Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)

Like many other exploitation-flick purveyors, actor/producer John Ashley and writer/director Eddie Romero worked in bulk during the ’60s and ’70s, banging out a slew of crappy pictures about monsters, women in prison, and other lurid topics. Some are palatable, but many are like Beast of the Yellow Night, an interminable horror saga about a fellow who turns into a creature at night. This idiotic picture is sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde story, sort of a Satan-worship yarn, and sort of a werewolf tale, but mostly it’s just confusing and dull and silly. Opening in 1946, the film establishes that Ashley’s character (who goes by various names), once made a deal with the devil, as personified by portly Filipino-cinema stalwart Vic Diaz wearing a loincloth. Upon sealing the deal by consuming human flesh, Ashley gained the ability/curse to transport his soul into new bodies over the course of several decades. (In “present-day” scenes, the host body has the same face as the Ashley character’s original body.) Then there’s the whole shape-shifter bit. Nightfall causes Ashley’s character to transform into a were-beast of some kind, though the makeup effects are so shoddy that Ashley looks as if he slathered his face with green-tinted cottage cheese and a bit too much eyeliner. Given the dopey storyline, Ashley and Romero would have been wise to bombard the audience with thrills-and-chills scenes, but instead anemic stalking bits are interspersed with laughably pretentious dialogue exchanges about the nature of existence. There’s a reason people don’t gravitate to Ashley/Romero movies for deep thoughts.

Beast of the Yellow Night: LAME

The Twilight People (1972)

A cheesy ripoff of H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, this action/horror flick was wrought by the dubious brain trust of actor/producer Josh Ashley and director Eddie Romero, who made a number of lurid productions together in the Philippines, Romero’s native country. Like their many women-in-prison pictures, The Twilight People burns screen time on travelogue shots featuring people moving through jungles. The picture also bears the Ashley/Romero hallmarks of catfights, torture scenes, underground dungeons, and villains prone to grandiose monologues. In some of their other projects, Ashley and Romero hit the exploitation-movie sweet spot, conjuring just enough vivid sleaze to sustain 90 minutes of lizard-brain interest. Not so here. The Twilight People is episodic, goofy, and slow. Worse, the makeup FX for the story’s animal/human hybrids are pathetic—anyone who can’t deliver on the promise of the opening-credits phrase “Pam Grier as the Panther Woman” has some explaining to do. Ashley, all tight-lipped cynicism and tough-guy posturing, stars as Matt, a diver kidnapped by minions of Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay). He’s a loon who wants to help man evolve for life underwater and in outer space, hence the Panther Woman, the Antelope Man, the Bat Man, and so on. Matt was stolen for his ideal combination of intellect and physicality, because Dr. Gordon wants to use Matt’s DNA as an ingredient for his experiments. Matt tries to escape, improbably receiving help from Dr. Gordon’s hot daughter, Neva (Pat Woodell), so before long, the jungle chase begins. The only element of The Twilight People that works is the tension between Matt and Dr. Gordon’s hired gun, repressed homosexual Steinman (Jan Merlin), but it’s hard to take that trope, or anything about The Twilight People, seriously once Romero unleashes unintentionally hilarious shots of the Bat Man “flying” through the jungle.

The Twilight People: LAME

Beast of Blood (1970)

After unleashing gory sci-fi mayhem in The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), director Eddie Romero and star Josh Ashley reteamed for this sequel, which is also known as Return to the Horrors of Blood Island, among many other titles. The picture begins with Dr. Bill Foster (Ashley) heading back to civilization after his adventures in the first picture. Alas, one of evil Dr. Lorca’s creatures is on the same boat trip, leading to a slaughter and an explosion. Bill survives and resolves to visit Dr. Lorca’s chamber-of-horrors island once more. Tagging along is leggy reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall). The purpose of the return visit is somewhat murky, though it presumably has to do with Bill proving he didn’t invent the story of what happened to him. In any event, the outcome is predictable. Upon returning to the island, Bill receives a chilly welcome from native inhabitants who don’t want anything to do with Dr. Lorca and his grotesque experiments. Bill’s arrival prompts attacks by mercenaries and monsters, leaving many natives dead. Yet Bill presses on, again for reasons that are never particularly clear, although he finds time to have sex with Myra and to rebuff the advances of a busty native guide. The real weirdness happens in Dr. Lorca’s lab, where he keeps a man’s body and head alive separately. The head, resting in a jar and connected to wires but made up to resemble a vampire that’s been badly burned, taunts Dr. Lorca. Suffice to say that’s more interesting to watch than the sequence of Bill leading an expedition into a haunted mansion, where Myra falls through a trapdoor into a small chamber occupied by an irritable cobra. Boring and stupid, except for a few fleeting moments when it’s insane and stupid, Beast of Blood is shoddy even by the low standards of the many Filipino shockers that Ashley and Romero made together.

