Director Cirio H. Santiago Story Manuel Songco Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Gina Alonzo, Celia Rodriguez, Aida Roxas, Oscar Keesee, Ruben Rustia, Vic Diaz, Johnny Long, Tommy Romulo, Carlos Padilla Jr, Juliet Pardo, Mona del Cielo
1964 – Bakas Ng Dragon/“Trace Of A Dragon” (People’s Pictures) LAGALAG #2
[Release date 3rd July 1964]
Director Cirio H. Santiago Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Gina Alonzo, Celia Rodriguez, Eva Montes, Ramon D’Salva, Ruben Rustia, Ely Ramos Jr, Tommy Romulo, Bruno Punzalan, Abelardo Cortes, Paquito Salcedo, Miriam Jurado, Nancy Roman, Ruby Regala, Adora Neri, Lydia Aguilar, Lourdes Ramos, Fred Param, Vicky Velasquez
1964 – Scorpio(People’s Pictures) LAGALAG #3
[Release date 25th November 1964]
Director Cirio H. Santiago Story Manuel Songco Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Gina Alonzo, Nancy Roman, Ruben Rustia, Ramon D’Salva, Jose Garcia, Ruben de Jesus, Tommy Romulo
1965 – Kaaway Bilang Uno/“Enemy Number One” (Cirio Santiago Film Organization) LAGALAG #4
[Release date 18th January 1965]
Director Cirio H. Santiago Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos, Ruben Rustia, Manuel Songco Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Paquito Diaz, Gina Alonzo, Carol Varga, Ruben Rustia, Nello Nayo
1965 – Hongkong 999 (People’s Pictures) [some sources list Cirio Santiago Film Organization as production company] LAGALAG #5
[Release date 10th May 1965]
Director/Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos Story Cirio H. Santiago Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Gina Alonzo, Juliet Pardo, Celia Rodriguez, Oscar Keesee, Ruben Rustia, Patria Plata, Ely Ramos Jr, Tommy Romulo, Sammy Sarmiento, Fred Memije, Cesar Leyson, Renato Morado, Marco Antonio, Mel Francisco, Carol Varga
1965 – 7 Mukha Ni Dr Ivan/“Seven Faces Of Dr Ivan” (Cirio Santiago Film Organization/People’s Pictures) LAGALAG #6
[Release date 12th August 1965]
Director Cirio H. Santiago Story/Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Gina Alonzo, Eva Montes, Nancy Roman, Ramon D’Salva (Dr Ivan), Carol Varga, Marco Antonio, Eva Darren, Ruben Rustia, Jose Garcia, Tommy Romulo, Ely Ramos Jr, Carpi Asturias, Renato Morado, Sammy Sarmiento, Cesar Leyson, SOS Daredevils, Patria Plata, Abelardo Cruz
1965 – Hanapin Si Leo Baron/“Find Leo Baron” (People’s Pictures) LAGALAG #7
[Release date 18th November 1965]
Director/Producer Cirio H. Santiago Story/Screenplay Teodorico C. Santos Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Gina Alonzo, Nancy Roman, Ruben Rustia, Mona del Cielo, Marco Antonio, Alex Froilan, Stella Suarez (Teresa), Jose Garcia, Mary Walter, Renato Robles, Tommy Romulo, Fred Param, Martin Molina, Antonio Moreno, Johnny Long, Ruben de Jesus, Cesar Leyson, Sancho Tesalona, Benny Pestaro, SOS Daredevils
Cast Eddie Fernandez (Lagalag), Alberto Alonzo (Agent 69), Alona Alegre, Minda Morena, Oscar Roncal, Ruby Regala
Synopsis (from the Filmography of Philippine Films 1959-1989): “Highlights the most vicious trap ever set by syndicated crime for the country’s top secret agents, Lagalag and Agent 69.”
1966 –Room 69(AM Productions) LAGALAG #9
[Release date 31st August 1966]
Directors Gerry de Leon, Cirio H. Santiago Screenplay Ruben Rustia, Artemio Marquez Producer Amalia Fuentes Music Tito Arevalo
Cast Eddie Fernandez, Leopoldo Salcedo, Gina Alonzo, Celia Rodriguez, Robert Arevalo, Ruben Rustia, Nancy Roman, Rosario del Pilar
[originally published on the Senses Of Cinema website, March 2005]
b. Gerardo de Leon Ilagan, September 12, 1913, Bulacan, Philippines
d. July 25, 1981, Manila, Philippines
I. The Two Gerrys
Few figures in cinema inspire such uniquely contradictory reactions as Filipino director Gerry de Leon. Revered in his home country as a national treasure and esteemed by the international critical establishment, De Leon is just as readily dismissed by unwitting cinephiles – and undoubtedly many of the same critics who champion him – as an anonymous hack.
This schism doesn't represent a vehement divergence of opinion on his ability as a filmmaker, but stems from a confounding material conundrum: there's a distinct, maddening paucity of available works from De Leon's most fertile period, while a series of low-budget, independently produced, mostly American-funded and distributed films he began directing in the late 1950s are abundantly available.
