Equalizer 2000

Equalizer 2000

Philippines – 1987

Director – Cirio Santiago

MGM/UA Home Video, 1987,VHS

Run Time – 1 hour 25 minutes.

I’m going to spend a little time with the cover of Equalizer 2000 here because no matter now old I get and how many times I “fall for it” I will always be a sucker for this kind of box. I’m also a sucker for films with a number in the title and especially (I know, we’re getting real esoteric here) numbers that are round thousands. They practically scream out “The future is going to be awesome! Come see!” And especially when the date in question has already passed by the time I see the film. That’s how I picked this movie. From the cover of Equalizer 2000, a cover which I might add is one of the most amazing pieces of modern pop-art ever created, one immediately assumes it’s going to be about Richard Norton and his breasts. The painting (because this was originally painted, by a person, with a brush) perfectly captures the look of slightly melancholy disinterest which, from Gymkata (1985) to Road House 2 (2006), Norton consistently brings to his performances. I realize that’s just how his face is shaped, but it is beautifully captured here and perfectly suited to this film. So intimidating and so confident is he that this whole endeavor is quite literally boring. So too does the woman at his side appear nonplussed by the battle that’s just begun in both word and deed on the cover. She is after all sheltered by the considerable bulk of Norton and his tool. In fact, she almost looks tired. Like a Southern California roller-skate waitress who’s been working all day and just wants you to quit staring at her chest and order your fucking burgers. Her boyfriend is here now and you are sooo not interesting.



But this movie isn’t really about Richard Norton or breasts. It’s not Richard Norton’s undeniable physical prowess which is the subject of that line on the back of the box. He is not the ultimate weapon although you would be excused for thinking so. No, the entire movie, from the title to the endless squabbling of the plot is about that rifle-grenade-launcher, rocket-launcher, laser, shotgun he’s carrying. That is the Equalizer, and they’re hanging a hell of a lot on that weapon. After some kind of apocalypse the world has been reduced to a parched desert landscape marked intermittently only by the cardboard and canvas forts of scattered scavenger cliques. Norton however, known here as Slade (the most popular boys name after the apocalypse it would seem) is a roving unaligned loner. As various

factions attack and defend against other factions, Slade is wounded and rescued by Karen who drives them back to her “good” guys. It is here that Slade discovers them welding a bunch of extra barrels onto an M-16. Upon completion Slade simply takes it. No one argues. Karen (Corrine Wahl) stares longingly at Slade. More assaults follow and the Equalizer changes hands several times until the “good” guys win and Slade drives off into the sunset to be alone with his thoughts. The purpose of this presumably is to build tension as “the ultimate weapon” tilts the delicate balance of post-apocalyptic society one way, then another. It doesn’t.

For as badass as it may be, the Equalizer is lost in the political squabbling that poses as this film’s “action,” its result as predictable as it is tedious. Corrine Wahl, nee Alphen does hang lustily upon Slade’s body, but from afar, with her eyes. She’s come a long way from Hot T-Shirts after all. In his second screen role ever, Robert Patrick makes an appearance as a minor character. His first film had been Santiago’s supremely nutty Future Hunters in which he starred as "Slade" with the supporting talents of, you guessed it, Richard Norton who looked predictably bored. Further lifting the costumes straight from Bobby Suarez’s Warrior’s of the Apocalypse, Equalizer 2000 discards the drug addled lunacy of both earlier films in favor of a monotonous back and forth exchange of small arms fire. Cheap Filipino post apocalypse films could hardly be more different. Slade and Karen’s thousand yard stares on that gorgeous cover would seem to be more disappointment than confidence.

For the box completist...

Silk

Silk

Philippines - 1986

Director – Cirio H.Santiago

MGM/UA Home Video, 198?, VHS

Run Time: 1 hour, 24 minutes

For a movie named after its lead protagonist, Silk is infuriatingly coy about using her. Few action films are so audacious as to be named after the key protagonist but in such cases there is no hesitancy to demonstrate the reasoning behind this decision. Both Dirty Harry and Cobra open their films with an explosive introduction that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Perhaps it is because Silk is a woman that director Santiago didn’t feel that people would buy the idea of a tough, trigger happy female cop. Perhaps it’s because the name doesn’t make any sense considering the character’s lack of personal suavity and the film’s dearth of nudity.

