upon mortal man

by the host of darkness,

condemned to stalk the night

with an insatiable lust

for living flesh.

It was wild.

But I felt it was too far out

for this kind of a market.

Why do you think I keep

bringing you back like this?

To awaken the latent evil

in the people

that I come in contact with.

I felt that

for that type of film,

the characters were more fully

developed, more believable.

Whatever else you might be,

you are still a man.

It didn't do as well.

When the film was released

in the uk,

the reels were put

the wrong way round,

and when I told Eddie this,

you know, he just laughed,

and he said,

"did anyone notice?"

And I said, "no, it probably

made the film better."

It ended up

going to Roger corman,

and Roger corman

was kind of stuck with it.

He didn't really like it.

It was such a twist of fate,

really,

that Roger corman

came to the scene.

John Ashley recommended

coming to the Philippines

and said,

"you have carte blanche there.

You can do whatever you want."

Roger corman wasn't like.

Kane Lynn or John Ashley.

He had no love

of the Philippines.

This was just a money-making

opportunity for him.

I first visited the

Philippines in 1970,

which was the year

I started new world pictures.

New world and Roger corman

were really the experts

in genre films.

But in any film

I've ever worked on with Roger,

there's three main elements

that he's looking for,

one is humor,

which he considers

tremendously important.

Grand theft auto

is a love story...

With cars.

Another is action,

Which he considers

very important.

And another is sex,

which he considers important,

but not quite as important

as the other two elements,

I don't think.

This clinic deals specifically

in sexual problems.

What's the matter?

Having trouble?

Cinema was really changing,

and it was becoming r-rated,

and these were

low-budget movies,

moving away

from the studio films.

In fact, if you look

from today's perspective

at 1970s exploitation pictures,

they look like they were made

on another planet.

The basic elements

of them are things

that you couldn't put

in movies today

and get away with.

And these pictures

always played

at drive-ins,

where huge screens

can be seen for Miles around

by cars driving back and forth,

and the images in these pictures

are astonishing.

The new world company

built their success

on women's exploitation.

It's the candy striper's job

to make the patients' stay

in the hospital more pleasant.

This is not

what we mean by pleasant.

It was pleasant, wasn't it?

Our first film was a picture

we made in the United States

called the student nurses,

which turned out

to be a major success.

The student nurses.

Once you've met them,

you'll never forget them.

New world did a lot

of nurse pictures.

Roger was just turning

them out as fast as he could,

making five, six pictures

a year.

Student nurses,

student teachers,

and then what else

could we have?

How about

young female prisoners?

There have always been

women in prison.

There's always been bad girls

in juvie hall

or the dormitory films.

The difference between the films

is really only,

how tawdry are we going to get?

By the time we started,

you could do a lot that was

just absolutely unheard of,

so that really made

the difference, I think.

So what have you got

in the Philippines?

Jungle.

The big doll house

was originally written

for the United States,

but after I saw the Philippines,

I thought, we could easily

switch this to a tropical prison

and I could make

a bigger picture for less money.

The prison films focused

always on beautiful women

who were imprisoned

rightly or wrongly

and fought their way out.

This way

you'll only get killed.

Not if we get out of here fast.

Women in cages and in boxes

and confined.

We hear in one of the movies

that the women are only allowed

two showers a week,

but we as the lucky viewers

get to see both showers.

You've got to have "t" and "a"

and then a little torture.

The person being tortured

on the wheel

or having fire beneath them,

and they're all screaming,

and the next scene they're fine.

As far as incorporating

all those elements,

you had to have

at least one per reel.

I just imagine

the screenwriters just saying,

"okay, I've done three pages.

Nobody's been tortured."

And they just write that in.

Strip.

Torture.

Women,

guarded by barbed wire and guns

in a tropical hell.

They call it the big doll house.

Big doll house set the tempo

for almost every woman

in prison,

woman in jeopardy situation

that came after it.

Prerequisite girl fights

and dunking heads in toilets.

That was pretty humiliating.

I mean, they did it.

They took my head

and put it in the toilet.

I read the script and I

thought it was just, just awful.

I said, "oh, my God.

What am I going to do

with this?"

Jack was aware that people

were willing to see women

in these incredibly

tense conditions,

all being thrown together,

what were the pressures

that were going to build

among these women?

Green, scared, and pretty.

And they're not wearing

very much,

and there's gonna be

lesbianism.

You can bed down over here

where I can take care of you.

And there's gonna be

cockroach races.

That's it, go boys!

The filipinos

got these huge cockroaches

that they were able

to catch very easily.

There were plenty

of them around.

Come on, baby!

All of these elements

that ended up making

for what he knew was gonna be a

sensationally entertaining film.

Judy brown strapped

to a table naked,

and then being menaced

by a live cobra

on some kind of contraption

like the pit and the pendulum.

Silly, huh? Ridiculous.

Totally ridiculous.

There was a sheet

of glass involved there.

I'm a bit claustrophobic.

Being enclosed in,

that was what scared me more.

And I was topless.

Yeah.

All these girls were ready

to take on new experiences.

They wanted to get

their careers going,

and they wanted to be

up on the screen,

and if it involved

cobras, okay.

Meet the girls

of the big doll house.

Well, you don't look like

a hardened criminal to me.

They're young,

they're beautiful,

and they're killers.

There were no big stars

who came out of those pictures

and went on to huge movies.

That wasn't the case.

No shit!

Pam is the exception,

because Pam is basically

Jack hill's discovery.

Even though she had virtually

no experience

and no training

that I was aware of,

I just felt she was a natural.

And she went over there,

and she learned to act.

They gave me

the actor's studio,

the actor's workshop,

the myth that they gave me

all these great books on

stanislavsky, right?

So I'm learning

this profound work,

and I'm going to do

a Roger corman

booties-in-the-jungle movie.

So I said, "I'm gonna do it.

"I don't care if it's a b movie.

I'm goin' in there,

and I'm gonna kill ya!"

She had an intensity,

obvious good looks,

extremely large breasts,

and she was smart.

She probably still is smart.

You don't get dumb.

And I think all of that

shone through.

Who you can talk into

to going to the Philippines...

That was the trick.

My agent said,

"don't you do this movie!"

I don't think

a Hollywood starlet

would be very happy there.

It's so humid and so hot.

I remember I got heatstroke.

I don't remember ever having

dressing rooms or honey wagons.

My dressing room was a cave,

and guess what else

that cave was used for?

The men's latrine.

It was just horrible.

We would immediately get

a call from the agent,

saying that they were living

in some rat infested jungle hut.

I saw a rat carrying a kitten

through the window.

I wonder if everybody in this

place lives like this.

And you would have to say

to the agent,

"well, you know,

"it really is the best

of those jungle huts down there,

"you know?

They're really out there

in the middle of nowhere."

The bugs were enormous.

Bugs the size of birds

that were flying around.

I can remember eating a salad,

and roaches were climbing out

of my salad.

I don't recall that there was

any health or safety on set,

off set, whatsoever.

We were using military-trained

attack dogs.

The director of photography

went in with his light meter

to get a reading on the dog,

and the dog ate it.

You just want to do the scene,

and you want to do it properly,

and get out.

