8th August 2010: Eyes Of The Condor (1984?)

Eyes Of The Condor

Thailand 1984? colour

aka Eye Of The Condor

Director “Chalong Pakdeevichit”/Chalong Pakdivijit

Cast “Soraphong Chatri”/Sorapong Chatree, Douglas Dull, Krung Srivilai, Joe Samenchai

Most Filipino B-film exports would never have made it past Manila Customs if it weren't for the efforts of Davian International Ltd, a distribution and later production company formed by Hong Kong-born David Hung and his Philippines partner Vivian Andico (hence the “Dav-“ and “-ian” the company name) in 1986. Like Bobby A. Suarez before him, Hung had already muddied his boots in the low-budget distribution trenches as one of Joseph Lai's General Managers for Intercontinental Film Distribution Ltd, and was keen to source saleable action films for his fledgling company, primarily from his own back yard. Davian purchased the international rights to Tagalog-language films, recut them from their customary two hour running times to a more serviceable 90 minutes, and supervised the dubbing into English, more often than not in Quezon City. Hung would then set up a booth at Cannes and the American Film Market and peddle his wares directly to overseas distributors. In this way, even the most generic Tagalog action film for other local producers – such as the Dante Varona vehicle Commander Lawin (1981) and The Day They Robbed America (1985) - could be given a Davian makeover and raffled off to one of their less discerning customers.

Davian also procured a pair of Thai action films, the Sorapong Chatree-starrer Cobra Thunderbolt (dir. Tanong Srichua, 1984) and Eyes Of The Condor, presumably from the same period, although Davian's version bears a 1987 copyright in its closing credit. And kudos to their impeccable taste, I should add: it's an ambitious and utterly charming crime-caper featuring a jewel thief, two cops, a bald Indian, two Caucasian baddies and a squadron of dwarves, all looking for the legendary Eye of the Condor, a precious diamond (the eighth largest in the world, we're constantly reminded, and the most beautiful). The gem disappears from its owner's exhibition on his yacht in the opening sequence: pandemonium breaks out as suave shyster Kenny Hemmings swims with the Eye to a waiting speedboat and his dwarf driver takes off, allowing Kenny to escape via the hang-glider conveniently located in the boat, thus living up to his moniker The Sky Robber! His slimy American boss tries to double-cross Kenny and his stubby sidekick, but they escape once again with the diamond, and hide out with the cherubic sidekick's miniature mates and their normal-sized sister Nancy, an odd household in which Nancy plays Snow White to their Five Dwarves. That is, if Snow White was Asian. And related to the Seven Dwarves. And if there were five... They're more like hyperactive children, running around "Uncle" Kenny's ankles and causing mayhem and structural damage while he suavely woos the suitably impressed Nancy.

A pair of cops are assigned to the case of the missing Eye. the glamorous yet humorless Lieutenant Phyllis (no-one's sure if it's her first or last name) and the more laissez-faire Captain Ben Daniel, and they manage to snare Kenny, only to befriend him (awww!) use him as bait to flush out the REAL Mr Big of the Syndicate, a silver-haired slimeball who looks and sounds like a Greek shipping magnate. The diamond goes missing several more times - once at an ice factory, once in an iced coffee, and once in one of the Five Dwarves' stomach - and the film becomes an endless cat-and-mouse game winding up on the Greek Tycoon's island lair, in a protracted, gloriously over-the-top action finale worthy of a Bobby A. Suarez film. It's here our director "Chalong" (S.T.A.B. [1976]) pulls out every trick from his Boys' Own Book of Action Theatrics. There's an invading army on jet skis, a commando squad of Indian Thuggees looking for their temple's sacred stone, and another hang-glider causing explosions galore. There are stunts on top of other stunts, and that's on top of the rest of the film's kung fu, tuk-tuk chase, mid-air knife fight, and the cheapest, ugliest furniture and sets, unfashionable EVEN for the Eighties.