At the time that De Leon took these latter projects on, the Hollywood-style Philippines studio system that had nurtured his early career – action specialists Premiere Productions in particular – was experiencing a meltdown analogous to that in the United States thanks to a well-coordinated, industry-wide labour dispute. De Leon was still the country's most revered “golden age” director, but he was no longer first in line for the choicest projects and grew ever more dependent on American backing for more exploitative material. Little wonder that he ended his days complaining of “the foreigners taking over” and arguing for state-subsidised production (1).
Given the rich and unusually convoluted artistic path De Leon had followed, his disillusionment and bitterness were perhaps understandable.
II. Passion, Opera, and So Forth
Born in 1913 to a show-business family in the Manila suburb of Bulacan, Gerardo de Leon Ilagan began making films in the late 1930s after finishing medical school, becoming licensed as a physician, and serving a stint as an actor. He directed dozens of movies in almost every genre over the next 30-odd years, among them Bahay Kubo (1938), a musical; acclaimed adaptations of Filipino anticolonialist martyr Jose Rizal's novels Noli Me Tangere (1961) and El Filibusterismo (1962); antic action-fantasy programmer Sanda Wong (1955), which was co-produced with Hong Kong's Vistan-Chapman studio; Pedro Penduko (1954), a treatment of Francisco V. Coching's popular comic book series featuring a sort of Filipino L'il Abner; Blood Brothers (release date unknown), a staff orientation film for the United States Navy; and, most intriguing, a handful of anti-American propaganda films produced in collaboration with the occupying Japanese forces during World War Two (2). De Leon won every possible major Filipino film industry award in his lifetime, and became the first filmmaker to be recognised as a Philippines National Artist shortly after his death in 1981.
De Leon's reputation with cineastes peaked at around the same time, thanks to screenings of several of his films in France and a gushing, perceptive appreciation by Charles Tesson in Cahiers du cinéma. Tesson neatly encapsulated the director's style and the giddy awe that it can evoke:
The extreme depth of field of his shots allows the viewer to take in everything, all the possible lines of action, and creates an internal rhythm sustained through all the mishaps and vicissitudes of the narrative. A change of axis, a shift of frame, suffices to upset the rhythm. ... Visually, this axis creates lines of flight – horizontal planes extending outside the frame to dissipate tension; as well as lines of force – diagonal planes within the frame. In short, he creates dynamic tension at the very source of each action, each adventure. ... This is truly great artistry. (3)
A few decades later, Bill Landis, editor of American schlock-movie fanzine Sleazoid Express, would exhibit similar enthusiasm by praising De Leon's way with girl-on-girl torture scenes (4).
Regardless of such taste-bridging talent, however, widespread renown for De Leon's work stalled around the time of Tesson's explication thanks to a dearth of the director's earlier work in Europe and North America.
Because the Philippines' economy and damp tropical climate (to say nothing of its turbulent political one) are detrimental to archiving audiovisual material, all but a few of the films from De Leon's prime appear to be lost forever. Indeed, as Richard Peña, programmer for New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, has said, “To the best of my knowledge, there are only five of De Leon's films that exist in whole or in fragment of the 60 or so that are attributed to him.” Noli Me Tangere occasionally turns up in museum and festival screenings, and restored prints exist of Sanda Wong and the politically themed The Moises Padilla Story (1961). But, as Peña notes, “Most of what we know about De Leon's films is from written accounts. From what we can see, it seems very, very clear that he was a very strong talent.” (5)
Peña's statement reveals the central conundrum of assessing De Leon's work: By “what we can see”, Peña – whether he realises it or not – is referring primarily to the films produced during the last years and arguably lowest point of De Leon's career. With such sanguinary titles as Brides of Blood and Mad Doctor of Blood Island, and showcasing the sort of graphic violence and exploitation adored by the Sleazoid Express crowd, these American-backed potboilers are, for better or worse, all the De Leon most moviegoers will ever see.
Treasured up until now only by genre completists and nostalgia merchants, these movies – despite their low quality and even lower aspirations – tend to bear out Peña's hunch about De Leon's artistry, and their release in the last few years on DVD makes it easier to put his talent to the test. (For years, they were only available in fuzzy, fifth-generation videotape dupes marketed by disreputable distributors.) Nevertheless, most film historians are either unaware of these later works – hence Peña's undercount of extant De Leon films – or dismiss them altogether. On the flip side, the average video renter in the West is unlikely to know that De Leon directed anything else, and the various versions of these films released over the years, with their confusing re-titlings, threadbare transfers, and truncated credits, have made him an easy target for derision.