There was always a rumor

that there was one girl

who didn't come back,

and it was circulated around

the actresses,

and they were all afraid to go

because of this supposed girl

who had vanished

in the Philippines

and never came back.

Roberta Collins.

She was in the first couple.

Action, big mouth.

She was like a favorite

for directors

of this kind of film.

She had just

a remarkable personality.

Get it up or I'll cut it off.

The audience just exploded

with that line,

and that was one that I wrote

myself, actually.

I don't know if I should be

proud or ashamed of that.

In my family,

there was a lot of outrage

about the big doll house.

"What have you been doing, Jane?

What kind of movies are these?"

I didn't like the film.

I thought it had gone

a little bit too far

with the sex and the violence.

It was the most profitable

independent picture

ever made up to that time.

It was just a huge, huge hit.

The film cost about $100,000

and grossed something

like $4 million.

When I saw the grosses,

I have to admit,

my scruples faded away,

and I said,

"let's make another one."

Women in cages.

The sensational

new motion picture

that rips the veil off

the dirtiest racket

ever conceived

by the minds of vicious men.

The market

was flooded immediately,

essentially flooded by us.

Women in cages

was Gerry de Leon's

last American-funded film.

It's a beautifully shot film,

but very lackluster in the

performances and the plotting.

If you liked the title,

women in cages,

you're gonna like this movie,

because you know what it's got?

Women in cages.

So, you know,

it's truth in advertising.

The next film that I did

in the Philippines

was the big bird cage,

which I did almost as a spoof

on women in prison pictures.

I felt to just do

another one wouldn't work,

so I kind of made fun

of the whole genre.

Nothing like that

ever happens to me.

Jack was trying to appeal to

what the audience responded to,

and we were surprised

at how much the audience

liked the humor.

The big bird cage,

a strange and brutal world

of men who are only half-men...

Don't play coy with me,

tootsie.

You don't have anything

I'd be interested in anyway.

And women who are more

than all woman.

I told you I was cut it off

if you try to pull

that shit on me!

But still including the kind

of ingredients that you need.

Being hung up by your hair

in the sun,

that always seemed to me

a bit extreme.

The fact is, if you really

have a lot of hair,

it's not that big a deal,

that that can support

your weight.

I just liked the combination

of sid and Pam grier

working together,

so I starred them as a team

in the big bird cage.

Say, when are we gonna have

that revolution anyway?

Pretty soon, pretty soon.

Sid haig is

a lazy revolutionary

who gets this wonderful idea

of breaking the women

out of this women's prison

in order to help

get the revolution started.

Worst plan

in the history of movies.

Everybody gets killed,

and it's supposed to be

a happy ending.

The big bird cage did not do

as well as the big doll house

and maybe the fact that we

played it a little bit too much

for the humor hurt it.

A lot of the pictures

had no really redeeming factors

as far as the stories

were concerned.

They were very bizarre,

to say the last.

I remember one film we made

called night of the cobra woman.

I was getting tired

of the woman in prison concept,

so we started to move

into science fiction.

How much longer must I remain

in this ridiculous human form?

It featured a woman

who was part cobra.

Plunging her fangs

into warm flesh,

she sucks the life

from the bodies of men.

She's a woman who has sex

with men and extends her life,

but when they wake up,

they're like 90 years old,

and then they die.

Marlene Clark had some sort

of snake skin,

and I remember a scene where

she just peeled it off her body.

It was a very strange movie.

Only the cobra could satisfy

her unearthly desires.

If there's an underlying theme,

then it would be,

be careful of women.

They're snakes.

They'll suck the life

out of you.

I'll suck the years

out of your body.

It was only way I can be

a human and a woman again.

It was filmed in slitherama,

with a hiss.

I came up with that,

slitherama.

One of the things that

made these films noteworthy

was the fact

that very few people

were making films

with women leads.

Roger treated women

in film really as heroes...

And that was a departure.

Moviegoers were not used to

seeing women doing action

at all.

And even if they were little

mousy girls at the beginning,

by the end,

they're toting two machine guns

and shooting down

scads of guys.

Female guerrillas.

Machete maiden action.

You not only had

a female heroine,

but you also had

a female being abused.

So you got both sides

of the coin,

and you appealed

to the male audience,

and you appealed to any dates

they may have had to bring,

which I suspect were not many.

Is this how you get your kicks?

There are a lot of filmmakers

who are responsible filmmakers,

but sometimes what's fun

are the irresponsible filmmakers

who later say, "well

of course, I was doing this."

They were about women

being abused at the beginning,

but then taking over

and having revenge.

I think that was

very helpful overall

in terms of women establishing

themselves on the screen

as powerful figures

and being empowered as women.

Women really related to that,

and began to love us as heroes.

You hear people talking about

the crassest, most exploitative,

sexist, racist films

as liberating, and intelligent,

and I'm thinking,

"what are they smok...

I mean, you know, "what?"

You can't rape me.

I like sex.

Feminism and women

taking their power

was worldwide at that time,

so taking off our tops was

kind of a powerful thing to do.

It was, to a certain extent,

liberating.

Look, I can do this,

I can still be an actress,

and I can still be respectable.

It's an interesting mixture

of feminism,

because there we were, being

exploited in a certain way,

and at the same time,

we were showing that

we were powerful women.

They took control,

but they'll show you their tits.

All those films

in the Philippines,

ten beautiful women,

naked every single time.

Hundreds... I mean hundreds...

of beautiful little girls,

just running around bare-assed.

And all the only guy is you.

That's right.

I don't buy

that feminist stuff.

What you're talking about

is a tit shop,

pure and simple.

Feminism with aggressive women

was not going to be palatable

in the mass market

without tits and ass.

Buenos dias, senoritas!

Somehow we had to do that in

order to get to the next step.

I didn't feel badly about it.

I saw it as a path.

Are we not taking this

a little too seriously?

Intellectualizing this?

This is not a film

about the human condition.

This is a film

about tits and ass.

A lot of filmmakers deal

with people all the time

where someone says,

"in your film,

when the, you know,

"mutant woman gave birth

to the mulatto monster

"who tore the head off the Nazi,

"weren't you talking about the

exploitation of colored peoples

around the world

and their ultimate triumph?"

And they'll go,

"yes, I was,"

and inside they're thinking,

"what the fuck

are they talking about?"

The revolutionary spirit

of young people in the '60s

continued into the early '70s,

so with a number of these films,

we had a rebel,

revolutionary spirit to them.

The revolution is at hand.

The time has come.

A lot of pictures with rebels,

a lot of pictures with corrupt

regimes being overthrown.

It was very easy

for our directors

to get the political content in

because I told them

I wanted the political content.

In his mind,

it was kind of a moral balance

between the exploitable

ingredients that he needed

to sell it,

and giving him a feeling that

there was some importance to it.

And I bought that

completely myself.

If you look

at Jonathan demme's the hot box,

that's overtly political.

The hot box.

Four American nurses

snatched from their work

in a foreign hospital.

We abduct nurses to provide

healing and medicine

to our guerrilla army.

We were doing the whole thing

that Roger likes.

You know,

"oh, no, don't take us!"

You will do what

you are told to do!

If not, you will all be shot.

I played a character

in the film called bunny,

and bunny was the one

who always got hysterical.