Eyes Of The Condor sounds like the rest of Davian's pickups, courtesy of their Quezon City dubbing team. It's not just your regular kung fu voiceovers; Davian's team use a plethora of silly and inappropriate voices, squeaks, panting and squarks, not least the penguin sounds uttered by the five munchkins. Luckily the film plays the dwarves' antics for cheap yucks, an essential ingredient in these Thai masala movies. Whether on the receiving end of a Three Stooges-style ladder gag or trotting out the old "one dwarf on the other's shoulders under a long coat pretending to be a tall person" routine, these little guys emote their hearts out and provide an added element to what's already a preposterous crime caper. I'm not sure if it's an absurdist element or the film's missing heart, but it lifts Eyes Of The Condor far above most of South East Asia's relatively one-dimensional action movies into a completely new realm. And that's a tall order (f'nar, f'nar!).

23rd June 2007: "One Of Us, One Of Us" triple!

Freaks

USA 1932 b&w

aka Forbidden Love, Nature's Mistakes, The Monster Show

Director Tod Browning Writer Clarence Aaron 'Tod' Robbins

Cast Wallace Ford (Phroso), Leila Hyams (Venus), Olga Baclanova (Cleopatra), Roscoe Ates (Roscoe)

Tod Browning, flushed with success from his 1931 horror smash Dracula, returned in 1932 with a film that was not a horror film but was certainly horrifying. Freaks is a story of love and revenge set in a circus and populated with real so-called freaks. Amongst the cast are dwarves, a half-man-half-woman, Siamese Twins the Hilton Sisters (more on them later), a trio of “pinheads” whose grotesque innocence inspired a Ramones song, and Radian the Human Torso - like a blood sausage with teeth - who call roll a cigarette with his lips.

Central to the story of Freaks is a husband-and-wife pair of German midgets, Hans and Freida. Hans spies the voluptuous trapeze artisy named Cleo and announces in front of his wife, “She’s the most beautiful BIG woman I’ve ever seen!” Hans is, let’s say, a little insecure about his size, and, beating his tiny chest and sounding like the old blues song “I’m a Man” played at 45 instead of 33, declares his undying love for Cleo. She plays with his affections, but it seems she is only after his inheritance and she continues an open affair with the strongman. His wife pleads with him to return to her, to no avail; at the fateful wedding banquet all is revealed when a drunken Cleo starts screaming “You’re all FREAKS!”

By this moment you’re already inhabiting their claustrophobic, hermetically sealed universe ruled by a strict code about dealing with intruders. The phrase “one of us” is repeated often enough as a creepy mantra that signals the film’s barbaric ending; the sight of the Human Torso crawling underneath a caravan with a knife between his teeth is the stuff of nightmares. If there’s a message, it’s this: circus freaks are people too, and due to their extreme condition they experience jealousy, infidelity, betrayal, humiliation and retribution in their most extreme manifestations. Either that or circus folk are inherently evil - particularly those no bigger than a postage stamp.

Jarring, creaky and yet always mesmerizing and at times heartbreaking, a film that almost sank Tod Browning’s career and was banned in England until the 1960s - if you’re truly one of us here at Schlock Treatment you’ll know what I mean when I say “gooble gobble” and introduce our kind of people: Freaks.

The Terror Of Tiny Town

USA 1938 b&w

Director Sam Newfield Writer Fred Myton

Cast Billy Curtis (Buck Lawson), Yvonne Moray (Nancy Preston), 'Little Billy' Rhodes (Bat Haines) Billy Platt (Jim 'Tex' Preston)

Here’s one you’ve probably only ever heard whispered outside mixed company or read about in the Fifty Worst Movies Of All Time. The Terror Of Tiny Town is like a typical white hats versus black hats B-western of the 1930s, but entirely populated with midgets. All under four feet, and riding tall in the saddle on Shetland Ponies no less. And it’s a musical. Are you still with me?

The Preston and Lawson ranches are a feudin’ and a fussin’, and it takes hero in a white hat Billy Curtis to point the finger at villain-in-black played by Little Billy. Seriously, the plot in The Terror Of Tiny Town pales into insignificance next to the sheer chutzpah of mounting such a novelty production. There’s even a Song Of The South-era negro manservant - no political correctness here at Schlock Treatment - and Nita Krebs the seductive saloon singer who pleads to be loved by everyone in the room, even though she looks like she’s 8. If I was aghast, you probably will be too.

