I had an entire article planned for this month. I was almost done with the research when I confirmed, once again, the almost 300 year old thoughts of Robert Burns: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” (I am making reference to one of the oft quoted poems in the last three centuries because, frankly, that’s about all the “culture” you’re getting in this article.) Luckily, unlike the mouse in Burns’ poem, my plans weren’t ruined by a plow going through my home. Instead, it was a movie. While sitting down to finally convert my notes into an article, I flipped on the documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! This look back at the prodigious Philippine film export industry made me immediately switch my focus from the Korean productions and co-productions of the 1970s to the those made in the Philippines. Don’t worry, though; we’ll get to Korea soon.
Three days ago if you had asked me to name as many martial arts films as I could produced in the Philippines I think I could probably cough up the following list:
Stickfighter
(some of the) American Ninja movies
The Big Bird Cage and a few similar knock offs
Bloodfist
I think I’d be done after those four. I might have come up with Apocalypse Now, too, if I thought beyond the exploitation and martial arts titles. Then I would change my mind and decide that Blood fist was set in Thailand and then change it back again. In short, I wouldn’t be able to come up with much of a list. After watching “Machete Maidens Unleashed!” I grabbed my trusty copy of Dr. Craig D. Reid’s The Ultimate Guide To Martial Arts Movies Of The 1970s and was shocked at the number of films shot there in that decade alone. There weren’t many of the grand, 1970s period pieces on the list but they make up for it with crossover exploitation titles such as:
TNT Jackson
Cleopatra Wong
Hot Potato
The Muthers
Ebony, Ivory and Jade
They Call Him Savage!
Now I realize that the kung fu snobs among you out there may be turning up your noses at this point. There aren’t any Shaolin versus Wutang epics. No wuxia adaptations with dozens of oddly named and powered characters. The closest you’ll come to high end kung fu cinema are a few Bruce Lee knock-offs, and even I’ll admit that isn’t very close. Don’t sell the films of the Philippines short, though, just because they didn’t make the classic Shaw Brothers style period pieces. They have contributed a great deal to martial arts cinema.
First of all, it is important to remember that the studios in the Philippines didn’t have the historical village sets found in Hong Kong. Instead, they had lots of jungle and beach, which made the area much more suited for films with tropical battle scenes, banana republic dictators and drug smuggling. When you look over the list of films found in the appendix of Reid’s book, it quickly becomes clear that the bulk of the Philippine movies were fodder for the drive-in and grindhouse circuit. These low budget, high action, minimal plot vehicles tapped into the exploitation and action markets. Many added martial arts simply as a way to give their scantily clad (at best) heroines a way to overpower leering male guards, soldiers and thugs.
In many ways these movies are responsible for the transition of martial arts film from the costume epics of the 1960s to the American style vigilante films of the 1980s. They brought many more people into martial arts fandom because they offered an alternative to the silk suit and spear films, which many moviegoers still likened to the European sword and sandal movies. In the interest of complete truth, we should probably also admit that the Philippine action films also had one other huge asset when it came to drumming up an audience: copious nudity.
If you get a chance to catch Machete Maidens Unleashed! (which can be streamed from EpixHD.com if you are a subscriber) you really should watch it. Although its focus really isn’t on kung fu films, as the productions drift from WWII movies to weird horror films to exploitation and then back to horror you will learn a few things about the connection between martial arts movies and pure grindhouse. For example, you’ll hear filmmakers admit to making up a martial arts award (something like the Ebony Fist for best black woman in kung fu) to promote one film and hear about adding martial arts to stewardess films to make them more marketable.
Even if you can’t catch the documentary, you might want to stretch your boundaries a bit and check out one of the old Philippine made movies. These grindhouse films really did a great deal to help shape the landscape of straight to video and cable releases (and let’s face it, in the US that is where martial arts movies almost always fall). It isn’t the greatest chapter in the history of film, but for the martial arts fan this documentary is a fun reminder of the contributions of the Philippines to our favorite genre.
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