I hope some day

you're on a date,

and then some maniacs

come along and shoot your dates

and drag you into the jungle

and then attack you

and then not even tell you why!

She wasn't very deep,

but she really said it

like it was.

We escaped only to discover

that the military

was actually the brutes.

Soiled, spoiled and violated,

they wouldn't take it

lying down.

It was the girls

learning firsthand

what the efforts of the

revolutionaries were about.

You get tired of seeing

your sisters assaulted,

your families abused,

paying a fine week after week

for trying to sell

what you grow.

The original title was called

rx prescription revolution.

One day I get a call

from Roger corman,

and Roger says, "Margaret."

"Hi, Roger."

"I just want you to know

that the title,

prescription revolution,

is now the hot box.

His sense of it was

that we didn't have

that iconic moment.

He said, we're going to shoot

that scene of the hot box.

Plunged into the fiery depths

of the hot box...

They had some guy kind of

spraying us down with hoses.

A tropical torture chamber

where anything can happen.

And we were standing

in the corner,

freaking and screaming,

and now the movie

was the hot box.

The girls were treated in a way

that was somewhat titillating

for that kind of audience,

and I was really dismayed

that the purity of what we

thought we were going after

was really kind of undermined.

One of the great ironies

of the Filipino pictures

is you have these movies

being made about revolution

against essentially

fascist dictatorship

in a fascist dictatorship.

1972, all right?

That's when all the TV stations

just stopped,

and then suddenly there was that

face.

I have signed

proclamation number 1081,

placing the entire Philippines

under martial law.

Marcos declared martial law,

and he called all the shots.

He was the ultimate leader.

Martial law

means military power,

and he, as commander in chief,

was in absolute control

of this country.

There were checkpoints,

militia with the guns

and the whole thing.

And they were on every corner.

You had to be inside at

a certain time in the evening.

And if you were in a club,

and it was midnight,

the owner of the club

just went over

and put the lock on the door,

and you had to stay

and party all night

till 6:00 in the morning.

Okay.

And if you went outside

after curfew,

they would put you in jail,

and you would end up picking

up trash along the streets

the next day.

When they declared martial law,

we were supposed to go

into some town square.

All unlicensed firearms

now in your possession

should be turned over

to the Philippines constabulary.

After that time, you know,

anybody with a gun,

it was a serious offence.

Brutality was absolutely

a reality in this country.

They'd stop somebody because

he was kind of shady looking,

and "oh, there's

a butterfly knife.

Big offence.

And they shot him

right there on the spot.

Life was like...

You'd get snuffed out

just like that.

State control

was almost absolute.

And media definitely

had no escape

from this kind of governance.

Artists of all kinds

who were subversive

were afraid to voice

any kind of opinion

because they would disappear

or end up in the prisons.

Print, radio, television,

and, of course,

the movie industry

were all under

the control of the state

through its various

instrumentalities,

such as, for example,

the censorship board.

The only problem there

with censorship is

if you do a film

that deals with subversion.

In the big doll house,

pat woodell's character

has that one line...

Before you can do anything

in here,

a lot has to be changed

out there.

If that were made

in a philippine movie,

that would be stricken out,

and then you'd never

hear from the director again.

You're under arrest.

Somebody's determining

exactly what kind

of entertainment

we're going to have,

but the American movies

were just out there.

So, you are the

representatives of the people.

They're liberators,

and we are the oppressors.

Almost censorship

was not in place.

I don't think they had

any jurisdiction over us.

They had no idea what we were

doing on a day-to-day basis.

They didn't read the script.

To a certain point,

that was kind of liberating

for some

of the Filipino directors

who engaged in the production

of films for export.

If you're making an

exploitation picture,

you actually can get away with

a lot more subversive stuff,

or really powerful statements

because nobody's looking.

One of the reasons

that we were able

to get away with films

with a revolutionary theme

was the fact that we didn't

really say in all the films

they were in the Philippines.

Well I shouldn't even be here.

My trial was a real joke.

Those fucking banana Republic

cops.

And I don't think marcos

would look at a character

such as the commandant

in big bird cage

and equate himself to that.

After that,

the almost desperate need

for the dictatorship

to attract business

into this country.

We were trying

to explain production

to president marcos,

and we were talking about

the various aspects,

and the subject came up

about below-the-line costs,

right, in which he got a rather

puzzled expression on his face

and said, "can you explain

about this below-the-line?

Is that something like

under the table?"

We got all the cooperation in

the world from the Philippines

because we paid 'em.

Almost anything we needed,

marcos was very open

to giving us.

I asked the army to supply me

with three helicopter gunships

to be there at 9:00

in the morning,

and the captain in charge said,

"I apologies for being late,

"but we were 100 Miles north

strafing and bombing rebels.

We will now change

to blank ammunition."

"Excellent idea," I thought.

The army was very willing to

stage the battle scenes for us.

And that actually was important,

because although we started with

the women in prison pictures,

we very quickly moved

to action films.

Black mama, white mama,

from a hellhole

of twisted passions,

to an inferno of flaming death.

When Roger called me to invite

me to do black mama, white mama,

he said, "I want you to know

it's the female version

of the defiant ones.

Chains of hate

kept them bound together.

Two women,

totally different purposes.

A terrorist and a hooker.

You two should have

lots to talk about.

Out for themselves,

but in the end,

finally bonded together.

Pam dragged me through

the jungle,

and I dragged her,

and then I got raped

while she was on

the other end of the...

Pam grier was amazing

on all of these shoots

because she was up

for almost anything.

There I am, hooked with

handcuffs together with her,

and if Eddie asked her

to jump off a cliff,

she would have gladly done it

and taken me with her.

Some of it was an exaggeration,

but we got along very well.

I liked Pam very much.

What's that?

It's a charm bracelet.

The later Eddie romero movies,

woman hunt,for example,

was a lot sleazier in terms of

the way the times had changed.

Audiences were expecting more.

They certainly offered

a more extreme meal

than the early ones had.

Pig, ready for the butcher.

Come, join the woman hunters.

Set your sights

on the tastiest game.

Pretty basic formulas.

Women being kidnapped

and sold into slavery.

They haul us in there

in a cage through the jungle,

and they turn us over

to this lesbian,

black widow kind of woman...

You like to put on a beard

when you do it?

Do you dress up like Tarzan,

or do you pretend

you're a woman?

Who has her way with us.

Another incredible bevy

of beautiful women

who were being hunted down

by these wealthy, industrialist,

perverted guys.

We're all pigs.

We're all gonna be slaughtered.

Roger liked that theme

where they were the game,

the naked prey,

and literally, having to flee

for their lives,

and having to fight the hunter

was a unique way

in which to present

a new women-in-jeopardy theme.

Hello, lover.

In the Filipino films,

the best ones are the ones that

are trying to do it for real,

are trying to make a good movie.

Failing miserably, but trying.

I would look

at making a "b" picture

for a "b" audience

with "b" elements,

but not Eddie romero.

Every picture to him

was an "a" picture

that had complexity of story.

I wanted to make the characters

and the stories

more believable.

My own wife,

my closest colleague.

You never understood.

You never understood!

Eddie was doing

a film with Roger

called the twilight people.

