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 on your 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 full accept the statement we were making exploitation films.
Exploitation really is about ballyhoo.
It's about marketing.
I have here the up-chuck 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 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 the exploitation films made there
were made for the United States, Australia and Europe.
These were western-style Roger Corman tits-and-ass movies.
And Marcos said,
"Come on down. I'll give you the army."
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 to 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.
The Philippines appealed in several ways.
First, it was inexpensive.
The cost of labor was so affordable.
We could hire Filipinos for about five bucks a day.
They have an amazing movie industry.
They had studios,
they had all of the camera equipment that we needed.
We shot with a Mitchell that was so old
that the serial number on it was, like, 006.
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.
Anti-Americanism 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 make-up 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 70's, 80's,
maybe starting even from the late 60's, 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 field.
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 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. Here 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 Peizer'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 was 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. It was 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 it it is sort of visceral feeling of the pain
that this creature that's being created out of animals feels.
The shots were always striking.
They way they were lit, the way they were framed
and they 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 the pig and they 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 Bs.
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,
and they'd look up, see some-thing 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 would you expect?
It seems that some living organisms on this island
are undergoing drastic mutations.
They were kind of two-dimensional 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.
Serve us as simple characterizations as we can,
lets create a situation that was very tense,
and 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 because 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 don't think we 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.
From 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 didn't want seen.
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, Ramon.
I hope you slept well?
The head can talk to Doctor Lorka.
The day may come soon, Lorka.
Hence the famous line,
"Lorka,"
because that head is going to get Lorka
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.
It did well.
But I got a little tired of them after a while.
I think everyone's affection for those movies is based in
tolerance.
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, Langdon?
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.
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 at genre films.
Well, in any film that I've ever worked on with Roger
there are 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 are 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 patient's 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 films.
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&A and then a little torture.
The person being tortured on the wheel
or having fire beneath them and they're all screaming
and then in 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!
The Big Doll House set the tempo
for almost every women-in-prison, women-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 going to be lesbianism.
You can bed down over here where I can take care of you.
And there's going to 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! That's...
All of these elements that ended up making for
what he knew was going to 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 screens
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 Method.
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.
You 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 four 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 like the title Women in Cages,
you're going to 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.
Darn!
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 were more than all woman!
I told you I was gonna cut it off
if you tried 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 least.
I remember one film we made called Night of the Cobra Woman.
I was getting tired of the women-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 it 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've sucked the years out of your body.
It was only way I could 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 note-worthy
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 smoking?"
I mean, "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 running around bare-assed.
And the only guy is you.
That's right.
I don't buy that feminist stuff.
Whatcha talking about?
It's a tit shop, pure and simple.
Feminism with aggressive women
was not going to be palatable in the mass market
without tits and ass.
Buonos 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 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 someday you're on a date
and then some maniacs come along
and shoot your date 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.
Do 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 some-what 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 for the Filipino pictures is
you have these movies being made about revolution
against essentially fascist dictatorships
in a fascist dictatorship.
1972, alright?
That's when all the TV stations just stopped
and then suddenly there was that face.
I have signed proclamation number 10/81
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.
You know, 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 six o'clock 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
you were supposed to go to some town square.
All unlicensed firearms now in your possession
should be turned over to the Philippine constabulary.
After that time, you know, anybody with a gun,
it was a serious offense.
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 offense.
And they just shot him right there on the spot.
Life was like...
You could 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 express 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 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.
Their liberators.
And we are the oppressors.
Almost as if 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 nine in the morning
and the captain in charge said,
"I apologize 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 that is 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
and that audiences expected 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...
Do 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,
and we're all going to 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.
It 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 interact
and so on and develop their stories.
Roger sent back a very terse telegram which said,
"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 maybe 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 princess
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 paycheck 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.
C'mon, girls.
Line up for your present!
I'm going, "This is totally nuts."
But I wound up the whole deal by shooting all four.
Ha-ha!