There’s two positives in this film: it only runs for an hour and barely outstays its welcome, and secondly, I love movies with midgets in them. This is no secret. But an entire movie where our little helium-voiced varmints drink beer, strut around in cowboy hats and shoot each other? Like a monkey smoking a cigar, it doesn’t get much funnier than this. I may be forced to eat those words one day, but I will almost certainly have a two-foot-nine army of darkness to defend me. Lsdies and gentlemen, boys and girls, midges and midgettes, please lower your seats a good two feet to get into the right headspace for what could be the only all-midget musical western in history, the 1938 Terror Of Tiny Town.

Chained For Life

USA 1951 b&w

Director Harry L. Fraser Writer Nat Tanchuck

Cast Violet Hilton (Vivian Hamilton), Daisy Hilton (Dorothy Hamilton), Mario Laval (Andre Pariseau), Allen Jenkins (Hinkley)

And now to the tale of the original Hilton Sisters, Violet and Daisy, who despite being conjoined at the back, managed to lead quite scandalous lives. Born to a barmaid in 1908 and raised by the midwife who delivered them, the Hiltons were dragged around the sideshow circuit, and were paid very little if at all for having their uniqueness exploited. Within a year of divorcing themselves from their surrogate mother, the Hiltons landed a prominent part (or parts) in the 1932 film Freaks, and from then on stayed more or less in the public eye. From Violet’s very public sham marriage at the Dallas Cotton Bowl in 1936, to learning hypnosis from Harry Houdini so they could pretend to be alone, and to a Broadway musical called Sideshow, the Siamese Twins managed to pack more into their troubled years than most oakies wouldn’t dream of. Amazingly they lived to the ripe age of 60, though sadly by then in poverty and complete obscurity; their bodies were discovered in their apartment after not showing up for work.

Chained For Life from 1951 is yet another shabby attempt to exploit their “otherness”. Taking elements from their vaudeville careers and private affairs, this poverty row production cobbles together the story of the Hamilton sisters, freakshow stage performers who plan a mock marriage to help along their careers. Stage sharpshooter Andre is picked for Daisy, who at one point imagines herself free and unfettered from the confines of her sister - a poignant moment and tastefully done, I might add. Andre, it seems, is an unrepentant gigolo and unbenownst to Daisy, sister Violet takes it upon herself to teach him a lesson. With a smoking pistol. On trial for murder, the moral dilemma is this: by sentencing Violet, you condemn the innocent Daisy.

And thus signals an endless series of courtroom palava sandwiched between vaudeville nonsense and the one-dimensional performance of the Hiltons, nice singing voices aside. It seems the freak shows were long gone, but cinematic freak shows will never die, if the careers of Anna Nicole Smith and Winona Ryder are any indication. Still, Chained For Life is a compulsively awful viewing experience, and its multi-layered exploitative approach only heightens its sleaziness. Time to peer into the damaged existence of the first Hilton human car-wreck combos, with the 1951 Chained For Life.

28th July 2007: Weng Weng on Blood Island Part 2!

The Impossible Kid

Philippines 1981 colour

Director Eddie Nicart Writers Greg Macabenta, Cora Caballes Producer Peter M. Caballes

Cast Weng Weng (Agent 00), Romy Diaz (Senor Manolo), Nina Sara (Lolita), Tony Carreon (Don Simeon)

One night in 1996, I dreamt I was in the Philippines directing a documentary about Weng Weng, the long-dead Filipino midget James Bond. Ten years later, I’m actually in Manila making a deal with the forces of chaos and following his two-decade obsession to its logical conclusion. It’s just the beginning of a very strange adventure, and as fate would have it, it’s all captured on film - my documentary The Search For Weng Weng, the rough cut premiering at Brisbane International Film Festival on Sunday 5th August.

Follow me as I fearlessly leap into the trenches of the Philippines’ once thriving film industry, armed only with a Mini-DV camera and with a head full of gloriously bad B-movies, and allow blind chance and serendipity to point the way. I discover a schizophrenic Banana Republic dotted with shopping malls and a scale model of Hollywood now a disaster zone, symptomatic of a country attempting to claw its way out of its post-colonial malaise, yet curiously on the verge of a digital filmmaking revolution.