We had all these characters that

were half-human, half-beast,

and one of the characters

was the bat man.

Eddie sent Roger

a long script rewrite

on how he wanted

these characters to interreact

and so on and develop

their stories,

and Roger sent back

a very terse telegram

which says, "Eddie,

just make the goddamn bat fly."

"You make the bat fly,

and we're in business."

Nobody could really take any

of those things that seriously,

let's face it.

So it's a take off,

but it wasn't meant

to be amusing.

You gotta play it straight.

I would hate to do a film

without any trace of humor.

I don't think

there were many spots

where you'd break out

and really laugh

unless it was really

the poor little bat man,

trying to fly.

When they decided that there

was a limited return

that you could get

from pictures that were r,

then they said,

"okay, we'll make some pgs.

We'll make some

fantasy pictures."

A movie about Atlantis

with fish monsters.

They were odd-looking

creatures,

except for Leigh Christian,

who was a

terrific-looking creature.

And also John Wayne's son

as the star.

What's the pitch?

Ashley assured me

that they were going to attempt

to do something

on a higher level,

certainly a pg level.

A primeval priestess leads

a people from a kingdom

beneath the sea

to a blazing battleground above.

Beyond Atlantis.

That's almost always

the kiss of death,

because people who don't know

how to make

fantasy pictures for families

end up making fantasy pictures

that don't work for families.

Cannibal fish.

- We need a rope.

- I got one.

My father and I kept

this hybrid society going

by having me mate with humans.

It is your destiny to mate

with an outsider,

not to love him.

It was, like,

highly improbable.

You had to suspend disbelief

along the way

for all of this stuff.

I wasn't very happy

with the script.

We tried to do

what we could with it.

I kind of, like, got the idea

that people cared about it.

I'm given a script,

and I do what I'm told,

and I collect my pay check

and go home.

Eddie romero got the idea

that the scenes

that I did with Pam grier

were incredibly sexy.

Perverted but sexy.

And so he thought that,

"God, it would be great

if we had him with two girls.

That's gotta be twice

as sexy, right?"

Then we did savage sisters,

and I had four women.

Come on, girls.

Line up for your present!

"Oh, God.

This is totally nuts."

But I wound up the whole deal

by shooting all four.

Ha ha!

You needed only one bullet

last time.

Stinkin' bitches

wouldn't stand still!

Straighten your tie.

Shine your shoes.

Company's coming.

Three little maids from

the toughest school of justice,

with plenty of ammunition

stacked in

just the right places.

You couldn't possibly take it

seriously.

It was really a cartoon.

It was full of sex.

I'm a dog.

What kind?

A whipped dog.

Money.

Greenback salad.

My favorite dish.

Killings.

I guess this is where we blow

your stinking heads off!

Anything you can think of.

I enjoyed doing that.

But there were limits to what I

could do with the material.

You look kind of sexy,

all tied up like that.

Well, I used to think I'd let

all of you pee in my face

just to see where it came from,

but, hell, not anymore.

I don't know if I want

to become so descriptive

of what I had to do

in the movie,

but if you could just take

your imagination

of a little part of a man's body

and have a good time with it

and tear it off.

Things were a little tense,

but I think it came off alright.

To say I'm proud of the movie?

No.

These are not really

the kind of films

that I've been longing to make.

They were the films

that I had to make

considering what the market

had to offer

and what the market wanted.

Eddie's a very honorable man,

and whatever he did,

he always gave it his best shot,

and sometimes it didn't live up

to his hopes and expectations,

but what else is new?

He wasn't proud of the films

and pretty much disavowed

them late in his career.

I was always tired,

but I felt, you know,

I had little choice.

He's now national artist

for cinema and a grand old man,

which is pretty amazing

for a guy

who started with

terror is a man.

Cirio Santiago was

kind of the next generation

of filmmakers

after Eddie romero.

They saw what Eddie had done

and they thought,

"well, we can have

some of that."

Here comes

this Maverick director, cirio,

who saw in the Filipino films

that they produced, you know,

something that was

not Hollywood enough.

He was making philippine films

when I met him,

and then he made the transition

to working with me.

He asked me if I wanted

to direct for this market.

I said,

"yeah, I would direct for free."

He said,

"well, I'll pay you $3,000."

The first film cirio

directed for me was savage.

Savage!

That's his name.

The biggest dude

with the baddest gun.

He's more than a man.

He's a death machine.

Now they found his new hero.

This savage, they call him.

I had grown tired

of the women-in-prison genre,

and I felt this black

soldier of fortune action film

might do well.

Let's do something to excite

the imagination of the people.

Something dramatic.

It'll be dramatic, all right.

That was a time

when black films

were very special in drive-ins.

They were very big.

Stronger than slaughter,

slicker than shaft,

more super high than super fly.

Savage!

Cirio was a good director,

and he got the army to come in

for the big scenes.

Fire, all units!

So we really had a fairly

big-looking film

for a small amount of money.

Savage is still

a pretty shitty movie.

That's what you call an

understatement.

Tnt Jackson, black bombshell

with a short fuse.

The basic idea

behind tnt Jackson

was to combine

the black exploitation concept

with kung fu.

You want it black,

you got it black.

Roger called me up one day

and said we had a script.

I had read the theme.

It didn't seem to read right.

So he said,

"well, you rewrite it."

It was started by dick,

and he got, I think, $500.

Roger said,

"well aren't you going

to write any more?"

I said, "I'm finished."

And he said, "I wanted

to get my money's worth."

I heard him talk.

He said, for $500,

what do you want,

gone with the wind?

I know very little

about kung fu.

The idea is to get

as much as you can

on film at that time,

so you write a good sentence.

You write, "the battle begins.

That can be, you know,

months of shooting.

You got it covered

in one sentence.

It was fast and furious.

It starred Jeannie bell.

The name is Diana Jackson.

Damn.

Tnt to you.

She was an unknown, so I said,

"we've got to

publicize Jeannie bell."

My wife at the time, Sylvia,

came up with the idea

of a fake award.

The first annual

ebony fist award

as the greatest black kung fu

fighter in the world.

She was a two-time winner.

She was a two-time winner,

exactly.

Jon davison, who was the head

of our publicity,

came up with a great catchline:

"Tnt Jackson..."

"She'll put you in traction."

With that dynamite bod,

she's a jet-black hit squad.

You'd better treat her fine,

or she'll shatter your spine.

You'll know you've been kissed

by her ebony fist

when the blood from her face

stains your diamond necklace.

That may have only been used

in the TV spots.

She's a one-mama

massacre squad.

This was one of those movies

that was not, shall we say,

in the forefront of the

great... even Filipino movies,

and we had to do a lot

of faking in the trailer.

We just decided to make up

a whole subplot about heroin.

Undercover out to blast

a killer army

that's poisoning the people

with deadly China white.

Deadly China white

in black Chinatown

where the red dragon rules.

Black Chinatown,

where flesh is cheap

and life is cheaper,

and the red dragon rules.

Films like savage!

And tnt Jackson

did bring a different look

to the black exploitation films.

They took it out

of the United States of America

to do black filmmaking,

and as a matter of fact,

you wouldn't think of that

in the Philippines.

Black actors

in a new environment.

