Hot Rod Gang falls into that category of movies that are better known for their poster art than for the actual film. And the poster art is definitely brilliant—no dispute there—but the movie? Not so much. John Ashley plays a hepcat who gets in trouble for reckless driving and, due to the pursuit of the local strongarm cop, has to adopt a new identity. Thrown onstage by happenstance, this new identity—Jackson Dalrymple—becomes a rock and roll star. Where’s the hot rodding, you wonder? The movie is really a musical comedy with a bit of racing wrapped around, while uniformly atrocious acting bogs down the whole enterprise. The main attraction is watching early rocker Gene Vincent play himself and put on a couple of numbers. The film also features other, less adept, probably dubbed performances, including several by Ashley, who you may remember for his run of Mystery Science Theatre-worthy 1970s horror/action epics shot in the Philippines. In the end Hot Rod Gang all comes together in a rumble and a chase. We can't recommended it, but it’s amusing if you’re in the right frame of mind. Oh, and we almost forgot—our copy kicked off with the ad you see below. Hot rods indeed.

The Big Bird Cage finds writer-director Jack Hill at the top of his form as he sticks star Anitra Ford in a Philippine jungle prison where an evil warden uses the female inmates as slave labor to process sugar. Pam Grier and Sid Haig are revolutionaries who want to recruit women for their cause, so Grier infiltrates the prison and primes the women for a big breakout. This is one of the most remembered of 70s B-romps, a sleazefest filled with iconic scenes such as Ford being suspended by her hair, and seven-foot model Karen McKevic slathering her body with grease and dashing naked through camp. The classic poster is above, a brilliant production photo appears below, and if you’re looking for actual reviews, well, there are about a thousand online. Wild, weird, and oh so incorrect, The Big Bird Cage premiered in the U.S. today in 1972.

We’ve seen hunters battling giant crocodiles on the covers of pulp magazines, but yesterday, it happened for real. On the southern island of Mindanao, in the Agusan del Sur township of Bunawan, hunters snared a giant crocodile measured at twenty-one feet and more than 2,300 pounds. That makes it the biggest specimen ever captured in the Philippines. Gleeful mayor Edwin Cox Elorde posed with the creature, and, after one hundred villagers managed to wrestle the trussed croc into a fenced enclosure, announced plans to use it as the central attraction in a planned ecotourism theme park. While the capture and exploitation of the animal bothers environmentalists (including us), and we can just picture this future theme park (not a pretty image), Bunawan crocodiles’ free days frankly were numbered from the moment one of them bit the head off a ten-year-old girl back in 2009. When more people narrowly escaped being croc chow, and two reptiles ate the head off a carabao (water buffalo), the push to capture the animals intensified. Yesterday, hired hunters succeeded. Up next: the croc's inevitable escape and vengeful rampage.

Update: Lolong, which was the name given to the croc, has died. After living an estimated century in the wild, he lasted less than a year in human hands. Figures. Locals plan to display him stuffed so they can keep cashing in on him.

We were going to post about this earlier in the week, but then changed our minds. But today we’re feeling wordy, so here you go. If you follow boxing, you know Manny Pacquiao. He’s a punching dynamo, one of the toughest guys in the world, and has been on the sports pages for months due to the drama surrounding his on-again off-again bout with undefeated Floyd Mayweather. If you follow politics, you know by now that Pacquiao won a seat earlier this week to the Philippine parliament. He’ll be representing Sarangani province, which is on the island of Mindinao. Pacquiao won his post by beating a wealthy and entrenched political clan, and in defiance of those who predicted his congressional bid would fail the same way his 2008 attempt did.

But this time Pacquiao was more organized, disseminating his anti-poverty message at a grassroots level, and outspending his opponent Roy Chiongbian. In fact, some observers have suggested that Pacquiao’s massive spending doesn’t square with his message about poverty, but we don’t particularly see that. Pacquiao spent what was needed to win and now claims that because he used mostly his own money he owes no favors to special interests. In our view, politics is about nothing but favors to special interests, and if you’ve spent millions of your own money your first thought might perhaps be to make some of it back. Just saying is all. But we admit to seeing events through an American prism. We don’t want to sell Pacquiao short—he’s passionate, seems sincere, and worked hard for his win. In politics, it’s sometimes possible for sincere outsiders to storm the palace. Maybe Pacquiao is one of those outsiders. And there’s always this: if he turns out to be just another corrupt corporate shill, Sarangani voters can always fly Floyd Mayweather into town to beat the shit out of him. 

