MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED! (Mark Hartley). 85 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (March 4) at the Bloor. See Indie & Rep Film. Rating: NNNN
Having mined his own nation’s 1970s exploitation cinema wave for nostalgic gold in Not Quite Hollywood, Australian documentarian Mark Hartley casts his eyes to the Philippines for his follow-up, Machete Maidens Unleashed!
It’s a slightly disingenuous pitch, though, since the bulk of the movies shot in the unstable island nation during the 60s and 70s were outsourced American productions. Frugal schlockmeisters like Roger Corman realized that the U.S. dollar could buy a lot more of everything in the Philippines, and found the sweltering jungles an ideal setting for monster rampages and women-in-prison movies.
Assembling interviews with Corman, his stars and the filmmakers, Hartley conducts a delightful, briskly paced tour of the very finest exploitation tactics: constant nudity, lurid violence and cheesy political speechifying.
These films were all sold to grindhouse audiences via blatantly misleading trailers cut by future auteurs Joe Dante and Allan Arkush, who turn up to offer a helpful tutorial on the value of inserting helicopter explosions and shower scenes from other movies to pump up whatever picture they were selling.
Veteran character actors Sid Haig and Pam Grier offer highlights, telling stories out of school about improvised sex scenes, revolutionary subtexts and attempts to subvert gender expectations by empowering female characters – after first showing them brutalized and tortured. Demands of the market, you understand.
