Machete Maidens Unleashed!

VANCOUVER PREMIERE! ► Mark Hartley’s jaw-dropping documentary unleashes a gleeful celebration of a lost, lurid, and decidedly downmarket movie movement that truly put the B’s — blood, breasts and beasts — in B-movies. In the 1970s and 80s, the jungles of dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s Philippines provided a budget-friendly haven from which American exploitation filmmakers (including the legendary Roger Corman) and their Filipino brethren churned out an astonishing body of bad-taste, low-brow genre product. Encompassing topless kung fu, vampire hookers, women in prison, blaxploitation, and much else besides (Tarantino fave Pam Grier was a regular), this grindhouse schlock-wave flew below the radar of the U.S.’s MPAA, which never saw the films and thus never rated them. As one interview subject (the director Joe Dante) says, these movies now seem like they’re from another planet — and they frequently contain images that you just couldn’t get away with today. Yet, for all their tits-and-ass female exploitation, they also, paradoxically, served up a fair bit of female empowerment — or at least broke new ground for female action leads in movies. Hartley’s previous film was the similarly rowdy Not Quite Hollywood, a history of Australian exploitation cinema. “Sit back and enjoy one of the most outlandish studies in film history ever told” (Colin Geddes, Toronto I.F.F.) Colour, HDCAM. 85 mins.