We’re patting ourselves on the back today, because El Mono Blanco successfully moved our headquarters from San José City to Manila without missing a beat on Pulp Intl. Why did he move? Well, let’s just say MB wore out his welcome in the hinterlands. His first clue was when his nightly slumber was shattered by hysterical screaming. To his surprise and chagrin, the screaming was coming from his girlfriend, who was sitting bolt upright in bed next to him, having been awakened by rummaging thieves. The crooks managed to steal a camera before they fled, but in true pulp fashion MB stalked the dark streets of San José City, screaming that he would kill them if they dared show their faces again. Picture him in slippers, unleashing a torrent of profanity that would make George Carlin spin in his grave. A day or two later, in an unrelated incident, a man threatened MB with a painful and grisly death via machete. Discretion being the better part of valor, or something like that, MB pulled up stakes and beat it out of town. So add another weird chapter to Pulp’s short but rich history. We know what you’re thinking. Why not avoid these troubles by simply moving someplace safe, like Canada? Soundly reasoned, and thank you. But where would be the fun in that?     

When Pam Grier goes bad, she goes all the way bad. In the Roger Corman produced Women in Cages, she’s the head matron of a hellhole prison somewhere in the Philippines and spends the movie permanently covered in a sheen of sweat as she sneeringly tortures her beautiful female convicts. The girls endure every manner of humiliation—the rack, rats, snakes, the hole, leeches, electric shocks, and some really harsh words. Oh, and the whole prison is basically a racket to sell the women into sexual slavery, so there’s that problem too.

After enough of this treatment the jailbirds finally decide it’s time to escape into the jungle, but unforeseen circumstances result in them taking Grier hostage, leading directly to her death via gang rape and strangulation. The audience is supposed to feel she’s gotten what she deserved, but all we felt was our lunch coming up. Such are the vicissitudes of '70s b-cinema.

Women in prison movies are misogynist by definition, but there is still a line somewhere and, though it’s difficult to know exactly where it is, it isn’t difficult to know when it’s been crossed. Anyway, once Grier has been disturbingly dispatched, the escape takes a few more turns which we won’t give away. We’ll just sum up by voting thumbs down on this one, and footnote by adding that we’re glad Pam went on kill so many men in her later movies. Women in Cages premiered in the U.S. today in 1971.

Known as the King of Philippine Movies, actor-director Fernando Poe, Jr. was such a popular figure in his home country that he ran for president in 2004. After a hotly contested election that he lost, his supporters accused the opposition of fraud. Seven months later he was killed by a coronary thrombosis, whereupon some people close to Poe blamed his enemies, but that’s a pulp story for another time. What we’re interested in today in his huge body of work—nearly 175 movies over more than five decades. You’d almost have to be two people to produce so much and, in a way, he was. He directed for years under the name Ronwaldo Reyes, and kept the identity secret until the night he walked onto stage at the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (or FAMAS) Awards to claim a statuette. The above film, the actioner Ang Padrino, may have low budget promo art, but it won three more FAMAS Awards for Poe, including best picture. It opened today in Manila in 1985.

Night of the Cobra Woman, which opened in the U.S. today in 1972, wasn’t even remotely about top-billed actress Joy Bang getting it on with a snake, as the promo poster hints. No, the plot actually involves were-serpents—you know, people who turn into serpents. Seriously. And the lead is not Bang, but is actually African Amerian actress Marlene Clark, not deemed worthy of a place on the poster for reasons we can only guess. Meanwhile, a shoestring special effects budget denies us the thrill of believable snake transformations. But we do see a lot of Clark's flesh, and that, as they say, is at least something.

The film was shot in the Philippines, which gives it a gritty feel, but even though Philippine laws are notoriously lax concerning snake-on-girl action, it never actually occurs in the way implied on the promo. So basically, the filmmakers cruelly teased the snakes, then compounded this sin by violating truth-in-advertising laws. Had we been around in 1972, and had PETA been around, we’d have called them in, because it’s evil to give any creature blue balls, but particularly snakes, who have to slither around on them. Frankly, we expected more from an actress named Bang.