As for Weng Weng: he remains an enigma even to those who worked with him. His reign as the midget Agent 00 was an outrageous novelty that plucked him from complete obscurity and returned him just as quickly. What was he like? When and how did he pass away? In a country of 80 million people, it seems the truth about Weng Weng has slipped between the cracks forever.

His first feature role in the 1981 midget James Bond parody For Y’ur Height Only turned Weng Weng into an instant superstar, appearing on TV and at parties, film festivals, movie openings, even an advert for children’s motorbikes. Liliw Films producers Peter and Cora Caballes quickly cranked out two more Weng Weng features to capitalize on his staggering novelty value: a much less successful Agent OO sequel, The Impossible Kid (1982), and a modern Pinoy western D’Wild Wild Weng (1982), starring Weng Weng as a government agent known only as “Mr Weng”, which doesn’t appear to have made it beyond the Philippines borders. There may be other Weng Weng film appearances, including an earlier starring role in Agent OO (1981) [since confirmed] and a guest cameo alongside the stick-thin Palito’s character “James Bone”, but even in the Philippines information is sketchy at best, if not non-existent.

In The Impossible Kid, midget superhero Agent OO is back and is shorter than ever in his little white suit and pudding bowl haircut, now working for the Manila branch of Interpol. The Chief, a low-rent version of M complete with his own Miss Moneypenny, sends him in the pursuit of Mr X, an arch villian with a white sock on his head, who is holding the Philippines to ransom. Two businessmen, Senor Manolo (classic bad guy Romy Diaz) and Don Simeon (Tony Carreon), pay the demands but Weng Weng suspects foul play and goes deep undercover to reveal the identity of Mr X. Here the James Bond references kick into top gear: Agent OO has even MORE gadgets at his disposal, including a miniature bike which sounds like one of those high-pitched grass cutters and does an incredible leap across a ravine - along a very visible wire! Another highlight is an incredible stunt where Weng Weng gets to use his circus training and walks along a tight rope between two buildings. He then jumps down a garbage chute straight onto his waiting motorbike. Impossible? Mais non!

The opening is a killer - Weng is suspended over the side of a building and gets to ogle naked women through the windows. Now, nudity has never presented a problem to me. But in a Filipino kids film? With midgets involved? The Impossible Kid now ranks up there with 70s Danish sexploitation export The Sinful Dwarf as sleaze mini-classics. Not exactly “dwarfspoitation”, but very sordid indeed. Musically the film offers the same hodge-podge of garbled Bond scores courtesy of Pablo Vergara and, more bizarrely, the theme to The Pink Panther (well, almost). Top of the Manila hit parade is the opener “The Impossible Kid” sung by a cabaret songstress who croons to her micro-hero: “I love you my Weng Weng, come to me and kiss me, I love you Weng Wengggggg!!!” Unfortunately the film is no For Y’ur Height Only, so hoping to strike Comedy Gold a second time is really asking for the impossible - without the surreal rescripting and preposterous English dubbing with bad Peter Lorre impressions, it’s not the same delirious experience. Still, any Weng is good Weng, and we should be thankful for the little guy getting a second shot at filmic infamy.

As the profits diminished, Cora Caballes moved on to a political career and Liliw Films folded. As a result, Weng Weng found himself no longer flavour of the month and without a film career. According to his brother, his family was poor before he became famous, and afterwards remained as poor as ever. In a bizarre twist of fate, General Ramos decided to put Weng Weng through paratrooper training; this time he was given a genuine Agent badge and was sent on infiltration missions where his size would been used to its maximum advantage. Thanks to the Caballes’ connections at Manila Airport, Weng Weng was seen patrolling the Arrivals Lounge in the mid-Eighties in his blue uniform as the unlikeliest “Welcome To Manila” banner.

He continued to live in the family home in Baclaran, gained weight and, according to some reports, drank heavily, and developed hypertension after a severe reaction to eating crabmeat. His health declined steadily over the next twelve to eighteen months, and he died of heart failure on 29th August 1992, just short of his 35th birthday.