Such contempt may be misapplied, but it isn't entirely unfounded. With a few notable exceptions, these films are hobbled by juvenile story lines, silly monsters, repulsive gore, amateur performances (representative lead actresses include a retired Miss Denmark and sad, porn-starlet-to-be Angelique Pettyjohn), and the ubiquitous presence of faded 1950s American teen heartthrob John Ashley. Moreover, their Philippines setting serves as little more than a vaguely Asian, anachronistically “exotic” backdrop that's been culturally denuded for Yank consumption. It's only slight consolation that these choices reflect the tastes of the audiences the films were intended for (American drive-in habitués) rather than the director's own.
Yet for all their reliance on sure-fire schlock these films kept De Leon steadily employed, and he was given relatively free artistic rein on them. Most of the credit for this goes to his friend and one-time protégé Eddie Romero, a screenwriter and director who was perceptive enough to start an independent production/distribution company in the Philippines with Americans Kane W. Lynn and Irwin Pizor at the end of the studio-dominated era. Romero happily gave his former mentor work during this lean period, and among De Leon's early films for the fledgling Hemisphere Pictures was Intramuros (1964, later retitled The Walls of Hell), a well-regarded war movie that marked the first of the many projects the two friends co-directed.
Although it adheres to stock Hollywood combat-film tropes, Intramuros is unusual in its sensual abrasiveness and emotional equivocation. The soundtrack is a draining barrage of explosions and gunfire literally from start to finish, while the mise en scène is a baroque murk of smoke, dust, rubble, and bleached sunlight. The story, like all of De Leon's American ventures and many of his Filipino ones, is a mixture of overt cliches (the dialogue is peppered with such gems as “Any way you cut it, it's a dirty deck of cards”) and unresolved cross-cultural tension: a US ranger team sent to liberate hostages in the final days of Manila's Japanese occupation clashes with a Filipino ally (enduring Filipino box-office champion Fernando Poe, Jr) who sees the Yanks as little better than the Imperial Army – an estimation the film makes no effort to disavow.
Romero directed other war movies for Hemisphere that mimicked the themes and tone of Intramuros (1968's Manila Open City was, in fact, an unacknowledged remake), but they lack the stark physicality of that film. Romero is inclined to assert that De Leon's contribution to their collaborations was “style” while his own was characterisation, (6) and it's undeniable that Romero's solo films pivot more on moral – and not infrequently moralistic – quandaries than kineticism. Regardless, De Leon's work is, as Tesson suggests, the more visually indelible, and the complex, hair-trigger nature of the relationships in Intramuros belie Romero's neat recollection of the division of labour in their collective efforts.
III. The BloodIsland of a Poet
Judging from De Leon's American-backed follow-ups to Intramuros, it could be argued that it was all downhill from there. But even under the most dire circumstances he exercised a characteristic cinematic bravado.
This is especially the case with Blood is the Color of Night (Kulay Dugo ang Gabi) (1964) and Whisper to the Wind (Ibulong Mo sa Hangin) (1966), two vampire films shot in Tagalog that Hemisphere purchased ready-made, edited (heavily, in the case of Blood is the Color of Night), dubbed, and retitled The Blood Drinkers and Creatures of Evil, respectively (7).
Of all his later films, this hip, dynamic pair showcases De Leon's skills best. His spare approach to narrative – which he credited to his early love of silent films – combines with a restless camera, extreme deep-focus set-ups, and monochromatic palettes signalling emotional and/or tonal shifts to make for unusually hypnotic viewing. (Cult director Guy Maddin's 2001 Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, a dance film commissioned for Canadian television, appears to borrow from De Leon's stylistic repertoire for these films, particularly the balletic Blood is the Color of Night.) Even the long, expository sequences that usually bring low-budget genre fare to a standstill are eye-catchingly composed.
In addition, despite the Gothic trappings, De Leon's vampire duo brims with more socio-historical baggage and potent cultural metaphors than even the incendiary Intramuros or The Moises Padilla Story. Whisper to the Wind, in particular, which takes place during the last gasp of the Philippines' tumultuous colonial era, has more on its mind than the usual connotations of sexual menace typically associated with horror cinema (although it oozes sexual menace as well). If both movies ultimately come off as oppressive Catholic agitprop – something Philippines film critic Mauro Tumbocon, Jr attributes to “a tendency [in Filipino horror] to moralize [and] reaffirm one's faith in the existing system” (8) – they nevertheless make for dynamic, probing pop artifacts.
Only the first of the “BloodIsland” movies De Leon helmed for Hemisphere, a melodramatic spin on H. G. Wells' TheIsland of Dr. Moreau called Terror is a Man (1959), fares half as well. The film lifts the central device of Wells' novel – a driven, demented physician transforming wild animals into human beings via surgery – as well as its interloper's point of view. But whereas Wells' darkly satiric tale of “the aimless torture in creation” explores the cruelty of God, De Leon and screenwriter Harry Paul Harber ponder instead the compulsive, barbaric ways in which humanity punishes nature – specifically its own. If the interpretation falls short of Wells' far-reaching treatise on Darwinism, it is unusually adept at highlighting the abiding cruelty of man, a theme that surely resonated in the serially colonised Philippines. (Ironically enough, most of Hemisphere's Philippines-produced films were never released in the country in which they were shot.) De Leon's tense pacing and noirish milieu capture a sadism that suits the material well, and it allows him to emphasise emotion over spectacle without sacrificing the kind of jitters Hemisphere was after.