Beast of Blood: LAME

Sudden Death (1977)

          On some levels, Sudden Death is almost a parody of the tough-guy genre. Swaggering Robert Conrad stars as Duke Smith—yes, really—a former covert-ops guy now living out a casual retirement in the Philippines with his daughter and his girlfriend. When he gets roped into a case involving political intrigue, he steadily escalates from pummeling opponents to killing them, eventually leaving a huge trail of bodies in his wake. Through it all, he preens like a bodybuilder, showing off his taut physique in what can only be described as topless scenes, and he spews macho dialogue that might seem more at home in a blaxploitation flick. (Beyond unpersuasively barking the epithet “motherfucker,” he threatens a dude by saying, “Talk or I’m gonna spit in your face and kick you in the balls.”) Like some Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone movie from the ’80s, Sudden Death isn’t so much a narrative as an exercise in brand management, selling the idea that Conrad’s the baddest son of a bitch on the planet. With all due respect to his incredible athleticism (back in the day, Conrad was known for doing many of his own stunts), Conrad is a relatively small man, measuring just five feet and eight inches, so watching him strut around this way has the unavoidable air of overcompensation. The spectacle is weirdly fascinating to watch. So, too, is Sudden Death.

          Although the picture was made by the same folks responsible for many sketchy Filipino coproductions of the era, notably director Eddie Romero and costar/producer John Ashley, Sudden Death is markedly slicker than other flicks with similar origins. The camerawork is austere and confident, the dialogue is terse and periodically amusing (think Walter Hill Lite), and the methodical escalation of brutality provides a brisk pace. That said, Sudden Death suffers from a hopelessly trivial storyline about the machinations of an opportunistic corporation. The picture gets an energy boost during its second half, with the introduction of hired gun Dominic Aldo (Don Stroud). Since he’s a former acquaintance of Duke’s, Aldo is basically the same character without a conscience, so the film builds toward their duel at the end. The showdown a brief but vicious battle, concluding with a horrific demise. Sudden Death then goes even further down the nihilistic rabbit hole with one of the most pointlessly grim final scenes you’ll ever encounter in an action movie. So in a trash-cinema sort of way, Sudden Death hits hard and leaves a mark.

Sudden Death: FUNKY

Smoke in the Wind (1975)

          Hampered a limited budget, overly sincere acting, and an unwillingness to depict violence with gritty impact, Smoke in the Wind explores an interesting aspect of the post-Civil War era—fraternal conflicts in the Deep South between dogged Confederates and Southerners who fought for the North. In some places below the Mason-Dixon Line, the end of the war was the beginning for a new period of aggression. The story begins with noble officer Cagle Mondier (John Russell) and his son, Whipple Mondier (John Ashley), returning home to Arkansas after serving in the Union army. They’re devoted abolitionists, which puts them at odds with former friends and neighbors, especially sadistic pro-slavery zealot Mort Fagan (Myron Healey), who commands a band of vigilantes determined to lynch every “traitor” to Southern values. The narrative tracks the Mondier family’s battle with Fagan’s thugs, and the situation is complicated by romances that cross enemy lines. In particular, one of Cagle’s wartime subordinates, Smoky Harjo (Henry Kingl), is in love with Cagle’s daughter even though Cagle hates the bloodthirsty and hotheaded Smoky.

          Featuring the last performance of familiar big-screen character actor Walter Brennan—who plays the minor role of a shopkeeper—Smoke in the Wind feels a bit like a community-theater production, with amateurish players breathlessly delivering trite dialogue in costumes that look like they came straight from a rental house. Even nominal leading man Ashley, perhaps better known for the myriad exploitation flicks he made in the Philippines, gives a stilted performance, suggesting a lack of vision behind the camera. (Two directors are credited on Smoke in the Wind—Walter Brennan’s son, Andy, who never helmed another feature, and Joseph Kane, who directed countless programmers from the 1930s to the 1950s before shifting to episodic television.) For the most part, Smoke in the Wind is harmless, using life-and-death melodrama to put across a parable about decency vanquishing prejudice, but the combination of a turgid storyline and unimpressive acting ensures the highest this piece can ever rise is to the level of mediocrity.  