The Philippines’ tiniest film icon is buried in a modest white concrete tomb with his parents, grandparents and great-grandmother in Pasay City Cemetary.

My documentary The Search For Weng Weng leapfrogs from one eccentric character to the next - Weng Weng’s director Eddie Nicart AND his only surviving brother Celing, as well as producers, actors, stuntmen, midget waiters, transvestites and dwarf zombies, each one with a unique place in Filipino cinema - all the while dismantling the country’s greatest filmic urban legend. It’s part detective story, part forgotten B-film history, and part surreal Quest for the Holy Grail - that is, if the Grail is a two-foot-nine superstar called Weng Weng, aka The Impossible Kid.

Beast Of Blood

USA/Philippines 1969 colour

aka Beast Of The Dead, Blood Devils, Horrors Of Blood Island, Return To The Horrors Of Blood Island

Director Eddie Romero Writers Eddie Romero, Beverly Miller Producers Kane W. Lynn, Eddie Romero

Cast John Ashley (Dr Bill Foster), Celeste Yarnall (Myra Russell), Eddie Garcia (Dr Lorca), Liza Belmonte (Laida)

From Filipino midgets we go to mutant Manila monsters, and the 1969 Beast Of Blood, an indirect followup to the 1968 Brides Of Blood and direct sequel Mad Doctor Of Blood Island (1969) which reunites Hemisphere Pictures producer Kane Lynn, Filipino director Eddie Romero, and the velvet Elvis Presley of drive-in sleaze John Ashley for a third and last outing to Blood Island. Taking up the action on the boat where Mad Doctor... left off, the hideous chlorophyll experiment of Dr Lorca is loose and destroys the ship; miraculously both Dr Foster (John Ashley) and the creature survive, and Ashley heads back to Blood Island with suspicious female reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall) in tow to uncover its secrets - and secretions - once and for all.

Of course it doesn’t take Ashley long to unearth Dr Lorca. Now played by Eddie Romero’s favourite bad guy Eddie Garcia (Curse Of The Vampires, Beast Of The Yellow Night) and crippled, badly scarred, and left with one eye after his experience as the Mad Doctor Of Blood Island, Lorca is continuing his ghastly experiments in green blood-soaked transplants in a secluded underground lair. More like a Bond villain than a scientist, he instructs his goons to kidnap the reporter then dresses her in a bikini, trades one choice amoral line of dialogue after the other with Sean Connery substitute Ashley (“I’m madder than EVER!”), before watching a cut-rate rescue mission by Ashley’s jungle raiders dissolve his lair in one explosion after another. All that’s missing is a tank full of angry piranhas, and you have an evil sanctuary Blofeldt would be proud of.

Luckily the chintzy would-be 007 touches don’t overshadow the film’s raison d’etre. Always considerate of the wants - no, NEEDS - of its drive-in audience, Beast Of Blood ups the ante on the previous Blood Island epics by offering more sleaze, more cheese and much more over-the-top gushing of the red red vino, particularly during the brutally realistic surgery sequences. Of particular note is Lorca’s creature, a vast improvement on the previous two creatures of Blood Island - this time it looks like its bones are on the outside, and its head spends much of its time separated from its body - a head, by the way, which taunts Lorca from its saucer full of chlorophyll with lipless teeth and perfect diction. Have you tried saying the word “mammoth” without lips? This creature is AMAZING, and could be the spearhead of a future ventriloquist revival.

In my documentary on Filipino B-films The Search For Weng Weng I interview both the star Eddie Garcia AND director Eddie Romero (remember kids, it’s Sunday August 5th at Brisbane International Film Festival). Until then it’s aloha to Blood Island with the headless, eyeless, seamless fusion of science gone mad and the bad getting worse in the 1969 Beast Of Blood.

21st July 2007: Weng Weng on Blood Island Part 1!