The disappointing, increasingly formulaic follow-ups to Terror that De Leon directed with Romero, Brides of Blood (1965) and Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), are sumptuously shot if occasionally nauseating pulp entertainment, but lack the atavistic dread of the original or the quasi-Freudian depth of his vampire films. American indie micromogul and one-time Hemisphere silent partner Sam Sherman suggests that it was a case of the foundering production company “going to the well once too often” – or twice, since Romero directed a fourth entry, Beast of Blood (1970), on his own – and says that Romero, Lynn, and Pizor “ended up repeating everything they did. They had no versatility.” (9)
IV. Average Joe
The same can't be said of De Leon, who returned to strictly Filipino productions after scraping the bottom of the American exploitation barrel with the lurid Women in Cages (1971). This incongruously well-made girls-in-prison movie, which features cult icon Pam Grier in an early starring role as a brutal warden, was produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Corman, like Kane W. Lynn before him, had discovered the low-budget production potential of the Philippines; unlike Lynn, however, he had no affection for the place or its artists and craftsmen, and the slapdash programmers he churned out succeeded in alienating much of the Filipino filmmaking talent who'd come to rely on his brand of funding.
After moving on, De Leon's next few works – all unreleased in the West – included the award-winning horror movie Lilet (1971), a segment of the omnibus film Fe, Esperanza, Caridad (1975), and the film he was working on at the time of his death, Juan de la Cruz – a title that is the Filipino equivalent of “average Joe” (10).
The detours and derailments of De Leon's career are not substantially different from those of other non-Western filmmakers: removed from the money, power, and stability of the world's film production capitals, they are plagued by chronic budget shortfalls, resource scarcity, local indifference, and, in some cases, the humiliating scrutiny of official sanction.
What sets him apart is not just the sui generis muscularity of his films or his impressive flexibility, but his persistence. Gerry de Leon straddled the terrain between the disposable and the durable for much of his working life, and mined improbably rich material from it – all for no other reason than that he loved making movies.
Endnotes
1. From “Gerardo de Leon: A Master Film-Maker Speaks Out” by Amadis Guerrero, Philippines Daily Express, September 3, 4 and 5, 1978. Despite his resentment of Hollywood (and a disappointing attendant anti-Semitism), De Leon may have had a point. American films have dominated the Philippines' box office virtually since the introduction of cinema there, making local filmmaking ventures difficult to fund and a struggle to distribute. Thus the latter half of the oft-used, flippant summation of Filipino colonial history – “three centuries in a Spanish convent, 50 years in Hollywood” – is in one sense literal. Interestingly, “whorehouse” is sometimes substituted for “Hollywood” in this maxim.
2. There's evidence that De Leon was keen to work with Japanese director Abe Yutaka, who hand-picked him for these projects. Regardless, De Leon was imprisoned for treason after the war for his efforts, and was later pardoned when it came to light that he'd surreptitiously assisted the Filipino resistance at the same time.
3. From “Deux Cineastes Philippins”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 333, March 1982.
4. Landis on Women in Cages: “All exposition and explanation is irrelevant in this picture, which rides on the pure visceral impact of torture scenes in which glamazon Pam [Grier] works over Roberta [Collins], Judy Brown, and Jennifer Gan...” From Sleazoid Express, Fireside Books, 2002, p. 245, a book-length compendium/expansion of the zine co-authored by Michelle Clifford.
5. From author interview, January 2002.
6. From “Eddie Romero: Our Man in Manila” by Lee Server, Film Comment, March–April 1999. Romero on his and De Leon's collaborative style: “He was all passion, opera, and so forth, and I was all laid back and not wanting to make things a big show. Don't let people notice the framing, keep it real, keep the actors believable. And Gerry would be the opposite.”
7. Blood is the Color of Night and Whisper to the Wind were later re-retitled The Vampire People and Curse of the Vampires, respectively, to appear on the bottom halves of separate drive-in double-bills; little wonder that even Filipino film scholars have lost track of these as De Leon's work. Happily, they were released on DVD in the United States several years ago, complete with pristine transfers from new prints (supplied by Hemisphere beneficiary Sam Sherman), restored scenes, and yet another title change for Whisper to the Wind (it's now the more marketably thematic Blood of the Vampires).
8. Tumbocon makes this observation in advance publicity material for “In a Climate of Terror: The Filipino Monster Movie”, his essay in Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Fear Without Frontiers, FAB Press, 2003.
9. From author interview, June 2001. Sherman, who went on to launch the successful production and distribution company Independent-International Pictures, had reservations about Hemisphere's business acumen, and was also sceptical of Eddie Romero's filmmaking instincts: “Eddie's an intellectual, he likes character and story.” (The rogue!) Sherman had no recollection of De Leon or his work.
