Skin Central Reviews Machete Maidens Unleashed!

Director Mark Hartley made quite a skinpression here at Skin Central with his Ozploitation opus Not Quite Hollywood (2008), and we’re slappy to report that his newest movie, Machete Maidens Unleashed!, is a wildly entertaining documentary that follows the first criteria for a good exploitation flick: it lives up to the promise of its title.

Have you ever seen a drive-in movie about sexy female prisoners in an unidentified jungle hell fighting the Man with sub-machine guns, kung fu, and yes, even sometimes machetes? Those were all shot in the Philippines, and this is their story.

Machete Maidens Unleashed! (hereafter referred to as MMU) tells the largely unknown story of American exploitation filmmaking in the Philippines. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Americans flocked to Manila, home of cheap film and cheaper labor, to churn out movies that featured a different, but still pretty great, kind of three Bs: boobs, blood, and beasts.

Like Not Quite Hollywood, MMU is composed of first-person accounts from filmmakers, actors and producers who were either involved in or loyal fans of the drive-in fare of the 1970s, like directors Jack Hill (The Big Bird Cage, Switchblade Sisters) and John Landis (The Kentucky Fried Movie), actresses Judith M. Brown (The Big Doll House), Gloria Hendry (Savage Sisters), and Margaret Markov (Black Mama, White Mama) and the man who paid for it all, Roger Corman. All the interviewees tell amazing war stories, but directors Allan Arkush and Joe Dante (Rock N’ Roll High School), who made trailers for Corman's New World Pictures in the 1970s, stand out with their fascinating skinsight into the anything-goes process of marketing these movies for the drive-in, like making up martial arts awards for actresses with dubious kung fu skills (sorry, Jeannie Bell devotees, but there is no such thing as the "Ebony Fist Award") and the footage of an exploding helicopter that Dante kept in his desk drawer in case of boring-movie emergencies.

Also like a good b-movie, MMU is a brisk 82 minutes, zooming through film genres shot in the Phillippines- action, horror, sexploitation, blaxplotation, and every other -sploitation you can think of- skillfully interweaving interview footage with clips from the films they are talking about. Corman pictures famously always had to include action, sex and comedy, no matter what the subject matter, and MMU faithfully follows this rule by skincorporating both shocking, lurid details (a section describing the working conditions of Filipino stuntmen is downright jaw-dropping) and a good sense of humor about itself (Like Landis' immortal quote: "never has there been material so ripe for masturbation!").