For Y’ur Height Only

Philippines 1981 colour

aka For Your Height Only

Director Eddie Nicart Writer Cora Caballes Producer Peter M. Caballes

Cast Weng Weng (Agent 00), Tony Ferrer (Chief), Carmi Martin, Beth Sandoval

The 1981 Manila International Film Festival was designed by First Lady Imelda Marcos as an elaborate showcase of Filipino culture. To everyone’s horror, the only film that sold to the world was a midget spy film – a miniature mockery of Western pop iconography, and a joyously naïve celebration of Filipino Goon Cinema - called For Y’ur Height Only. Its star, a two-foot nine primordial dwarf named Weng Weng, became the most famous Filipino celebrity of his generation both inside the Philippines and abroad, yet curiously, less than 30 years later, the real Weng Weng story has all but been forgotten even by those who worked alongside him.

He’s listed in the Guinness Book of Records as, at just 83 cm (2 ft 9 in) tall, the shortest ever lead actor in a motion picture. That’s as far as the official story goes - blame faulty or selective memories, or a fad-driven culture that never pauses long enough to ask “who?”, “what?” or “why?” - truth is, the story of Weng Weng has become one of the Philippines’ greatest urban legends, and the wildest and wooliest of stories fill in the gaps. Stand-up comedian married to a porn actress, real-life secret agent, hit karaoke chanteur with Imelda, the flow is endless. Once the horseshit hardens, it’s almost impossible to extricate truth from fiction, the right from the rot. Was he truly a national disgrace? Or was he small enough to have slipped between the cracks of film history?

It’s taken me over a year, three visits to the Philippines and more than 40 interviews with the people closest to him, including his only surviving relative, brother Celing de la Cruz, to glean the following information. There are still enormous gaps, but this is the most detailed portrait of Weng Weng I am able to put together; my documentary THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG, screening at this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival on August 5th, is as complete as it ever will be.

Weng Weng was born Ernesto de la Cruz, the youngest of five brothers, on 7th September 1957 in Balacaran, a district of Pasay City (now part of the sprawling 17-city Metro Manila). A condition known as primordial dwarfism caused him to be born, in the words of his brother Celing, “no bigger than a coke bottle”, and he spent the first 12 months of his life in an incubator. He was not expected to live. Naturally, it was declared a miracle when he did, and in a country that venerates miraculous acts of faith, it is no surprise that Weng Weng was dressed as the Christ-child figure at the head of Baclaran’s yearly Santo Nino parade.

A cheerfully mischievous child, his family nicknamed him Weng Weng, an epiphet usually reserved for toy dogs. He was obsessed with martial arts and trained almost daily, until his instructor contacted film producer Peter Caballes and said, “You just have to see THIS.” Peter and his wife, the successful businesswoman Cora Ridon Caballes, took Weng Weng on the rounds of film producers, including Bobby A. Suarez, whose novelty kiddie films The Bionic Boy (1977) and Dynamite Johnson: The Bionic Boy Part 2 (1978) were already international hits. Suarez turned down the idea of Weng Weng as a midget Superman, but successful indie producer/director Luis San Juan, who specialized in kung fu films for the export market, cast Weng Weng in a cameo in a film whose name is now lost to the sands of time. Peter Caballes then introduced Weng Weng to the King of Philippines Comedy, Dolphy, who cast him as his kung-fu kicking sidekick in his spy caper The Quick Brown Fox (1980) and western parody Da Best In Da West (1981). Weng Weng, meanwhile, was a frequent visitor of the Marcos family at the Presidential Palace, where he was made an honorary Secret Agent by future President General Ramos, and was presented with a badge and a 25-callibre pistol.

This act may have been the direct inspiration for Weng Weng’s first starring role as Agent OO in the James Bond parody For Y’ur Height Only, produced by Peter and written by Cora Caballes for their company Liliw Productions. Eddie Nicart, renowned stunt director for the SOS Daredevils, trained Weng Weng every day for three months to be a professional stuntman, and was given his first opportunity to direct. And what a job he did - over the astounding course of the film Agent 00, our curious little brown hero with a receding Ramones bowl cut and an all-white suit and boater, cracks an international drug ring, gets the girl, loses the girl (“Irmaaaaa!”) and infiltrates the secret lair of evil criminal mastermind Mr Giant (played, appropriately enough, by a dwarf), all with an armful of gadgets and his famous trick of punching someone in the balls, then running between their legs.