10. Eddie Romero kept working, too, and after several more exploitation movies and a gruelling stint as the location liaison on Apocalypse Now (1979), he also weaned himself from American funding. He subsequently wrote and directed a series of well-received films that addressed the Philippines' social and political intransigence head-on, and never looked back. Romero later called his American-financed “cult” films – including the “Blood Island” entries he co-directed with De Leon – “the worst things I ever did” (from “Eddie Romero: Our Man in Manila” by Lee Server, Film Comment, March–April 1999).
Sam Sherman and I at Sam's Independent International vault (with the face from Dracula vs Frankenstein!), New Jersey, June 2008
“Sam Sherman and The Bloody Brain Monsters of Ghastly Horror!”
[Sam Sherman interview with Michael Weldon in Fangoria #29 (1983), pp.38-39]
Before Sherman and Al Adamson got their own company going, Sherman became associated with Hemisphere Pictures through his friendship with Hemisphere president Irwin Pizer. Pizer's partner, Kane Lynn, was a highly decorated naval officer and pilot in the Pacific theater during World War II. As a result of Lynn's familiarity with the Phillipines, Hemisphere was able to pioneer the use of the island republic as a film location - thereby paving the way for umpteen New World cheapies and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Prior to Sherman's association, Hemisphere had made mostly war pictures, one notable exception being 1959's Terror Is A Man, an effective leopard-man movie starring Francis Lederer. Fairly bloody for its time (it was set on "BloodIsland"), the Dr. Moreau-inspired thriller was promoted with a warning buzzer gimmick to alert the audience of shocking scenes.
"I kept telling them to go into horror, go into horror and stop making war pictures, and induced them to do it," recalls Sherman. "They took Terror and retitled it Blood Creature, billed it with The Walls of Hell (a Phillipines-made war movie) and got their first taste of horror; the bill did very well. As a result of that, they purchased another picture from the Phillipines called Blood Drinkers, by the same director as Terror, Gerry DeLeon, a very clever, creative director. That was teamed with a black and white film from Texas called The Black Cat."
So, 10 years after Terror is a Man was made, it spawned what is now known as "the BloodIsland trilogy." John Ashley, formerly a teen star (Frankenstein's Daughter, Eye Creatures and several A.I.P. beach movies), lit up the screen in Brides of Blood (1968), Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969) and Beast of Blood (1970), gory hits produced by Kane Lynn and directed by Eddie Romero.For over a decade to come, these same films would resurface constantly at drive-ins and on TV under myriad titles (for instance, Brides of Blood was reissued by Motion Picture Marketing as Grave Desires).
One of Sherman's favorite tasks was creating outrageous ad campaigns and clever promotional gimmicks. For instance, the opening of Mad Doctor was a title card that led the audience in the reading of a blood oath. The patrons would then be told to swallow the packet of gelatin-based green "blood" that each had received. Though the blood was formulated to be quite safe, the very thought of consuming the viscous food was sufficient to produce a few casualties at each screening.
Eddie Romero directed yet a fourth John Ashley film, Beast of the Yellow Night, which was to have been Hemisphere's fourth in the Blood Island series, however, the Kansas City backers who had financed the previous three films had a falling out with the producers at Hemisphere, and negotiated a release through the brand-spanking-new company New World Pictures, allowing Roger Corman to enter the burgeoning field of "Blood Island Mania." Sherman's own distribution company was finally off the ground at this time. Larry Woolner, Corman's original New World partner, then bought theatrical rights to the Klaus Kinski import Creature With The Blue Hand from Sherman (Sherman says that he had bought the film on the strength of Kinski's acting, though no-one had heard of him at the time). So it was that the Beast and Creature double-bill became the very first New World release.
Filipino caveman film from 1956 later re-edited by Sherman and Al Adamson into Horror Of The Blood Monsters (1970)
Sam Sherman, “Digging Up The Beast Of Blood”
[from Screem Magazine #4 (1994) pp.5-6]
I had a long association with Hemisphere Pictures, starting in the year of the company's inception, 1963.This involvement led from my being a consultant, doing advertising and promotion and eventually producing one of their horror films - Brain Of Blood. The principals of the company consisted of longtime distributor Irwin Pizor (President), Kane Lynn (Executive Vice President) and Eddie Romero (Vice President in charge of Production).The three were also the company's sole original stockholders.
By 1970 when Beast of Blood came along, Hemisphere had already established itself as an important horror film distributor through its earlier releases. Beast Of Blood was to reach the widest audience, through doing most business of any Hemisphere horror picture. Was the film superior to others? Perhaps not. However, the company was building to this movie and the timing was right.
Hemisphere’s so-called Blood series, was a group of individual films generally unconnected by anything except the titles. We were always trying to find some link between the pictures, to tie something new in with the previous film that had some measure of success.That was done with the titles selected, the print ads, the trailers and radio and television spots. In the case of Beast Of Blood, that was the one and only Hemisphere horror title that had any real connection to one of the previous films, as it was a genuine sequel to Mad Doctor Of Blood Island.