I won’t say that it’s all downhill from there, it’s not a bad movie per-se, but neither is it very memorable. Cec Verill (you wouldn’t know her from anything else) plays Silk, a hard-ass cop who busts drug smugglers in Hawaii (actually the Philippines.) Trouble is, much of the film seems to be about her male coworkers arguing amongst each other and fighting over money. Through a meandering plot Silk tracks down baddies and blasts ‘em, uncovers nefarious plots and blows ‘em up, gets captured, escapes and does it all again, but despite claiming to be “so fucking smooth,” her primary function appears to be fucking up dude’s plans. With a name like that I expected a veritable cacophony of one-liners or a sea of sweat slicked skin. I’m guessing the movie was named after the fact (as often happens) in order to create as false an impression as the cover. An image which, though titillating in the extreme, is about as egregious as the movie gets.

Santiago didn’t often waste a chance to get the women out of their clothes, (his earliest efforts included numerous Women In Prison films) but I can’t understand it here. I do appreciate the fact that her value to the film is not purely sexual (her outfits do make this claim dubious) but her hard ass attitude is as much a sensationalization of her gender (in it’s “unusualness”) as T & A, but the extra skin would have cheapened its appeal even more. Perhaps that’s the irony of Silk. In all it’s unreasonableness it upsets our expectations and reminds us not to make assumptions. Or not. Maybe I’m trying to validate what’s really just a bunch of crap.

Go read the review at Comeuppance!

The Deadly and The Beautiful

The Deadly and the Beautiful 

Philippines – 1973

Director – Robert Vincent O’Neill

Media Home Entertainment, 1984, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

When a famous Jai Alai player disappears without a trace, Mike Harber is off to track him down. Leading with his libido, he soon discovers that a syndicate of beautiful but deadly Wonder Women (the film’s original title) is behind the kidnapping. When Mike decided to pursue a career in insurance he never quite pictured himself fighting criminal masterminds or mad scientists in the seedy underbelly of Manila. The job description “insurance investigator” doesn’t exactly ooze sex appeal after all, but nothing is quite like it seems in The Deadly and The Beautiful. In fact, cockfights and cycle-cab chases aren’t exactly the “underbelly,” and Dr. Tsu’s Go-Go squad aren’t quite a syndicate.

Combining the well worn action spy/secret agent plot (the pre-credit sequence does a worthy Bond imitation, only topless) coupled with the mad scientist performing unorthodox experiments on humans, The Deadly and The Beautiful is essentially a film version of a men’s adventure magazine come a few years after its time. As such it’s not exactly unique or terribly inspiring in it’s content, at least nothing we haven’t seen from Eddie Romero or Cirio Santiago a few dozen times by now. Where it might suffer from a lack of budget or originality however, The Deadly and The Beautiful is extremely generous with sincerity. With all the dire intensity of a 40’s science-fiction serial, and the gritty peril of a location shot action flick, this film literally revels in it’s milieu like a pig in shit. Sincerity goes a damned sight farther than “propriety”, and no matter how many bad rubber monsters and shitty drunken lead actors you have, what an old friend of mine used to call “heart,” will make your movie.

Using a decrepit warehouse to transplant the organs of young athletes into the aging bodies of her wealthy clients, Dr. Tsu somehow manages to turn a profit despite her rickety handmade equipment. When Mike Harber shows up, Tsu cuts short her vinyl clad hit-squad’s latest session of frozen donor boner and sends them to make-out/take-out the erstwhile insurance investigator. Careening through a veritable buffet of Manila scenery and culture with the help of the ubiquitous Vic Diaz and crushed-velvet and ascoted Sid Haig, Mike at last lands on the couch for an up-close-and-personal round of ‘brain sex’ with the good Dr. Tsu. Just before they can reach whatever climax happens at the end of brain-sex, the doctor vanishes in a puff of smoke promising to return a-la Mad Doctor of Blood Island for a second round and possibly even a franchise. I suppose that would explain the carboard laboratory. If you had to abandon all that equipment every time some clunky gumshoe with an ethical hang-up came snooping around (and this seems to happen a hell of a lot,) you’d probably build your lab on the cheap too.

