Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

i must have seen a different film!!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

"Machete Maidens Unleashed" turned out to be a rather entertaining documentary about the golden days of exploitation cinema. And this is definitely a documentary that is worth your time and effort to watch if you have any interest in the history of cinema.This documentary offers a great insight into the history and evolution of the exploitation genre, and also offers some great details on the main players both in front and behind the camera. And that wide array of aspects really spiced up the documentary and kept it interesting. And it was further spiced up with lots of footage and clips from the movies, as well as good interviews with numerous people from the genre.I learned a great many things about the exploitation genre, and many of those things really put a new perspective on the genre for me.I especially enjoyed the in-depth interviews with the various cast, directors and production crew, as they offered some interesting views and insights into the movies, the genre and how the movies were made and what conditions people worked under back in the day."Machete Maidens Unleashed" proved to be a nice documentary, and it is one that I can recommend if you have any interest in the exploitation genre.

A fast moving odyssey into the subterranean world of the rarely explored province of Filipino genre filmmaking.I love horror films and exploitation films and consider myself both a critic and historian (having now reviewed over 2000 films and written numerous articles). Yet, I must confess, I was not aware of the hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of films that were made in the Philippines. I knew about some of them, of course, but did not know just how huge the output was. Wow! This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen on exploitation films (and I have seen my share). John Landis never disappoints, and some unusual suspects show up, too. R. Lee Ermey? Who knew?

After being left with an almost endless "must watch" list from watching Mark Hartley's fantastic doc about the Ozploitation film industry called Not Quite Hollywood,I was surprise to discover that a follow-up had been made about the Philippines film industry.The outline of the film:The documentary takes a look at the huge number of American and Australian B (and in Apocalypse Now's case A) movie film productions, that headed straight to the Philippines and made full use of the stunning locations and the super cheap labour (about $5 a day!.)At the same time,whilst all of the movie cameras were rolling,Ferdinand Marcos declared that the country was to enter martial law.View on the film:Although the opening of the film suggests that the doc is going to take a look at the Australian,US and Philippine films made during the era,I was sad to see,that with the exception of the always interesting Brian Trenchard-Smith, Ozploitation seems to have been completely left behind,so that the doc can instead focus on the US and Philippine film productions.Luckally the films that director Mark Hartley decided to focus turned out to some tremendous choices.For the first half,the film mainly focuses on the production of Blaxploitation movies,which along with allowing to show a number of the beautiful looking actresses being partly naked,also allows Hartley to show a number of thrilling action scenes that will have you rushing to grab a pen and paper right away.As the doc takes its focus from looking at "international" productions to mainly looking at the "local" Philippines productions,I feel that whilst this section of the doc offers a number of terrific production stories, (with the one about actor Weng Weng being a particularly fun and touching section)I feel that Hartley struggles to connect the movie productions and the social/political turmoil in the Philippines effect on the Philippine film industry in the same way that he had smartly done in Not Quite Hollywood.

This is a very entertaining look at a specific time and place in the history of exploitation film-making. It documents the rather strange scenario where the Philippines became a hotbed of psychotronic cinema production between the 60's and early 80's. While I haven't seen more than two or three films that were made under these conditions, it didn't stop the film from being interesting and entertaining. In fact, like many similar documentaries Machete Maidens Unleashed! is most probably a lot more enjoyable than the films it features. Instead we get many, many clips from these crazy films, so it's difficult to get bored.The films themselves range from the schlock horror of the 60's, via the women-in-prison flicks of the 70's to the martial arts action films of the 80's. It takes the form of the talking heads format where many of the participants tell us about their experiences working in the field. And perhaps unsurprisingly very different rules applied in the Philippines. There's a lot of humour in the presentation. No one is under any illusions about the seriousness of the movies, yet you will no doubt come away from this and have two or three new films you want to seek out. And I suppose with all that in mind, Machete Maidens Unleashed! has done its job.