Why it was a sequel is an interesting story in itself . That was due to the efforts of the late Beverly "Bev" Miller. He was a former theatre owner in the Kansas City, Mo. exchange territory, who operated a regional distributorship known as Mercury Fihns, which represented Hemisphere in several mid-westem areas. He had done well with horror pictures and developed a good relationship with Kane Lynn. Having some previous involvement in production, he wanted to take a more active role in filmmaking.
The success of Mad Doctor Of Blood Island prompted him to write a sequel story and carve out a nice role for himself as the old Captain. In this capacity he got a free vacation to Manila, and could engage in mock war heroics, shooting automatic weapons and downing the heavies. Being a non-actor, the role made no great demands on his dramatic skills and at the time his performance was criticized, as I recall. He may not have been a screen veteran, but he sure looked like one. I showed a still of him to some friends years ago in his Captain role and they were sure that they had seen him in many old Hollywood movies, which of course wasn't true. But, Bev Miller looked right in the role and in re-screening the film recently I felt he gave the role just what was needed, apart from enjoying my seeing an old friend again.
Bev Miller's involvement spelled the end for Hemisphere's production of films in the Philippines. He brought with him three new funding groups and their differences with Hemisphere led to Eddie Romero joining with them and John Ashley and making motion pictures for other comparnes, i.e. Beast Of The Yellow Night (New World) and Twilight People (Dimension). But for a brief moment there was Camelot. Hemisphere's Blood group existed for a short period of time and were marketed well, exceeding the results and reputation of the other films. These pictures had a quirky horror quality at the instance of Irwin Pizor and Kane Lynn, which were in their scripts, casting and marketing. The later non-Hermsphere productions gained in polish and budgets, but lacked in cult appeal, which is why horror fans are still interested m the Hemisphere films.
Mad Doctor Of Blood Island followed Hemisphere's Brides Of Blood (Island), with Kane Lynn taking my suggestion of dropping the last word as being an inactive one. John Ashley was hired by Lynn to go to Manila and play the nominal hero role in this production, and he fell in love with the Philippines. Along with Bev Miller, he took an active part in the Philippines productions which lasted into the post-Hemisphere era. He cut that involvement short after having his life threatened by guerrillas with machine guns while on a location scouting trip in the jungle.
While Brides and Mad Doctor had little in common plot-wise, Beast Of Blood (Island) did connect to Mad Doctor. After bringing “Island” back into the title, Kane Lynn once again followed my advice and dropped it for a second time, although BloodIsland was actually a part of the story.
Mad Doctor Of Blood Island (1969) told the story of a scientist, Dr. Bill Foster, who arrives at the Jungle-like Blood Island at the same time as heroine Angelique Pettyjohn, who is searching for her lost father. The mysterious Dr Lorca, played by Ronald Remy, star of a previous Hemisphere film The Blood Drinkers, is conducting the “green blood” experiments. Lorca, in trying to cure an old friend (Don Ramone) of a terminal illness, instead creates a horrible monster, known to the natives as 'The Evil One". At the same time, Lorca is also having an affair with Don’s wife. That sets up the forces in motion in the film. Various natives are used for experiments, get green blood contamination and the picture ends in a big fire with Don Ramone and Doctor Lorca apparently killed. A tag scene in the boat leaving the island with Ashley and Pettyjohn suggested the monster might still be alive.
This now sets up the action for Beast Of Blood. Ashley retums as Dr. Foster on a boat heading back to BloodIsland, with “The Evil One” secretly aboard. The monster attacks Foster and hte crew and the boat goes up in flames during the melees. Foster survives, clinging to some wreckage and the monster crawls to the shore on the island.
After the release of gore and sex loaded Mad Doctor, the ratings system came in and these elements had to be toned down in Beast Of Blood, which was more of a mystery film and jungle action picture than straight horror fare. For these reasons, the plot of Beast Of Blood unfolds slowly, as Dr. Foster and reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnell) trek through the jungles to find Dr Lorca still alive quite late in the movie's running time.Lorca, disfigured in the fire which ended Mad Doctor, is played by Eddie Garcia, who has captured Don Ramone and restrained him in a most unusual way. Ramone's head is kept alive apart from his body, attached to sorne kind of chemicals and lab machines. The same for the body kept alive without a head. Several attempts of Lorca's to graft native heads on to Ramone's body fail in the surgery. However, some unstated psychic connection still exists between the body parts, over which it has some control.
Eventually Ramone's head directs the body to attack and kill Lorca, which leads to the destruction of the lab in a violent fire and explosion. At the end, when Foster, Russell and company trek off from Lorca's domain into the jungle, a native is shown carrying an unusual large wooden box which one might assume contains something that will prompt another sequel. Alas, no green blood drips out and these thoughts only remain in the mind of the viewer.