It’s hard to pin down the appeal of For Y’ur Height Only. It’s not just the novelty of seeing a Filipino midget pretending to be a gun expert and ladies’ man, or the inexplicable thrill of watching bad (and I mean BAD) kung fu movies. Maybe it’s the inadvertently genius deconstruction of both Western action films and their Pinoy counterparts, surreal pot-addled dubbing by American expats (and Apocalypse Now survivors) Jim Gaines and Nick Nicholson, or inspired casting of every Bad Guy (or “Goon”) still alive at the time, and the James Bond of the Philippines himself, Tony Ferrer aka Agent X44, as Weng Weng’s boss. Perhaps it’s a combination of its constituent elements, or something new altogether. It all adds up to an absurdist masterpiece of gloriously bad cinema, one which was sold all over the world and became one of the Philippines’ most successful exports.

The more we screened the film on Trash Video’s film tours around Australia, the more I realized the power of Weng Weng to transform a jaded, cynical audience. “We love Weng Weng!” they would chant after the film, and each time I sat through the movie with a new set of faces, I would experience once again the sheer joy of watching the film for the first time. And now it’s your turn. Next week we present the 1982 sequel The Impossible Kid and give you the Weng Weng Story part 2, but now here is the first appearance of the incredible Weng Weng in For Y’ur Height Only.

Mad Doctor Of Blood Island

USA/Philippines 1968 colour

aka Blood Doctor, Grave Desires, Tomb Of The Living Dead

Directors Gerry de Leon, Eddie Romero Writer Reuben Canoy Producers Kane W. Lynn, Beverly Miller, Eddie Romero

Cast John Ashley (Dr Bill Foster), Angelique Pettyjohn (Sheila Willard), Ronald Remy (Dr.Lorca), Alicia Alonzo (Marla)

A few months ago on Schlock Treatment we screened the Filipino drive-in classic Brides Of Blood, starring former American teen heartthrob John Ashley and a bevy of naked virgin beauties being sacrificed to a green oozing monster. It must have been the heady cocktail of sleaze and tropical breeze that caught the imagination of the drive-in audience; Brides... would be rerun a number of times and create enough buzz for directors Eddie Romero, Gerry de Leon and producer Kane Lynn to return to Blood Island to make a pseudo-sequel, this time with more sleaze, more ooze, more salsa on the enchilada.

The result was Mad Doctor Of Blood Island, and Hemisphere Pictures had an even bigger hit. John Ashley is back as Dr Bill Foster, investigating the outrageous claim that some of the inhabitants have green blood. Along for the ride is notorious 60s sexploitation star Angelique Pettyjohn as Sheila Willard, looking for her lost father who’s now the island barfly. Ashley stumbles on the ghoulish vivisection antics of Dr Lorca (played by Ronald Remy, who you may remember as the suave bald-headed vampire doctor in The Blood Drinkers); Lorca’s experiments have been turning the locals including his own wife into crusty green-skinned chlorophyll freaks craving blood - and more!

Mad Doctor Of Blood Island is your quintessential drive-in experience from the late 60s: so much blood, so much flesh, so much cheese, and so many zoom effects it feels like it was filmed in throb-o-vision. Always with an eye for exploitation, Hemisphere filmed a prologue “Oath of the Green Blood”, where movie patrons were instructed to repeat the sacred words and drink from a plastic sachet of green muck that was supposed to be lime syrup, but was in fact a toxic gel that reportedly made publicist Sam Sherman sick for days!

Now you can duplicate the drive-in experience in your own home: grab a bottle of undiluted lime cordial and repeat after me...

"I, a living, breathing creature of the cosmic entity am now ready to enter the realm of those chosen to be allowed to drink of the Mystic Emerald fluids herein offered. I join the Order of Green Blood with an open mind, and through this liquid's powers am now prepared to safely view the unnatural green-blooded ones without fear of contamination."

Next week we return to Blood Island for a third and final time with Beast Of Blood, but for now, it’s time for the good doctor to make a housecall. There he is at the door: The Mad Doctor Of Blood Island.