The Deadly and The Beautiful isn’t purely Pinoy. The writer/director and the big ‘stars’, Sid Haig, Ross Hagen (Mike,) Nancy Kwan (Tsu) and Roberta Collins are all American, but as soon as the principals are done forwarding the plot or whatever it is they do, all sorts of Filipinos suddenly appear with vintage WWII weapons and start blasting the shit out of each other on behalf of one or the other side. It reminds me more than a bit of Western colonialism in that the Westerners (Europeans and Americans, in that order here) moved in and made the locals do the rough stuff. Only, underneath it all, nothing would have run without the locals, it was an economy of deception.

The more contemporary Westerners in question were just as dependent on this “cheap” exoticism (and labor) to make their movie(s.) There is an exemplary scene in The Deadly and The Beautiful when, after seducing and attempting to assassinate Mike, one of the Wonder Women flees and initiates a long chase scene through the streets of Manila. The local color makes for some exciting realism, but at the same time can’t help but reveal true local flavor. At one point can be seen a Mule carrying a man with a bullhorn followed by a string of pedicabs bearing banners campaigning for “Remy – Councilor.” This is, I am pretty sure, a frozen historical reference to the late martial artist Remy Presas who worked for the Philippine government for a minute in the early 70’s and which only Pinoy audiences would have appreciated.

To tell the truth of course, the movie industry in the Philippines was initially a product of colonialism as well. Dependent on the whims of the Western dollar to a great extent, but as with any local industry, the Filipinos built their own cinematic house with the master’s tools. The underlying myth to this whole narrative is revealed in the fact that without the local, without Pinoy, the whole ruse would be both narratively and economically impossible. Filipino, and I dare say Southeast Asian films in general (I'm thinking here specifically of Indonesian and Thai, but assuming it applies elsewhere) are some of the best in the world. I hate to say it’s purely a factor of scarcity because despite a relative dearth of these films in USAmerica, I don’t think it is. One gets the impression however that, at least during this period, Filipinos must have really cared about making movies because they put their heart into every one. The Deadly and The Beautiful is a prime example and a rare treat which, thanks to Jack at En lejemorder ser tilbage (among other fine sites,) I’m glad that I revisited.

Sorry about the image quality, its an old tape of a bad print!

I Spit On Your Grave

J'irai cracher sur vos tombes ( aka I Spit On Your Grave)

France - 1959

Director - Michel Gast

A 1959 French film based on a novel in which a light skinned black man returns to the town where his brother was lynched. Seeking revenge upon the murderers he joins their gang and ends up getting involved with one of the girls. Sounds basically like a French race-mixing exploitation film along the lines of the American model vis-a-vis I Crossed The Color Line and I Passed For White.

Day Of The Woman (retitled as I Spit On Your Grave in 1980)

United States - 1978

Director - Mier Zarchi

I Spit On Your Grave as most of us know it, is a pretty notorious film. I personally heard of it long before Thriller: A Cruel Picture or Cannibal Holocaust. It was so notorious that it spawned a number of remakes, sequels and "re-titlings" for video. An official remake is set to be released later this year.There are also several bands with albums titled "I Spit On Your Grave," and various plays on that title, and I found a few foreign websites that were sketchy so I didn't download any of their images.

This Italian poster for the Mier Zarchi movie makes it look like a fetish/slasher along the lines of Fulci's New York Ripper doesn't it?

This Wizard Video sleeve is from It's Only A Movie.co.uk. Wizard Video was an imprint of Charles Band's Empire Pictures.