Eddie Romero directed Beast Of Blood in straight forward narrative and professional technique. The jungle and action scenes didn’t suffer from the limited budget, and set design, lab machines and such, were generally well done. Gone were the shaky zoom effects from Mad Doctor, which I liked, and many others did not. This was the artistic touch of Romero's co-director Gerry De Leon, who pioneered many techniques in Philippine production.
When the next Hemisphere movie Beast Of The Yellow Night went instead to Dimension Pictures, Al Adamson and I made Brain Of Blood for Kane Lynn in Los Angeles. We hired Kent Taylor, star of Brides Of Blood, shot Hemisphere-type lab gore scenes and crafted a story that matched the "Blood" series plots. With the sets and locations selected carefully and using the original background music by Tito Arevalo from Mad Doctor, we created a film that fit the series, and which many thought was a sequel to Beast Of Bloodand just another Hemisphere Philippine production.
1964 - Kulay Dugo Ang Gabi/“Blood Is The Colour Of The Night” (People’s Pictures)
[Philippines release date 31st October 1964; also released by Hemisphere Pictures in the United States in 1966 as "The Blood Drinkers" and 1971 as "The Vampire People"]
Director Gerardo de Leon Writer Cesar Amigo Based on the komik serial by Rico Bello Omagap Producer Cirio H. Santiago Executive Producer Danilo Santiago Music Tito Arevalo Cinematography Felipe Sacdalan Editor Atilano Salvador Production Design Ben Otico Makeup Tony Artieda, Rey Salamat Sound Effects Tony Gosalvez Sound Engineer Demetrio de Santos Special Effects Hilario Brothers
Cast Ronald Remy (Dr Marco), Amalia Fuentes (Charito/Katrina), Eddie Fernandez (Victor de la Cruz), Eva Montes (Tanya, the vampire bride), Paquito Salcedo (Elias, the guardian), Renato Robles, Celia Rodriguez, Mary Walter, César Aguilar, Eriberto Amazan Jr, Philip Antivo, Eddie Arce, Luis Benedicto, Andrés Benítez, Jess Buenaflor, Rudy Bugarin, Ernesto David, Mona del Cielo, Felipe Dionisio, Frankie Lastimoso, Tiva Lava, Renato Murado Jr, Fred Parain, Ric Paulino, Ricardo Rivera, Jess Roma, Felisa Salcedo, Frank Seavedra, Evelyn Shreve, Vicky Velasquez
Review by Andrew Leavold
The Sixties saw a revival of the gothic horror tradition thanks to Hammer’s Dracula series starring Christopher Lee, and a smorgasbord of Continental shockers like Black Sunday and The Horrible Dr Hitchcock. The last place you’d expect gothic to thrive is the Philippines, and least of all by one of their most respected filmmakers. But it did, and in 1964 director Gerardo (or Gerry) de Leon released a vampire film that is both universal AND intensely and uniquely Filipino, The Blood Drinkers.
Ronald Remy is striking as the complicated villain Dr Marco, as bald as Nosferatu in dark glasses and snappy 60s black outfits, and simultaneously terrorizing a secluded jungle village while pining for his dying vampire love Katrina. As well as a vampire, he’s a man of science and medicine, and with the help of his hunchbacked assistant and mute dwarf, he plans to transplant the still-beating heart of the village girl Charito into Katrina (both played by the gorgeous 60s Filipino starlet Amalia Fuentes). Modern technology and traditional faith are constantly juxtaposed in a film which cuts between colour film and black and white footage tinted in cool blues and blood red. Apparently colour stock in the Philippines in the 60s was too expensive for an entire feature, but like the rest of The Blood Drinkers, director de Leon uses this budgetary contraint to full advantage.
De Leon may fill the screen with Hollywood-inspired images of caped counts and rubber bats, but this taps into a rich vein of Filipino folklore littered with tales of evil aswangs and female vampires with giant bat wings called the mananaangaal. Add almost five hundred years of Catholicism, a Spanish colonial heritage and a countryside ruled by an almost feudal aristocracy, and the image of Charito’s undead parents trying to feed off her blood becomes so much more potent, as does the the overload of garish religious imagery.
