A treasure trove of Pinoy pulp cinema

Blogging about old, locally produced B movies from non-English speaking countries is fun because, in a lot of cases, there's not a lot that's been written in English about them, and you can really feel like you're making some small contribution to promoting awareness of them to an audience that's potentially prone to their many charms.

Blogging about old, locally produced B movies from non-English speaking countries sucks because, in a lot of cases, there's not a lot that's been written in English about them, which makes it hard to find accurate information, and increases the potential for your own writing about them to be either inaccurate or incomplete in its details.

However, blogging about old, locally produced B movies from non-English speaking countries is both fun and humbling because, once you launch these bundles of inaccurate or incomplete information out into the blogoshpere, they act as a shining beacon of ignorance, summoning those more knowledgeable to come to your aid.

Case in point: My review at Teleport City a few weeks back of the Filipino spy film Tony Falcon, Agent X-44: Sabotage. It turns out that I had most of the details right, except for the small matter that I had gotten the film's actual title completely wrong. (Sabotage was the international release title of a film that was originally titled Sabotage 2, though I had identified it as Last Target--which is, in fact, a completely different film from the Tony Falcon series.) Fortunately, Andrew Leavold came to my rescue with the correct information.

Andrew--a filmmaker and critic, as well as the founder of Australia's Trash Video--is currently working on a documentary on Filipino B movies, but in the meantime the magnificent fruits of his obsession can be seen at his fantastic blog The Search For Weng Weng. This blog is a must for anyone curious about Filipino action cinema of the sixties and seventies, not the least for the incredible wealth of original posters, lobby cards and promotional materials that Andrew has on view. This is one you could get lost in for a good long while.

Plus the guy really knows his shit... which is more than I can say for some people sometimes. (That's right me, I'm talking to you.)