Japanese sleeve from the incredible Japanese VHS Hell.

Ms. 45
United States - 1981
Director - Abel Ferrara
Perhaps not an explicit spinoff , but the theme is exactly the same. Admittedly, there have been a great number of rape-revenge films made, but Ms. 45 was made almost immediately after I Spit On Your Grave, so its hard to deny the connection. Poster from IMPAwards

Naked Vengeance
Philippines - 1985
Director - Cirio H. Santiago
Naked Vengeance was an unofficial remake directed by Roger Corman's Philippine man of action and all around exploitation gristmill Cirio Santiago. Cover scan from Vestron Video International.

Savage Vengeance

United States - 1993

Director - Donald Farmer

The cult status of Zarchi's film generated a plethora of titular and thematic spinoffs including the Eden Entertainment I WIll Dance On Your Grave series, many of which were simply previously existing low budget films released under a deceptive series title and cheap cover artwork. However, the series did include the film Savage Vengeance which was an unofficial sequel to Day Of the Woman that stars (under pseudonym) Camille Keaton in a reprise of her DoTW Jennifer role.

Girls For Rent (retitled for video as I Spit on Your Corpse)
United States - 1974
Director - Al Adamson
When this film was released on video it was retitled, probably to conjure associations with the Zarchi movie. It is now available on DVD from Troma.

I Spit On Your Corpse, I Piss On Your Grave
United States - 2001
Director - Eric Stanze
Not sure about this, apparently a pretty rough film. I thought I had seen it in high-school, but the date is way off for that.

I'll Kill You, I'll Bury You, and I'll Spit On Your Grave Too!
United States - 1995
Director - Thomas R Koba

IMDB gives a date of 2000 for this one, but the box appears to say 1995. I swear I saw it when I was still in high school back in the 1990's, so who wins that one? Before I knew my ass from my elbow I remember mistaking it for the Zarchi film and being sorely disappointed by its low quality. The VHS box above confirms my story since it is basically the same "design" as the Eden I Dance On Your Grave series from the 90's, right down to the reused and cobbled cover image.

I Spit On Your Remains
Japan - 2005
Director - Yoshiyuki Okazawa

Oyle bir Kadin ki
Turkey - 1979
Director Naki Yurter
It think its a little presumptuous to simply call it "Turkish I Spit On Your Grave," as if the Turks have no actual creative spirit of their own. According to IMDB the title translates to "A Woman Like That" and I find it difficult to believe that Day of the Woman was released in US theaters in November of 1978, then made it to Turkey and was remade by a Turk and released by 1979. Unless the director saw DoTW in the US, the turnaround is just too quick. It took the "Turkish Star Wars" five years to appear after the release of the American film.

I Spit Chew On Your Grave

United States - 2009

There is no IMDB page for this film, but since the arbiters of corporeal substance, Amazon have it for sale, it must be real.

Behind Enemy Lines

Behind Enemy Lines

a.k.a. – Killer Instinct

Philippines - 1988

Director – Cirio H. Santiago

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run time – 1 hour, 23 min.

No, this is not the gung-ho Owen Wilson Gene Hackman vehicle of 2001. I liked that movie when I saw it in the dollar theatre because I knew nothing about the Yugoslav wars, but both of those things have changed.
This Behind Enemy Lines is all about the ‘Nam and is the product of Filipino ‘Namsploitation garbage-grinder Cirio H. Santiago, one of Roger Corman’s protégés in the days when he was farming production out overseas. Just in time too, thanks to Chuck Norris The ‘Nam was a popular product in the States and the Philippines was cheap and full of people who looked to Average dumb Americans sufficiently “oriental” to suspend disbelief. You’ve got to do a lot of that with Santiago.