1966 – Ibulong Mo Sa Hangin/“Whisper To The Wind” (AM Productions)
[Philippines release date 5th August 1966; released by Independent International/Hemisphere Pictures in the US in 1971 as "Curse Of The Vampires" and "Blood Of The Vampires", in the UK as "Creatures Of Evil"]
Director Gerardo de Leon Story Ben Feleo Screenplay Pierre L. Salas, Ben Feleo Executive Producer Amalia Fuentes [as Amalia Muhlach] Music Tito Arevalo Cinematography Mike Accion Editor Ben Barcelon Set Decoration Ben Otico Makeup Baby Buencamino Assistant Director Dik Trofeo Sound Recordists Vicente Dona, Vic Dona, Tony Evarle, Pedro Nicolas Sound Salustiano Evarle Sound Effects Tony Gosalvez Sound Engineer Demetrio de Santos Men’s Warbrobe F.P. Bautista Assistant Editor Narciso Galang Title Design [US version] Bob LeBar
Cast Amalia Fuentes (Leonore Escodero), Romeo Vasquez (Daniel Castillo), Eddie Garcia (Eduardo Escodero), Johnny Monteiro, Rosario del Pilar, Mary Walter (Doña Consuelo Escodero de Victoria), Francisco Cruz, Paquito Salcedo, Quiel Mendoza, Andrés Benítez, Luz Ángeles, Tessie Hernandez, Linda Rivera
Review by Andrew Leavold
Both The Blood Drinkers and de Leon’s 1966 follow-up Curse Of The Vampires were dubbed into English and sold to the world by US company Hemisphere, the company who spent most of the 60s in the Philippines jungle making war films for the insatiable American drive-in market. De Leon and Hemisphere would later craft the most notorious Filipino horror films of all, the “Blood Island” trilogy; Curse Of The Vampires was the bottom of a 1971 double bill with his frequent collaborator Eddie Romero’s Beast Of Blood, and from Hemisphere’s posters it looked to the world like any other low budget drive-in nonsense. But de Leon, along with Romero (Beast Of The Yellow Night, The Walls Of Hell), was a classically trained filmmaker and is enshrined as a Philippines National Artist, and thus everything he does is with purpose, from the masterful framing, composition, lighting… As a result, Curse Of The Vampires is not just a throwaway B-programmer with bloodsuckers but a serious horror film with deep cultural resonances.
A further link to The Blood Drinkers is Amalia Fuentes, who also produced Curse… under her real name Amalia Muhlach for her own production company. Amalia was one of the most famous Philippine actresses of the Sixties, a mixed Spanish or “mestizo” beauty who plays the heroine Leonore, a tragic figure at the centre of the doomed Escudero family riddled with vampirism and more. As a Spanish colony until the late 1800s, the country’s Hispanic legacy is still strong, leaving behind a feudal nobility who owed its alliegances more to Madrid than Manila. It’s no accident the film is set in the 1800s, in a Spanish mansion filled with the frayed trappings of a fading and failing colonial presence.
Leonore’s mother is played by Mary Walter, a popular mestizo actress from the Philippines’ silent era; the very Spanish-looking Eddie Garcia plays the weak and corrupt brother Eduardo, a classic villain of Tagalog movies here playing a less cartoonish and much more multi-layered version of pure evil. The other enduring legacy of the Spanish era is its overt Catholicism, which, as in many of Spain’s former colonies, has mutated into a strange hybrid of local folk beliefs with its own uniquely Filipino iconography. In this context, Curse Of The Vampires becomes a deeply Catholic morality play of good versus evil, combined with a cloying Filipino sentiment of love conquering all.
The film opens with Leonore in the arms of Daniel (Romeo Vasquez), a pure-hearted local lad who promises her to love her even from beyond the grave. Her father Don Enrique Escudero (Johnny Monteiro) denies permission for them to marry due to the family curse - vampirism, like madness, is borne by blood, and he has unwittingly kept the curse alive by keeping his vampire wife Dona (Mary Walter) locked in the basement. Every night she wakes up in her coffin, her now-animalistic screams pleading for blood. Don Enrique is forced to whip her into submission but can’t let go – the family has become insular to the point of incestuous.
The mother finally escapes from the basement, captured in a beautifully executed shot of the former matriarch, now a savage beast, tinted red in the foreground while her stern-looking portrait looms in the background. Eduardo willingly allows himself to be turned into a vampire by his mother’s loving embrace, and when his father dies in tragic circumstances, he assumes the paternal role of feudal lord. His veins now coursing with evil, he covets both his sister and Daniel’s sister Christina (Rosario del Pilar), to whom he becomes an aristocratic predator, demanding total servitude from his new vampiric bride (“You are my lord, I am your slave,” Christina says most tellingly on her short-lived honeymoon).
Leonore accepts her fate to follow the family curse, yet Daniel won’t allow her and reiterates his oath to protect her, in this life and the life after. The entire film is tinged with sadness and loss, and ends with not just a mob of angry villagers, but an entire Catholic parade, all brandishing torches while praying to gaudy statues of Mama Mary. Filipino gothic was a relatively small and short-lived genre, but de Leon certainly made it his own.
Its predecessor The Blood Drinkers was filmed with very little money in mostly black and white with tinted scenes for dramatic effect. Curse… is filmed in colour and unfortunately loses some of The Blood Drinkers’ aesthetic charms. De Leon does have a tendency to go overboard with in-studio lighting effects like a foaming-at-the-mouth Mario Bava, bathing entire scenes in saturated red and blue gels. It’s hardly subtle, but the effect is eerie and claustrophobic to say the least, even in the elaborately-lit jungle and cemetery exteriors. Weird without intent and without a single trace of kitsch, this is, along with The Blood Drinkers, undoubtedly one of Filipino horror’s finest moments.
Posts
