I can't believe this documentary was not on my radar at all. But perusing around Twitch, this trailer will smack you like a Weng Weng punch. From Mark Hartley, who gave us Not Quite Hollywood (his doc about the Australian exploitation boom), here he gives us a glimpse into the retro nuttiness of all things Filipino exploitation.I should be an expert on this but I'm not. I've only seen a handful of 70s and 80s Filipino exploitation movies (some goofy war flicks and most of the Weng Weng flicks). I've also seen their cheesy B-movie horror flicks where monsters and pseudo vampires (they call them Aswangs) films. Obviously, I've seen some of the blaxploitation and kun fu-sploitation that took the jungle meets civilization approach. This excellent blog profiles all the Filipino Vietnam war movies When the Vietnam War raged... in the Philippines.
Knowing a few things about Filipino culture, their identity is a very mixed bag of colonization, war and corruption. Blending in Spanish, Chinese and American influences with their own culture, its reflected in their entertainment. Their film and TV spoofed Hollywood and took knee deep lore and legends and blew them up into rubber monster movies. War movies spawned and Bruce Lee was the hero the everyman Filipino could believe in...so why not imitate him.
The trailer alone is chock full of kung pow insanity. I am very psyched to see this. It premieres on July 24th @ the Melbourne Film Festival...in freakin Australia! Damn, I wish I lived in Australia...for like a week.
Head over to the Facebook page for more info!
OK enough talk. Check out the trailer below. What do you all think?
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Ok I recognized a couple of those but never knew Pam Grier had did any filipino movies. Definitely want to see this flick and need to make room on my netflix for some more filipino films
ReplyDeleteI loved "Not quite Hollywood" and now really looking forward to this one, hopfully with more Tarantino input.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind words about my wee blog. I can't wait to see this and I so wish I were STILL living in Melbourne! (even if it were only for a week, lol). In case you don't know this: The new docu is actually a complete re-working of what was originally going to be a docu film called "The Search for Weng Weng" by Andrew Leavold.
ReplyDeletePS: I just checked your links and I see now you already knew about Andrew's documentary film. :D
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