Culture Shock 01.22.15: 'Wonder Women' perfect movie riffing material

Say what you will about the Philippines under martial law, it was a great place to make a movie on a shoestring.

President Ferdinand Marcos was a kleptocrat with expensive tastes and a high-maintenance wife, so for relatively small sums by Hollywood standards, he gave budget-conscious filmmakers the run of the islands. So it happened that the early 1970s produced such Philippine-lensed classics as "The Big Doll House," "The Big Bird Cage" and "Women in Cages," among a host of other inexpensively made, quickly shot and fondly remembered movies of the drive-in era. Pam Grier owes her stardom in no small part to Marcos' willingness to do whatever it took to keep Imelda in Prada.

Grier returned to the U.S. as the women-in-prison genre's breakout star and began top-lining movies stateside such as "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown." But back in Philippines, directors were still churning out exploitation flicks to ship back to the States. One of them was 1973's "Wonder Women."

Now "Wonder Women" is one of the latest video-on-demand offerings from Rifftrax.com, the current movie-mocking venture from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" alums Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett.

The Rifftrax guys have been on a roll with their recent VOD titles, from 1987's "ROTOR" (think "RoboCop" by way of "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" with the budget of a senior class play) to the infamous 1951 how-to-survive-a-nuclear-blast short "Duck and Cover." And "Wonder Women" is no exception. Nelson, Murphy and Corbett are at the top of their game, riffing with a confidence that takes viewers back the glory days of MST3K. There's no point now in MiSTies wishing for "Mystery Science Theater" to return; for all practical purposes, Rifftax is MST3K's second coming.

Apart from some brief poolside nudity that wouldn't have gotten past basic cable's standards and practices department back in the day, "Wonder Women" is exactly the sort of movie MST3K used to do best: entertaining schlock on its own, but comedy gold once the riffs start flying.

First of all, "Wonder Women" is not to be confused with Wonder Woman, although it's entirely possible the movie's distributor welcomed such confusion as long as it put butts in seats.

Tough-guy actor Ross Hagen (familiar to MST3K viewers from "The Sidehackers" and "The Hellcats") stars as Mike Harber, a safari-jacketed super spy soldier of fortune insurance investigator, or something, who takes an assignment to track down a criminal organization that's kidnapping star athletes and selling their organs.

Said criminal organization is run by Dr. Tsu, played by a bored-looking Nancy Kwan ("The World of Suzie Wong"). From her secret lair in the financially advantageous Philippines, Dr. Tsu oversees our titular all-women army, including exploitation mainstay Roberta Collins ("Caged Heat") and Maria De Aragon, who definitely didn't shoot first as Greedo in the original "Star Wars." (Seriously.)

Other supporting players include frequent Pam Grier co-star Sid Haig ("The Devil's Rejects"), as Dr. Tsu's financial go-between, and Philippine Peter Lorre look-alike Vic Diaz, who must have been contractually obligated to appear in every U.S. movie shot in the Philippines in the 1970s.

The plot is paper thin and serves mostly to provide Hagen reasons to shoot things and/or get beat up by various wonder women, which, when you throw in a free trip to the Far East, seems like nice work if you can get it. But insubstantial as it is, "Wonder Women" provides more than enough material for Mike, Kevin and Bill to work with. The seemingly endless chase scene through a Manila market district is one of the high points in the history of talking back to movies.

Exploitation fans will appreciate seeing "Wonder Women" in a new context, while for newcomers the Rifftrax VOD (available for $9.99 at Rifftrax.com) is the safest way to ease into the world of Philippine-shot exploitation flicks. Interested viewers can move on to Mark Hartley's fun 2010 documentary about the '70s Philippine exploitation boom, "Machete Maidens Unleashed!"

Culture Shock 11.10.11: New documentary unleashes 'Machete Maidens'

A scene from director Jack Hill's "The Big Bird Cage."

If you want to make a movie today, you might seek out a location where the tax incentives are enticing (Australia, perhaps) or the production costs almost nonexistent (for example, Bulgaria).

During the 1970s, the place to be if you wanted to make a movie on the cheap and without a lot of pesky safety regulations was the Philippines, and "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" — the new documentary from director Mark Hartley — is a 90-minute crash course in the seat-of-your-pants filmmaking that resulted.

Throughout the decade, producers from the West looked east for a place to shoot inexpensive movies, mostly for drive-ins. Chief among them was B-movie king Roger Corman, who had formed New World Pictures and was instilling his penny-pinching ways in a new generation of directors.

When Corman learned he could make movies in the Philippines less expensively than in the U.S., or just about anywhere else, that was all he needed to know. He dispatched director Jack Hill, and Hill returned with "The Big Doll House."

"The Big Doll House" wasn't the first "women in prison" movie, but it was among the first to push the genre's exploitation elements to their limits. It was a huge success back in the U.S., kick-starting a boom in similar movies, like "Women in Cages" and Hill's camp follow-up, "The Big Bird Cage."

All three — recently released together on DVD and Blu-ray as "The Women in Cages Collection" — feature Hill's greatest discovery, and the only real star to emerge from the Philippine film boom, Pam Grier.

In 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, but that did nothing to stop producers and directors from setting up shop in his country. They kept making their exploitation movies, and Marcos was just happy for the money. As director John Landis says, these were sometimes movies about overthrowing fascist dictatorships that were being made in a fascist dictatorship.

Or, as another filmmaker puts it, "Human life was cheap. Film was cheap. It was a great place to make a picture." With a few bribes, you could rent the army's helicopters for a day, provided they weren't busy putting down rebels somewhere.

It's an eclectic cast of characters that populates "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" The Philippines was where actors like Christopher Mitchum and Patrick Wayne — sons of Hollywood royalty — could make their own fortune, or not. It was where 2-foot-9 Weng Weng could be the hero in the bizarre spy spoof of questionable taste, "For Your Height Only."

It was mostly schlock and exploitation, although some of it wildly entertaining, Hill's movies in particular. Yet into this stumbled a film with an undeniable pedigree — "Apocalypse Now."

Martin Sheen may have woken up thinking he was in Saigon, but he was really in the Philippines. Where else was Francis Ford Coppola going to get all of those real military helicopters to set to "The Ride of the Valkyries"?

The Philippines was nearly the death of them both.

As with his earlier documentary, "Not Quite Hollywood," Hartley gives us high-octane history. It's not deep, but it is fun, glossy and well-made pop. If "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" doesn't quite equal "Not Quite Hollywood," that's only because, as wild as the Wild East was, the Philippines in the '70s and early '80s still wasn't as insane as Australia during the same period.

Those tax incentives you get in Australia nowadays are just no substitute for driving too fast, setting people on fire and blowing things up in the Outback.

"Machete Maidens Unleashed!" is new on DVD from Dark Sky Films.