Somewhere in “North” Vietnam an American patrol led by Robert Patrick is searching for a POW camp but they are caught just as they find it. The sun rises over the same rickety sets and cast of extras as ‘Nam Angels and finds our “hero” and his surviving boys stuck in tiger-cages and watched over by a sadistic Russian who Patrick will undoubtedly fight one-on-one by the end of the film. But for now Patrick escapes and gets back to base where he yells all his lines and recruits some more guys to go back and have another chaotic and ultimately boring firefight that seems to indicate the merciful end of the film.

No such luck. Patrick is wounded and the team flies to Thailand to regroup. A bearded guy shows up to cast an authoritative pall over next several assaults on the shantytown POW camp. The first of these multiple, yes, multiple raids takes place while Patrick is recovering from his wounds with the help of a pacifist American nurse who doesn’t have a warlike bone in her body, until now.

Sufficiently reassured of his manliness Patrick suits up for yet another daring daytime raid to get the Russian, god bless the broad daylight frontal assault. For a movie with such terrible dubbing we can hear every crunching clattering step these assholes make. The subsequent boom-fest and chase scene do indeed end with the long awaited Cold War analogue between Patrick and the Russian, ended in 30 seconds flat by Patrick’s vein-bulging hatred of all things living.
This is confirmed after the battle when he coldly guns down his nurse girlfriend.


It’s remarkable how in every one of his ‘Namsploitation junkers Santiago manages to take the fun parts -like the goofy borderline racist heroics- and drag them out into utter mindless boredom, or blast through ‘em in a few short seconds. I’ll admit, this is an improvement over Caged Fury, but with the awesome insanity of Future Hunters already long gone, and 'Nam Angels just over the horizon, Behind Enemy Lines shows that improvement is a contextual term.

There are at least six other films that go by this name including the David Carradine vehicle I reviewed under the title P.O.W. The Escape, and some other Nam P.O.W. thing that came out in the 90's. Like I said, blame it all on Chuck Norris.

Caged Fury

It says DVD here but this is the same cover art on my VHS tape.

Caged Fury
Phillipines/United States - 1983
Director – Cirio H. Santiago
VEC, 198?, VHS

With all the hope in the world, I opened my heart to Caged Fury because of the genre, and the name of Cirio Santiago. I tracked my immediate knowledge of his name to Future Hunters, but the recently deceased exploitation director/producer is well established as one of the exploitation greats and has left an impressive wake.In any case, I may have imagined for Caged Fury shoes too big to reasonably fill, but I can hardly be blamed.

A pre-credit Manchurian Candidatesque assassination bodes well, but is quickly overshadowed. A young Canadian woman with a Farah Fawcet-do is shuttled to a prison camp in Vietnam where women are brainwashed with daily volleyball-games and nightly booby-electrocutions.
The repeated shots of stony, vacant stares sandwiched between lines of banal dialogue very quickly grew to an excruciating crescendo of purgatorial painfulness. I know why the guards and commandant are so pissed off all the time.


“You have no brains to wash” the film boldly declares while rooting heartily in plot items that are somehow related to previously undisclosed information, and information related to plot items never to be disclosed. The requisite Women In Prison shower scene lasts mere scintillating seconds before an escape attempt, alluded to only in passing before, suddenly takes on an abrupt and suicidal immediacy.

Giving her Vietnamese prison-guard boyfriend everything she has, Canada hides with him in a chicken coop where a quaint and conveniently placed lantern give the subsequent copulation a 70’s cigarette advertisement feeling I just can’t shake. Shooting, and recapture follow.

All along the way, this movie has not provided me with the correct answers, and needs to be electrocuted into agreement, making what is really a rather hateful experience into something rather Phyrrically amusing.
Another ill-concieved escape attempt on a steam locomotive motivates the film, like our heroines under pain of torture into an explosive and genuinely entertaining, but tragically last minute exploitation plot-twist that this whole movie should mercifully have been all along.

Caged Fury

Caged Fury
United States - 1989
Director – Bill Milling
Cinevision Intl., 2006, DVD

From the title alone it’s pretty clear that this is intended to be bought as a “Women-In-Prison” flick. At least it passes itself off as one. Another film of the same name was produced and directed 6 years earlier by Filipino B-auteur Cirio H. Santiago, and looking for that Caged Fury, I stumbled upon this one.