You needed only one bullet last time.
Stinking bitches wouldn't stand still!
Straighten your tie...
shine your shoes...
company's coming!
Three little maids from the toughest school in the jungle
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 can 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 the middle 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 that I'm proud of the movie?
No.
These are not really the kind of films that I've been longing to make.
They are 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 of them
but I felt, you know, I had little choice.
He's now a 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, "No, 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 their family's new hero.
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, alright.
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 Superfly.
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 have a script."
I had read the theme.
It didn't seem to read right.
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 them talk.
He said, "Well, for $500 what do you want, Gone With The Wind?"
I know very little about kung fu.
The idea is to as much as you can on film at that time
so you write a good sentence.
You write, "The battle begins."
That could be, you know, months of shooting
and 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 know you've been kissed by her ebony fist
when the blood from your 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,
what could be claw marks from rodents.
Roll 'em!
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 Amishira.
They got David Carradine to come in for the day
and he taught me karate and kung fu in an hour and a half,
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 bit 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 ever 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 anytime 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 always had the exploding helicopter
in our drawer.
They made 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 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 Moracau.
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 moviemaking 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.
And 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, because the pig was in the Philippines
and we were here and he was a free pig."
Ten days. Two units, ten days.
No waiting. Two units, no waiting.
Two directors, no waiting.
Roger said it was the best 10 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, T.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!
That's 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 good 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.
I mean, we're not trying to be black
or against the white woman.
We're just out there, wanting to get our freedom.
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 will 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 'em down.
I said, "You know, I don't think I want Gillian 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 mom 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 don't like you very much.
Vampire Hookers... Yeah, that was awful.
Coffins are for being laid to rest,
not for being laid.
The catchline was, "Blood isn't the only thing they suck."
Imagine that.
He used to tell his cast and the 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,
although he denied they were done here.
I think he was still proudly Filipino.
Bobby Suarez was a guy who'd worked for Rank,
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.
They 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.
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 a franchise,
and he wanted to do a 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.
The scientist who had come up with this plan to have a laser
that was going to blow up anything he 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.
You know, Bobby had run out of money by that point.
That dragon has got twin cannons for eyes,
it has got a machine gun at its tail,
and when the mouth opened, it breathes fire.
The person who was inside working the flamethrower,
the thing backfired and he got burned
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.
He 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 kill 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 made 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 goes, "Chris, it doesn't look like 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!"
Kick them!"
One of the hoodlums really punched me here.
My appendix burst out.
Stunt guys there are nuts.
They'd 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."
So 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.
They saw an American go through a window, they thought,
"Well, hell 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 'em,
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 hold 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 whenever 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 a scene where they come in
and there's all these bodies hanging from the trees,
and they were using real bodies.
Somebody said they were in the refrigerator
in in the art department next to the beer.
My lips are sealed.
My buddy told me, "Come 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 centre of the Philippines
to be the centre of the Filipino soul
and the monument to 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 Cannes of the Orient,
you know? The Cannes 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.
We got every piece of debris and we did not stop
until we got each and every one of them,
and each and everyone'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 was a midget, but he's proportioned.
And he turned out to be this three and a half 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.
All of the things that you get in James Bond movies,
you know, the karate scenes, the flying jet packs,
the daring escapes, and the getting the girl,
are 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 specialities 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.
He would 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 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,
"You know, 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
and had done many films for us, to the Philippines.
Chuck was dealing very often with the 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!
No, you fool!
There are people out there!
Ow, my foot!
And the producer, being Cirio Santiago,
wanted to make it a scary, more serious film.
The sun's in my eyes.
So then it 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.
We 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 film
shown in a theatre, 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 congo area 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 even if 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.
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
because 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.
To me, it's always an exciting time to be making films.
The first time Savage! Was shown on Hollywood Boulevard,
I was there for one hour looking at the marquee.
The stories that take place on a film set
are 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.
If 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 to our snack bar or box office.
Thanks.