Smoke in the Wind: FUNKY

Beyond Atlantis (1973)

Dull and stupid, this Philippines/U.S. coproduction is a fantasy-adventure story about mainland criminals who venture to a mysterious island populated by fish/human hybrids in order to plunder a cache of priceless pearls. Virtually nothing in the movie works. The principal makeup effect involves pasting fake-looking fish eyes over the faces of the actors playing hybrids. One of the would-be highlights involves a fellow falling into a pit full of crabs. Crabs? That’s the most menacing creature the filmmakers could muster? The hybrids are inexplicably led by two normal-looking characters, an old man and his daughter, and the daughter is a slinky bleach blonde with perfect grooming and makeup. Whatever. The cast features a pair of American actors who spent much of the ’70s making bad movies in the Philippines: John Ashley plays a scuba diver with a mercenary attitude, and Sid Haig plays the crook who discovers the whereabouts of the pearls. (Indestructible Filipino actor Vic Diaz appears in a small role, lending his usual cartoonish corpulence.) Playing the movie’s nominal leading role is John Wayne’s son, Patrick Wayne, whose career peaked a few years later when he starred in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and if Beyond Atlantis isn’t the nadir of Wayne’s screen career, it’s close. Although most of Beyond Atlantis is boring, fans of bad cinema might enjoy the last 20 minutes or so, which include an underwater catfight, a poorly staged shootout, and the ridiculously long funeral sequence for a key character. One can actually feel the filmmakers straining to fill the screen with any old thing that might flesh out the running time of this insipid schlockfest.

Beyond Atlantis: LAME

Savage Sisters (1974)

          Narrative dissonance is often a hallmark of sloppily made grindhouse flicks, thanks to producers’ capricious melding of incompatible genre elements, but Savage Sisters is especially discombobulated. Part part heist movie, part military adventure, part prison picture, and part sexploitation, Savage Sisters has everything except coherence. The movie is strangely watchable simply because there’s no way to guess which direction the story might take in any given scene, but it’s not a satisfying viewing experience. However, the movie isn’t exactly traffic-accident horrible, either, since it sometimes seems as if director Eddie Romero and his collaborators are trying for intentional humor. So the best way to classify the movie’s appeal is to say that if watching semi-attractive women seduce and slaughter their way through South America while delivering lame one-liners sounds like fun to you, then you belong to Savage Sisters’ intended audience.

          The story, which is far too convoluted to describe in detail here, follows revolutionaries Mei Ling (Rosanna Ortiz), an Asian, and Jo Turner (Cheri Caffaro), a Nordic glamazon, as they battle an oppressive military regime represented by the comically preening Captain Morales (Eddie Garcia). When Morales’ men capture Jo and Mei, the women are entrusted to Lynn Jackson (Gloria Hendry), a black stripper-turned-warden who digs torturing people. Then, when the three women hear that an evil bandito named Malavel (Sid Haig) has purloined a briefcase filled with $1 million in U.S. currency, the multi-culti ladies join forces to bust out of jail and seek their fortune. Also thrown into the mix is an American hustler named W.P. Billingsley (John Ashley), who ends up becoming lovers with all three women. Oh, and lest we forget, there’s a scene in which a prison guard threatens to rape Jo with a giant wind-up dildo, a running gag involving a sidekick named Punjab who only speaks in grunts, and a “comedy” scene in which two men are buried neck deep in a beach just before high tide.

          Savage Sisters packs a whole lot of nonsense in to 86 fast-moving minutes, and the tone of the movie is all over the place—Haig plays all of his scenes so broadly that it seems as if he’s acting in a farce, while Caffaro and Hendry strut around like they’re in an action picture. And then there’s Ashley, the workaday feature and TV supporting player who also co-produced the movie. One can almost understand the vanity of Ashley wanting to repeatedly appear on camera while exercising, slipping into bed with women, and wearing bikini briefs, but, still, Ashley’s casting as a second-tier supporting schmuck represents a strange exercise in behind-the-camera power. Yet that’s the meager fascination something like Savage Sisters provides—every decision that went into making the movie seems so loopy that half the fun of watching the thing is imagining what went through the filmmakers’ heads during production. Okay, make that more than half the fun, because genuine audience enjoyment is not something Savage Sisters provides in abundance. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Savage Sisters: FREAKY