2010 | Australia | Directed by Mark Hartley
Logline: The story of the Filipino exploitation film industry from the 1960s through to the 1980s.
Originally commissioned as a television documentary on Filipino midget Z-movie actor Weng Weng, the producers soon realised they had created a monster that wanted to consume more than pint-sized secret agents! The machete maidens were unleashed and a fascinating insight into the previously untold story of a jungle-bound movie industry in the “Wild East” where Hollywood outsiders could make big fast bucks by throwing busty women into bamboo cages and then having them bite the balls of their captors and escape to the cheers of drive-in audiences across the great divide.
Mark Hartley, who helmed the equally lurid, and no less entertaining documentary on Australian exploitation (affectionately called Ozploitation) titled The Other Hollywood, was brought on board to give the doco the swift seductive treatment that had made his previous exploration of guerilla filmmaking so damn effective. Focusing on the work of Roger Corman, the undisputed king of American exploitation, who turned to the Philippines as an alternative location to the urban restraints of Los Angeles.
Under the dicatorship of Marcos the Philippines offered cheap labour, attractive dusky jewels with few scruples and even fewer acting skills, exotic locales, and no interference from conservative authorities. Marcos allowed the Americans free reign to shoot – and shoot again – in the hot and sweaty jungle terrain. The Big Doll House directed by Jack Hill and starring Pam Grier is just one example of what came out of this wild DIY industry.
Director Joe Dante worked as an editor cutting trailers of Corman’s Filipino misadventures and he tells many an amusing tale. These were the good ol’ days as Corman reflects. A period where political correctness were two words that hadn’t been put together before, where native stuntmen put their lives in serious danger to get that special shot, where actors shared changing rooms with huge rats that scurried past carrying dead kittens in the mouths, and cockroaches smoked your cigarette stubs in front of you!
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is the classic example of Filipino exploitation, but it resides in a mansion of arthouse brilliance, the rest of Machete Maidens Unleashed! lays in the squalor of a thatched latrine the smell of gunpowder masking the smell of desperation. But this isn’t a documentary about futility; on the contrary this is an affectionate tribute to a bygone era of imaginative filmmaking gusto and chutzpah. They don’t make movies like this anymore, and I strongly doubt they ever will again.
Eventually the rise of the blockbuster (Jaws was essentially an exploitation movie made with a huge budget and lot of style and panache) and the subsequent monopoly of VHS saw Corman’s school of filmmaking, and the entire grindhouse exploitation aesthetic get quashed into something only fractionally interesting. Thank Christ for Mark Hartley’s sensory assault approach, he’s created a truly fabulous documentary, and the perfect double-bill for The Other Hollywood.
TRAILER:
Machete Maidens Unleashed! 2-disc DVD (includes a swag of awesome extras including the Filipino feature The Muthers) is courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment, many thanks!
