THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG: Kickstarter Week #2 update!

Dear friends and colleagues,

As you may have heard, I'm currently running a crowdfunding campaign to finish my THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG documentary - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/210613803/the-search-for-weng-weng-1

The film has been a labour of love since I started filming in 2006. In short (no pun intended, I swear), it's a guerrilla-shot chronicle of my obsessive quest to find the two-foot-nine James Bond of the Philippines. Funnily enough, THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG is shaping into a film as much about obsession and following one's passions to extremes as it is about its two-foot-nine subject.

With over 100 hours in the can, it's finally time to deliver a 90 minute documentary feature. The $30,000 we're asking for from Kickstarter pledges is to pay for its post-production and, down the track, touring the film internationally. The idea is to fund its completion in the same way it was filmed - guerrilla style - to retain as much control as possible over the project. The finished film will subsequently be released in this country theatrically and on DVD by Monster Pictures in Melbourne (http://monsterpictures.com.au/features/the-wild-wild-weng-weng/).

At two weeks into the eight-week campaign, we are currently more than a third of the way towards our goal, and that's a very encouraging beginning.

However, there's a long way to go, and for that reason I'm asking for a personal favour from each of you.

Could you please visit the link, watch the video, and then forward the link and this blurb to anyone who might be interested. This would include:

- would-be investors, both small and large (and with a huge list of incentives on offer, even a $10 pledge to Kickstarter receives a VIP ticket to its Australian premiere);

- media outlets (newspapers, TV and radio stations, bloggers, social media);

- family and friends;

- and overseas distributors, exhibitors, film festivals etc.

I apologize for imposing on your valuable time, but I really believe you will recognize in this venture the tenacious spirit of independent filmmaking alive and kicking. Needless to say there is a lot riding on this for me, both professionally and personally, and I hope I can inspire you into coming along with me on my adventure of a lifetime.

Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to continuing this conversation here, by private message, or via email at andrewleavold@gmail.com.

Warmest regards,

Andrew Leavold (Writer/Director, THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG)

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.

9th September 2007: Happy 50th Birthday Weng Weng!

Curse Of The Vampires

Philippines 1966 colour

aka Ibulong Mo Sa Hangin, Creatures Of Evil

Director Gerardo de Leon Writers Ben Feleo, Pierre L. Salas Producer Amalia “Muhlach”/Fuentes Music Tito Arevalo

Cast Eddie Garcia (Eduardo Escodero), Amalia Fuentes (Leonore Escodero), Romeo Vasquez (Daniel Castillo), Mary Walter (Doña Consuelo Escodero de Victoria)

First tonight is a minor classic of Philippines horror cinema, the 1966 Curse Of The Vampires, a direct follow-up to the late director Gerardo de Leon’s equally compelling 1964 The Blood Drinkers. Dubbed into English and released by Hemisphere Pictures in 1971 as the bottom of a double bill with his frequent collaborator Eddie Romero’s Beast Of Blood, it looked to the world like any other low budget drive-in nonsense. But de Leon, along with Romero (the Blood Island trilogy, 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 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 trace of kitsch, this is, along with The Blood Drinkers, undoubtedly one of Filipino horror’s finest moments. We give you the 1966 Curse Of The Vampires.

D’Wild Wild Weng

Philippines 1982 colour

Director Eddie Nicart Executive Producer Peter M. Caballes Story/Screenplay Cora Ridon Caballes Cinematography Bhal Dauz Music Pablo Vergara Editor Edgardo Boy Vinarao

Cast Weng Weng (Mr Weng), Yehlen Catral (Elsa), Nina Sara (Clara), Max Alvarado (Lupo the mute), Max Laurel (Gordon), Romy Diaz (Sebastian), Ernie Ortega (Ku Manchu)

And now join us as we raise a glass to the Philippines’ littlest heroes. Today would have been the fiftieth birthday of Weng Weng, the midget James Bond from Philippines spy spoofs For Your Height Only and The Impossible Kid. Unfortunately he died in 1992, just weeks before his thirty fifth birthday. As a tribute to Weng Weng we’re screening tonight his third and rarest of his Agent OO films, D’Wild Wild Weng. Now, Weng Weng in a midget Filipino goon western? It sounds too preposterous to be true. But TWO midget Filipino goon westerns? The wild world of Weng just got that bit weirder...