It definitely opened up

the business.

Still want to go home?

Where's home?

Yeah, I know what you mean.

I think we've found our turf.

Once cirio started producing

and directing,

I mean, all bets were off

in terms of product being,

you know, halfway decent.

They were usually out of focus.

The sound quality

was sometimes terrible.

There were all sorts

of scratches,

there was gouges,

and you'd occasionally see,

you know,

could be claw marks

from rodents.

Roll it!

Roger would just get

madder and madder

during the course

of the screenings.

"I mean, really...

we're really screwed this time."

And they basically needed

to be doctored.

They needed new scenes shot.

And Roger almost always wants

you to add another chase

or at least another explosion.

You could hear him screaming

at cirio through the walls.

"You really screwed me, cirio!"

Break the sex barrier

with the stewardesses of fly me.

Rated r.

I wasn't supposed to be

a karate-kicking stewardess,

but when we got back

to the states,

they decided that it needed

a little bit more punch.

Fly me,which was another

terrible picture,

had Jonathan demme direct

three days at the yamishiro.

They got David carradine

to come in for the day

and he taught me karate

and kung fu in 11/2 hour,

and then I just beat people up.

I kicked the shit

out of a lot of people,

is really what I meant to say.

As the pictures went on,

they became a little

more threadbare,

and when cover girl models

rolled around,

it was pretty much the nadir

of the period.

Authentic oriental crap

is what it is.

But what it did have is

it did have a lot of dresses,

because they were supposed to be

fashion models,

and we said they're

always overexposed,

but they're never

under-developed.

Very important.

This is

mark "f stop" Fitzgerald.

If his camera could talk,

he'd be in jail

for statutory rape.

It's one of the best trailers

we made.

It doesn't reflect

the movie at all.

At some point,

someone is running

and fires a gun in the air,

and you cut to a helicopter.

Now that's the picture

where the exploding helicopter

came from,

and we learned that any time

anybody fired a gun,

if you cut

to the exploding helicopter,

it looked like they blew it up.

So later, when we found even,

you know,

less attractive movies

were coming our way,

we've always had the exploding

helicopter in our drawer.

They pinned her a criminal

in Jackson county jail.

As a viewer, you would see

new world trailers and go,

wasn't that explosion

in eat my dust?

So I used to look

at these things and say,

"these are brilliant."

In some cases, the trailers

are better than the films.

Steve carver

did a lot of trailers

for Roger before he moved

on to directing for Roger,

and he came up with some of

the more memorable catchphrases,

one of which was...

They wanted love...

"He gave them terror

and death."

We did push the limits

whenever possible.

On or off duty,

they always come when you call.

There were a lot of tricks

that I employed,

learning from Roger, of course.

How to distract

the rating people.

Wow!

If something was coming up

on the trailer,

all I had to do was

say something,

they'd turn their heads

and miss it.

Learn the bare facts

from the summer school teachers.

And that's how we got

a lot of that stuff by.

Jon davison bet Roger corman

that he could make

the lowest-budget picture

they had ever made

at new world at that time.

Welcome to miracle pictures,

where they make

a picture a week,

and if it's a good picture

it's a miracle.

I said, "what is the film?"

They said, it's going to be

Hollywood boulevard,

and it will be a parody

of a low-budget motion picture

production company.

Girls, I've called you all here

to offer you

a glorious opportunity.

Look out.

It is

machete maidens of mora tao.

Miracle pictures' new

super spectacle

shot entirely

in the Philippines!

We were making fun of something

that we knew very well.

We did this under the guise

of a movie making plot,

and the girls go

to the Philippines,

and they shoot filipinos

out of trees.

But the filipinos falling down

are from another picture.

But we went out to Malibu

and shot the starlets

with machine guns firing away.

Go!

Go! I want action!

There's a scene where they try

to get Mary woronov

to meet some dogs,

and it's just because we had

this shot of this Filipino guy

holding these vicious dogs.

So we just shot a scene

that was the other angle.

That whole movie doesn't exist

except for the existing

material.

Why is there a cut to that pig?

Well, 'cause the pig

was in the Philippines

and we were here,

and it was a free pig.

Ten days. Two units, two days.

No waiting.

Two units, no waiting.

Two directors, no waiting.

Roger said it was the best

ten-day picture of the decade.

It did reflect the spirit

of new world,

as a matter of fact.

A number of directors

who had started with us

and moved on came back

to play roles in the picture.

Paul bartel came back as

a totally pretentious director

of a low-budget

nonsense picture.

You tell the writer, p.G.,

that we have taken his empty,

flaccid, stupid little story

and firmed it up into

a pulsating, penetrating,

thrusting, unflinching

look into the future.

Now, when you look back at it,

it's kind of a documentary

of how new world pictures

were really made.

If you wanted a job

with Roger corman,

he would, like, give

you a broom.

And if you did a really good job

sweeping up, he would say,

"would you like to be

assistant editor on this film?"

And if you did

a really poor job sweeping up,

you know,

you just stayed sweeping.

It was an absolutely terrific

place to be a young editor

or young director or somebody

who wanted to direct.

I would say that this is

maybe the finest moment

in my motion picture career.

I respect and I admire

Roger corman,

but he is so full of shit.

He's about money.

Roger's about money,

and because he's about money,

he has given many, many people

their breaks, which means,

"I'm going to let you

break your ass

"and work so hard for me,

"not pay you, make millions,

but you'll have made a movie."

And believe it or not,

that's not a bad deal

for a lot of people.

And you look at all the people

who started with corman.

But you don't hear

Bobby de niro saying,

"Roger gave me my start."

He says, "that fucker

still owes me money."

Roger loves films.

You know, Roger loves,

in his own way.

As he says there's

only three ways to make films:

The right way, the wrong way,

the corman way.

You shoot the beginning,

the end, and the action.

And the sex.

"We want frontal nudity

from the waist up,

"total nudity from behind,

no pubic hair, go to work."

Everything else,

all the dialogue scenes

and all of the developmental

scenes of the characters,

those are left up

to the editing,

and you shoot them

very sparsely.

Go to your cameraman and say,

"how long to make it excellent?

How long to make it good?

And how long to get an image?"

And then get the image.

It's nonsense.

I mean, I have no idea

how these stories come up.

From the start

of the partnership with Roger,

cirio was able to also

produce and direct

for other film companies.

Ebony, ivory, and jade:

Three foxy mamas

with a thousand ways to kill.

In ebony, ivory, and jade,

I play ebony,

and I'm a track star

and my rival, ivory,

and my best friend, jade,

get kidnapped

by some terrorists.

What the hell is this?

If you say one word, you die.

And we have to karate chop

our way to freedom.

These sisters got soul

they can't control.

There's action.

Pretty girls.

I'm ready for my close up,

Cecil b. De Mille.

Kind of campy dialogue.

Oh, stop talking like

a martyr's ass.

All you're trying to be

is another black martyr.

With exploitation movies,

dialogue and acting

is always the problem.

You want the film to move fast

so you have a lot of action.

Whatever you do,

don't fall down,

because if cirio wants

to cut you out of the picture,

all he has to do is cut to

a guy firing a gun,

and you're out,

and you're home, you're gone.