If my assumption that a WIP flick is essentially required to have lots of skin wasn’t unasailable, I would say that at first, this has the emotional simplicity of a made for TV movie. Opening with a squabble between some prison guards who slash each other with razors between raping the underwear clad inmates offscreen, it’s clear that something besides the budget is going to be low.

Ostensibly a vehicle for top billed Erik Estrada of CHiPS, Caged Fury is more of an ironic diatribe on how men are fucking filthy sexist sharks as even the predatory protagonists are sexist tyrants, only wearing smiles. Kat, fresh young Mormon chum seeking her fame and fortune in Hollywood despite her father’s admonitions discovers from the word go that apparently even nice-guys will use any excuse whatsoever to use your meat and leave you dead in the water.

Look at those choppers.

The first to smell her blood is Buck, a discharge-dripping sleazo-photographer/agent who dolls her up in a slutty dress and takes her to a biker bar, where after being nearly raped by the bikers, she is “saved” by Dirk, a musclebound mulleted ‘Nam-vet/mercenary and his pal, pasty and swollen Estrada with a taut and toothy grin that looks like he could eat anything within arms reach. No sooner said, than Estrada coarsely pressures Kat into what we are led to believe is an offscreen sexual experience.

Next it’s an encounter with a grating overfed porn director who tricks Kat into a compromising situation which leads to her arrest. At an exasperating 38 minutes she’s finally sentenced to “prison” where the guards (including Ron Jeremy as “Pizzaface”) repeatedly rape and abuse the inmates with the collusion of the S&M lesbian warden.

Finally fed up after another 45 minutes of typical WIP debasement at the various and sundry hands of her captors, Kat foments rebellion among the inmates just as Dirk rides his motorcycle to the muscly stoic smash-happy rescue. As an afterthought, Estrada appears again from catering van convalescent leave with his clammy pork-chop face, still theoretically the toothless version of voracious misogynist, but for all his deceptive fat-puppy-dog whimpering, still chattering his fangs like a cold dumb sack-of-hammers.

The DVD triple-feature with which I secured my very own copy of Caged Fury.

Future Hunters

Future Hunters

United States/Philippines - 1985

Director – Cirio H. Santiago

Vestron Video, 1989, VHS

2025, in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, a guy with a suggestively biblical name is running away from a bunch of Mad Max throwbacks. Arriving at a decrepit brick building, he finds the Spear of Longenus, the spear that pierced the side of Christ as he was crucified, and apparently, allows people to travel through time. To prove the point, the guy grabs it and ends up in 1989, at the same building.

Michelle is a hot archaeology nerd poking around the building with her boyfriend Slade (Robert Patrick) when future guy shows up, saves em from some bikers, hands em the spear and mumbles something in a monotone before croaking
Resorting to a bickering match which is set to continue for the rest of the movie, the happy couple are soon menaced by some goofy Nazi goons who in similar fashion make a repeated whack-a-mole nuisance of themselves. In search of the other half of the spear, the couple flees to Hong Kong where, they meet up with Bruce Le who flexes his sweaty muscles, has a kung fu fight then vanishes from the script (exotic isn’t he?). Returning to their hotel just in time to rescue Michelle’s goods from some slavering natives, Slade is subjected to another practiced and scripted belittling, the shame of which he masks by assaulting a bellboy with his bulge.
The closer we get to the climax of this thing, the longer it feels and the more bizarre the plot twists become, but the introduction of a native militia, a small army of cave-dwelling midgets, and a band of fierce horny amazons can’t save the film from spiraling into a longwinded if action packed conclusion.
Throughout the film, bonehead jock Slade whines and complains, trying at every turn to throw in the towel, for which he is repeatedly upbraided by Michelle. Yet, despite the fact that she is the motivating force behind the entire plot, all the other characters essentially ignore her, and cast her aside to be smothered, along with a great plot, beneath a deluge of crude silly genre clichés.