One of Weng Weng’s first cameos saw him playing deputy to Dolphy, the king of Filipino comedy himself, in Da Best In Da West (1981), a film which employs the outrageous conceit of having its cast, itself a throwback to the glory days of the Pinoy western, run around in cowboy hats and ponchos, whilst clearly remaining rooted in the modern-day Filipino countryside. D’Wild Wild Weng (1982), made barely 12 months later between the Agent 00 films, is a shameless plundering of d’King’s RVQ production courtesy of Peter and Cora Caballes’ rival Liliw Films International, and shares (exploits?) much of the cast from Weng Weng’s other movies.

D’Wild Wild Weng is not strictly speaking an Agent 00 film, as Weng Weng trades in his characteristic white suit for a tiny waist coat and ruffled shirt (incognito, you understand). He is only ever referred to as “Mister Weng” or “Mr Wang”, depending on how hungover the guy in the dubbing booth was. He does, however, strip down to karate pants to do some suave martial art moves and, once the sight of Weng without a shirt becomes too much, dons the familiar white attire AND blue paratrooper duds for target practice, just in case you’ve forgotten what he’s capable of.

Silhouetted against the opening Spaghetti Western credits and Pablo Vergara’s jaunty mariachi score, government agents “Mr Weng” and his mountainous sidekick Gordon - who, played by future Zuma star Max Laurel, is more than twice the size of Weng - head to Santa Monica to investigate the slaying of the Mayor and his family. They find the Mayor’s caretaker Lupo has had his tongue cut out (Max Alvarado grunts and squeals and pulls faces, but under his Chinese villain mustache we can still see his tongue!) and the evil governor Senor Sebastian in control, along with the familiar faces of Eddie Nicart’s stunt team SOS Daredevils as Sebastian’s army of Goons, decked out in uniform sombreros and gunbelts. Villages are burnt, townsfolk are lynched, goats and chickens are confused. These are desperate times indeed.

Weng and Gordon rescue kindly villagers Mr Dencio and his daughter Clara, who warn them of Sebastian’s terrible ways. Later, sensing an opening, Weng tunelessly serenades Clara outside her window with Gordon on guitar and Lupo squealing harmonies; it’s a direct steal from Dolphy’s hopeless attempt at seduction in Da Best In Da West, in which Weng strums a guitar as big as he is. Less than a minute later they discover the family has been kidnapped - by ninjas, no less! - and are tied to X-shaped crosses by Sebastian’s sidekick Ku Manchu (Ernie Ortega). Weng helps them escape, but is later captured himself, spread-eagled between four posts with his shirt more than a little ruffled.

As always, Weng’s stature is the main source of amusement - from being carried around in a sack on Gordon’s back, to stealing bananas from under a table, to Gordon launching him like a coconut at Sebastian’s balcony. It’s as if a performing monkey had its cigar taken away and was cross-bred with Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes, then dressed in a set of Tijuana pajamas. At one point Gordon rescues Weng from his cell by dressing as a monk, while Weng crawls under his cowl and clings - fetal style - to his belly, before hanging down like Max Laurel’s third leg. Shudder. He then slides across the floor, in vintage 00 mode, through a goon’s legs and karate chops their hamstrings, and does a bionic leap from a sixth-story church tower into Gordon’s waiting jeep. In a word: Weng Gold.

Of course, there are very few gadgets in the Wild West other than a Gatling Gun, even bigger than Weng Weng, mounted on the back of a jeep for the big finale. And what an ending: Weng, Gordon and Lupo face-off against a veritable army of Goons. On the signal, Weng cranks the rattling Gatling’s handle as fast as his little arm can, mowing down wave after wave of “Mexicans” in slow motion (recalling the best moments of D’Wild Bunch). Stage left, a tribe of pygmy Indians - you ready correctly, DWARVES in redface and warpaint - launch a counter-attack with bows and arrows amidst a sea of explosions. Oh, and let’s not forget the ninjas. It’s one of the most insane Filipino B-endings, a micro-Apocalypse Now and a dadaist triumph for Nicart’s merry band of pranksters.

The Agent 00 films were sold all over the world, but I don’t recall an English-dubbed midget western ever making it past Manila Customs. As with its follow-up The Impossible Kid, Weng Weng has the same literal, uninspired and relatively humourless dialogue delivered in a breathy baritone at complete odds with his real helium-huffing voice, which makes you yearn for the For Y’ur Height Only crew to hijack the dubbing studio. And, like The Impossible Kid, it’s technically rough in places, and ultimately isn’t a patch on the original Agent 00 adventure. Nevertheless, D’Wild Wild Weng does have its share of glorious Weng Weng moments, and the fiesta music (with just a hint of the theme from The Good The Bad And The Ugly) keeps things, like Max Laurel’s third leg, swinging away nicely.

Happy Birthday Weng Weng as we unfurl your rarest triumph – the midget western spy kung fu actioner D’Wild Wild Weng. Salute!