He was trying to do...

do the American films

within a limited budget

and limited time.

He understood that kind

of exploitation template

with the humor.

We got mosquitoes,

we've got ants,

we've got no can opener.

Dinner is served.

That's what I wanted to do.

This is fun.

Don't take me seriously.

The muthers to me, you know,

it was what it was.

Sexual exploitation

in the jungle.

Just like every other snake

I ever met:

Can't leave my tits alone.

And the storyline was...

We were

two black female pirates.

The lead pirate, Jeannie bell,

her sister has disappeared.

Do you have any idea

where she went?

When little Sandra

gets out of camp,

she doesn't leave her

itinerary.

We get into the plantations

so we can take her out,

and she gets killed.

Then we have to find a way

to get out ourselves.

Didn't you know?

There's no way out.

There's my way.

It's one of the few movies,

I know for decades,

where four black actresses

play the lead.

One of the things that we

all had hoped for in Hollywood

was the opportunity

to get into a script

where it didn't really matter

what color you were.

We're not trying to be black

or against the white woman.

Just out there,

wanting to get our freedom.

And it has nothing to do

with what color you are.

It has to do with survival.

The only other parts that were

available for me were hookers

so I'd rather beat 'em up

than be beat up.

Firecracker was an idea

of cirio's.

Tnt Jackson had been

so successful,

he felt we should make

a similar film,

but make it with a white girl.

See Jillian kesner,

grand prize winner

at the black belt Olympics.

She'll mix seduction

with destruction.

She was a real trooper.

She didn't know that much about

martial arts at the time,

but she really studied hard

and went full bore.

The final showdown was

interesting.

They said, "okay, we have

these collapsible sticks,

"and she's gonna jump up

and come down,

"and gently push them

on your eyes,

"and they will collapse

into themselves

and maybe some blood squirt

out."

And I'm like, "really?

Let me see them."

And they, like, showed me

on a dummy,

and of course they stuck,

and the guy's jamming them down.

I said, "you know,

I don't think I want Jillian

to push those down on my eyes."

So of course they used

a mannequin at that point.

In the end,

when they showed that sequence,

and she jumped up and, you know,

my eyes squirted out,

my mum literally almost had

a heart attack.

At that point she jumped out

of her chair

and was like, "oh, my God!"

Firecracker.

The screen's first erotic

kung fu classic.

Cirio lived a dream.

He basically, you know,

worked on a film

every day of his adult life.

American films,

I did about close to 40.

Filipino films I made about 63.

More than a hundred.

He had diplomatic immunity

for a number of years

which was a good thing,

considering the

pictures he made.

Vampire.

We are all vampires.

We're all dead.

And we are like you very much.

Vampire hookers.

Yeah, it was awful.

Coffins are for being laid

to rest, not for being laid.

The catchline was

"blood ain't the only

thing they suck."

Imagine that.

I used to tell his cast

and their crew,

"don't think that we're

making a "b" movie.

Think that we're making

the best movie we can make."

Cirio was a pioneer.

Now we're having a hard time

getting into

the international market,

but he was there ahead,

and although he denied

they were done here,

I think he was still

proudly Filipino.

Bobby Suarez was a guy

who'd worked for rank,

in the English film

producer and distributor.

The big difference

between cirio and Bobby

was cirio was

personally unflappable,

but Bobby was like a spark.

He did the whole film

with a cocked .45 automatic

in his belt,

and every now and then he'd just

shoot at something.

It kept everybody

really nervous, and in line.

Nobody gave him any lip.

He's very proud of the fact

that he was a Filipino

and he had this opportunity

to make a little noise

for the country

as far as his films were

concerned.

He was a salesman

as well as a film producer,

so as he's making his movies,

he's thinking what is commercial

and what will sell,

what is needed

in the Western world.

The plots always got very

confusing.

What's going on?

I never really knew

who the bad guys were.

Who? Where?

I didn't really understand

what they were doing,

but they were bad,

so I killed 'em.

I figured no one's

ever gonna see this.

Money was always scarce.

We had car chases,

and because they ended up

wrecking the cars,

they didn't want to get

a really good car.

And they'd do flat out

35 Miles an hour.

I remember doing one car chase,

and traffic's passing us by,

and we were supposed to be

speeding along.

The breakthrough movie

for Bobby Suarez

was Cleopatra wong.

She's a fighter.

She's a mean machine.

It's about a syndicate

that took over a nunnery.

They actually capture the nuns.

Don't tell me that nuns

in this country

sport automatic rifles

underneath

their monastic uniforms.

Like all exploitation movies,

it's got these scenes

in it that stick in your brain.

The finale,

where the convent was blown up,

there were so many guys

dressed up as nuns

and they never seemed to die,

you know.

They keep on coming,

and those scenes

were all in slo-mo.

And you kind of think,

"well, if all of the film

"was as powerful as that,

then it would be some kind

of a masterpiece."

When Bobby was making it,

he didn't think that guys

dressed up as nuns were funny.

It was a very serious movie.

He was always trying

to build the franchise,

and he wanted to do

the series of films

using the same characters.

That's why he made

dynamite Johnson.

That's the bionic boy part 2.

Still very similar

to Cleopatra wong.

They have this group

of Nazi obsessed people

that took over a

whole mining camp.

I was doctor hiss...

By this time Tuesday,

Hong Kong will be no more.

This scientist who had come up

with this plan

to have a laser that was going

to blow up anything we wanted.

The mine was guarded

at night by a metal dragon.

Well I don't know if

it was made out of cardboard,

but it was certainly made

out of something flimsy

that was about

all we could afford.

But, you know, Bobby had run out

of money by that point.

That dragon has got

twin cannons for eyes,

it has got the machine gun

at its tail,

and when the mouth opened,

it breathes fire.

The person who was inside

working the flame thrower,

the thing backfired

and he got burnt,

and everyone was running out

of the dragon.

It was hilarious.

He would kind of make

whatever he thought

he could get someone

to put up the money for.

All Bobby needed

was a film title,

a good-sounding film title.

Wrote something down.

He said,

"this will be my next film."

And I looked at it,

and it said,

the one armed executioner

I said, "okay."

I said, "what's it about?"

He said, "doesn't matter.

"It's the title.

That's what gets 'em in."

Haunted by the memory

of a love that refuses to die,

he ruthlessly seeks revenge.

I'm going to get

every last one of them.

So help me God.

Bobby Suarez was kind

of dragged out of retirement

by suddenly realizing

or hearing

that Quentin Tarantino was

a big fan of some of his movies.

He started to dust off

some old scripts

and send 'em round to

all and sundry,

and they were pretty much

remakes

of Cleopatra wong

and bionic boy.

Bobby was like p.T. Barnum.

Everything was larger than life

as far as his films

were concerned,

and, I mean,

they were what they were.

They were okay

for what they were,

but I mean, they weren't

exactly blockbusters,

even though in his mind,

they might have been.

I don't think he realized

that time had moved on,

and these movies

were being looked at

with a kind of nostalgic glow.

God bless him for his vision,

you know.

He wanted to do something

better than what was being done,

and he gave it a shot

and to a great extent, he did.

Here come the losers,

killers by instinct,

mercenaries by profession.

The losers was about

five hells angels in Cambodia,

rescuing a CIA agent,

taking on the whole

Chinese army.

The plan was to blow a big hole

in the fence.

We got there too fast,

and I would have been blown up.

It's too late to stop.

Oh, my God!

I headed the front wheel

to hit this post,

and I hit it dead on.

The bike was in the air,

and it landed on top of me.

Safety issues

were pretty crazy.

Health and safety takes money.

I sustained a lot of injuries.

They make me hang from

a helicopter 100 feet up

without any safety nets.

I almost fell during

the second take.

Bobby said,

"do you mind rolling out

of the car at 35 Miles an hour?"

I said "yeah.

Yeah, I mind doing that."

The fights,

it was no holds barred.

Bobby calls me over.

He says, "Chris, doesn't look

you're hitting them."

I said, "you mean really

hitting them?"

He said "yes."

I said, "well, I'm not."

"That's what they're paid for.

"Hit them!

Hit them!"

One of the hoodlums

really punched me here.

My appendix burst out.

Some guys there are nuts.

They drive off cliffs,

they'd jump off the cliff

themselves.

They would just

cross themselves and jump.

The people they would get

to do the stunts,

they would regard

as breakables.

I said, "I tell you what.

Bring me about

20 cardboard boxes

and two twin bed mattresses.

They did, and I set up

a little fall pad.

It was like, "oh, my God!

"We can drop an actor

out of a three-story window

"and not kill him!

This is great!"

Here we have fire suits

that protect them,

and there, they just put some

fuel on a guy and lit him up,

and when he got hot,

he jumped in the water.

If somebody got injured

to the point

where they just couldn't

work anymore,

they'd just stuff

a five peso note in his pocket

and send him home.

There were a couple of times

in the films with Bobby

where I'd throw a guy

through a window.

It was a glass window.

They didn't know what

candy glass was.

So when an American goes

through a window, they go,

"oh, well, we can do that."

There was this tower.

It was supposed to be hit

by a truck.

The guard was supposed

to jump first,

but he panicked; He hung on.

He was killed.

In a country

where the rich rule

and the poor are shit,

you can get away

with that kind of thing.

They would take risks because

this is the big American movie.

You don't want

to look back and say,

"well, that was exploiting..."

But they were paid their salary.

We employed many,

many filipinos.

Hundreds and hundreds.

You could hire thousands

of them

if you needed thousands

of them,

and all they had to really do

was put on black pajamas

and charge up the hill

with their ak-47 bad guy guns,

and if they were close

to an explosion,

they were supposed

to flop over and play dead,

so anybody can do that.

I mean, it didn't take

a rocket scientist.

Apocalypse now,of course,

was without a doubt,

the biggest production that

ever came into the Philippines.

My film is not about Vietnam.

It is Vietnam.

It's what it was really like.

Coppola was able to use

helicopters, tanks, whatever.

Marcos gave us

just a blanket okay

and then it filtered down

to military men.

Marcos didn't make

any promises.

You know, he complained

that he couldn't get ahold

of any helicopters because

coppola was using all of them.

The philippine commander

would say,

"well, the helicopters

are sick today,

but if we had a certain amount

of money,

we could make them well.

There was always these

islamic rebels in the South.

The military would use it

all for the time for an excuse.

The real war took precedent

over the fake war.

The philippine government...

the fucking helicopters,

they take away whatever

they feel like

and they've done it three times

already.

It was a crazy shoot.

That's not news.

Every time things were smooth

and were running right,

all of a sudden, something

disastrous would happen.

Marty sheen's heart attack,

marlon Brando arriving

100 pounds

more than we expected.

The typhoon.

The roofs of major houses

were corrugated metal,

and those sheets would fly off,

and it was like a guillotine

that could decapitate you.

When it cleared, it was

just this kind of war zone.

As they say, shit happens.

I think Francis was absolutely

brilliant on that movie.

It's amazing what he got under

those circumstances.

He expected to get

everything he needed,

and sometimes... very often...

he expected too much.

It was a little bit insane

towards the end.

There's the scene

where they come in,

and there's all these bodies

are hanging from the trees,

and they were using

real bodies.

Somebody said they were

in in the refrigerator

in the art department

next to the beer.

My lips are sealed.

My buddy told me,

"come on, check this shit out."

Whoa.

But I never...

I never saw that.

You're in the asshole

of the world, captain!

You're just thinking,

"can we get through this?

"Can we get through this day?

Can we get through this week?

When will we ever get out

of here?"

There was no calendar,

so you never felt

you were progressing

or achieving.

We would refer to it as

apocalypse never.

The good thing, a wonderful,

great movie came out of it.

It defied fate.

It should have failed, right?

To relive it, I can't

put it on here and watch it.

You couldn't pay me.

It was Francis Ford coppola's

big fantasy, is what it was.

You had playgirl bunnies

and people falling out

of helicopters

and guys smoking dope

and taking drugs.

It was a joke,

and I don't know

one Vietnam veteran

that really could watch

that movie and enjoy it.

It just made us look like

simpletons,

made us look like

a bunch of total idiots.

That was nothing like Vietnam.

They were opulent.

They overspent.

They spoiled people for a while

and then they went away

and everything eventually got

back to normal again.

Marcos and imelda

saw that it might create

a feeling around the

world of serenity and security

and kind of make it a little

more enticing for tourism.

Imelda marcos was in love

with actors and movies

and really wanted to promote

that side of her country.

I said to him,

"what is my role as first lady?"

And he said, "as president, I'll

be the father of the country.

"I'll establish a strong house.

And you make it a home."

So I said, "I'll build

the cultural center

of the Philippines to be the

sanctuary of the Filipino soul

and the monument

to the Filipino spirit.

She did a great deal to expand

the potential of Filipino films.

She was the one who started

the manila international

film festival.

The dream was supposed to have

the current of the orient,

you know,

the current of Asia here.

And so they built

the modern-day Parthenon.

In a rush to finish building,

a whole floor collapsed

on workers.

And the story

is that imelda said,

"well, look, you know,

we haven't got time

"to dig 'em out

and restart again,

"so let the concrete dry

and just slice the limbs off

and then cover over it."

In that pantheon

of the cinematic arts,

it's also a burying ground.

Which is a big lie.

Cleaned up

every piece of debris,

and we did not stop until we got

each and every one of them

and each and every one's family

was compensated.

When it was finished,

her dream of putting up

the festival became a reality.

All the big producers

were there.

The thing that most of them

seemed to be interested in

was this character

called weng-weng.

Brace yourselves for the

acclaimed international star

of the Hollywood, cannes,

and manila film festivals,

weng-weng.

Who the hell are you?

Check it out.

He's a midget,

but he's proportioned.

And he turned out to be this

31/2-foot secret agent guy.

They used him

as a decoy during raids.

He could infiltrate

a small opening,

they'd shove him in,

open the doors, you know.

He made a whole series

of films, as we discover now.

This is agent 00,

and he will stop at nothing

to get his man

in for y'ur height only.

Lo and behold,

to everyone's surprise,

this film became the darling

of the market.

You're such a little guy,

though.

Very petite, like a potato.

Yeah, let's go.

I can see why

it may have been considered

a bit embarrassing, really.

All of the things that you get

in James Bond movies,

you know, the karate scenes,

the flying jet packs,

the daring escapes,

and getting the girl,

they're all in the

weng-weng movies.

He could parachute

using an umbrella.

One of the people behind

the promotion of weng-weng

was dick Randall,

and one of his specialties

was dubbing of movies.

But he had a very peculiar

sense of humor did dick,

so when he got the chance to dub

this weng-weng movie

into English,

he really went to town.

You know, sex is like Tequila.

Take one sip,

and you're a goner.

Shall we get it on?

Yes, darling. Bare your bod.

My husband

just adored weng-weng.

And he'd sit on his lap,

and dick'd get all excited.

"Oh, oh, weng-weng's wonderful.

We have to...

You know,

you're making me fall for you.

He had his own style.

He could be funny.

If you find that sort

of thing funny, you know,

you will be able to watch

that film with pleasure

for the rest of your life.

If you don't get it,

you're gonna just not get it

at all.

Oh, my little head.

I didn't understand it.

I'd look at it and say,

"oh, my God."

He was really a parody,

and we are all just laughing

at it,

not laughing for ourselves,

but laughing for America.

But I think it's a revenge

of third world filmmakers

to be able to take

these kinds of popular genres

from Hollywood

and slightly subvert them

and then send them back out

again and just say,

"well look what we've done,

and a big raspberry to you."

"Hey, take this."

We shrunk the goon.

It makes perfect sense.

This is exactly what

filipinos do.

We transform our pain

into ridicule.

Did Hollywood use us,

or did we really make

a breakthrough in Hollywood...

at the margins as it may be...

and use this

for our own cultural agenda?

Why the rest of the world

got it, I will never know.

The audience was changing

a little bit in the late 1970s.

People started thinking,

"oh, I'm paying the same amount

of money for this

as I am to see star wars,

and this isn't nearly as good."

What Spielberg and Lucas did,

their big influence was

to take exploitation films

which had always been "b" -budget

and now make them

"a" -budget pictures.

The biggest of that type

of film was jaws,

and when it came out,

Vincent canby,

the main critic for

the New York times,

said, "what is jaws but

a big Roger corman film?"

What he didn't say was,

"it was not only bigger

than mine,

it was better than mine."

And when I saw jaws,

I thought, "I'm in trouble,

and my compatriots

are in trouble.

I made piranha for Roger,

and it was an unexpected hit,

and, of course, I was asked back

to do another film.

I was asked to do a picture

called humanoids from the deep,

which was another American

version of piranha.

Humanoids from the deep.

Later on, he did a picture

called up from the depths,

which was the Filipino

rip off version.

Beneath these waves

lies a horror beyond imagining,

hungry for human flesh,

and it's coming

up from the depths.

I sent Chuck griffiths,

who was a good writer/director,

had done many films for us,

to the Philippines.

Chuck was dealing

very often with dreck

and so he was sent off to do

up from the depths,

and the only way he felt

that he could do justice to it

was to make fun of it.

I'll kill it!

I'll kill it!

No, you fool.

It's out there!

There are people out there!

And the producer,

being cirio Santiago,

wanted to make it

a scary, more serious film.

The sun's in my eyes.

So it actually becomes

somewhat of a dilemma,

because you have kind of two

films going on simultaneously,

and, you know,

what is it, you know?

Roger didn't mind you

making fun of the movie,

but he really didn't like it if

the movie wasn't as advertised.

A living tidal wave

of terror is rising,

clawing,

eating its way

up from the depths.

The creature they built

was a little bit crude.

It wasn't as good

as it should have been.

Chris walas made

an underwater monster

that was supposed to be

propelled by a diver

who was holding it

in front of him.

But the front half was so heavy

that when you would start

to shoot it,

it would just dip down

like this.

You got it!

Jimmy!

Anything that mimicked

a large-budget film like jaws,

if Roger's version

were to come out,

it would be

panned automatically.

The critics were a big problem

and I think critics

change audiences.

I felt maybe we had made

too many films

in too short a period of time

in the Philippines,

so we concentrated

on coming back home

and shooting in America.

Fewer and fewer marketplaces

were available to him.

The drive-ins were starting

to close.

The grindhouses

are starting to disappear.

The big-budget films

were starting to dominate,

so we had to adjust to that.

And Roger still continued

making pictures into the '80s,

but the places to play them

became limited,

and they started to go

directly to vhs.

But that's life.

I think we lost that

because it's nice to have your

films shown in a theater,

enjoyed by people.

Sometimes it would be

difficult to promote

the Philippines as

a safe filmmaking site

because of the security

problems.

In the South,

you have the Muslim militants,

who are in constant uprising,

and they're always shooting

people and kidnapping people

and blowing things up.

Banditry was not a problem

when I was shooting there,

but a little later on

when things deteriorated,

it was dangerous

to go out on the road.

People in the condo area there,

they could kill for a bottle

of beer.

I put my kids in

a little montessori school,

and there were guys

with sub-machine guns

guarding every entrance

to prevent kidnapping.

The political climate, I

think, just went a little crazy.

Filmmakers just finally got

to the point

where they were afraid

to go over,

and if even they weren't afraid

to go over

and shoot their movie there,

the insurance companies

wouldn't bond us.

That was basically the start of

the end of filmmaking

in the philippine islands.

That is a time in filmmaking

that will probably

never happen again, ever.

And I'm not saying that time

was better than this time,

although it may have been.

I look back at it now,

and really do think of it

sort of as the good old days,

'cause we were having fun.

It felt raw over there.

That's what I liked

a lot about it.

It wasn't anything

that was polished,

made to appear to be anything

more than what it was.

It was an amazing time.

Exciting, fun, creative.

We did have an audience

for these movies,

which helped the studios

go, "aha!

I think I'll have another

female action lead,"

which is good. Very good.

They're silly

and in a way primitive,

but also very engaging

and visceral.

I think the salaciousness

of them and the sexiness

is so trivial

by today's standards

that you can really look

at these films

and you can say,

"gee, these are really fun."

They all did well,

and they excited us,

and they were

the ultimate guilty pleasures.

You know, you can look back

on these things and think,

"oh, it was sleazy," or,

"it was this or it was that,"

but it really wasn't.

It was really revolutionary.

To have one of those great

"b" movies in the Philippines

under your belt,

that's not so bad.

For me,

it's always an exciting time

to be making films.

The first time savage!Was

shown in Hollywood boulevard,

I was there for one hour

looking at the marquee.

The stories that take place

on the film set,

ten times better than any of

the movies, any of the movies.

I've worked on too many films

where people are like,

"we're losing the light!

Jesus Christ!

"Oh, shoot into the...

just shoot this.

Okay, and run over there,

blow that up"!

Action sequence!"

Okay, shit!

And this isn't coherent,

we'll put it in anyway.

And later people are going,

"the brilliant direction

of somebody somebody,

you know..."

I've worked on too many movies

to buy into this stuff.

I don't know.

Where do these statements

come from?

This is one of the weirdest

interviews I've ever had.

As you leave the theatre,

folks, please be careful.

Don't let this happen

to your car.

If you should accidentally

pull a speaker loose,

please turn it in

at our snack bar or box office.

Thanks.