Polish Vampire in Burbank, A (1983)

Directed by:

Mark Pirro

Remember all those T&A “bikini” comedies that dominated last night cable and video stores in the early 90s? There was The Bikini Carwash Company (1 and 2), Bikini Summer (1, 2 and 3), Bikini Drive-In, Bikini Beach Race, The Great Bikini Off Road Adventure, Bikini Island, Bikini Squad, Bikini Hotel, Beach Babes from Beyond, Beach Beverly Hills, Cave Girl Island, California Hot Wax and scores more. The formula was simple: Fill your movie with as many beautiful women in barely-there bikinis (usually consisting of little more than a few pieces of strategically-placed string) as possible.

One title from this cycle that always stood out to me was Pirro's Buford's Beach Bunnies (1993), which "boasted" the star value of Jim Hanks (Tom's brother) and was on constant rotation on late night cable. Even though it otherwise stuck pretty closely to the usual bikini movie formula, I remember being surprised by the sheer number of goofy sight gags that were packed into the film. Sure, some of them worked better than others, but what was impressive was that the director even bothered putting them in there in the first place. Instead of entirely focusing on lingering ass and tit shots, Pirro would stick a lot of the comedic gags in the background. It's kind of like he wanted to make the comedy movie, was assigned the T&A movie (or knew he could market the T&A movie), and decided to make both and have them running simultaneously. Not high art, mind you, but it showed more effort than other, similar titles and it did make the film stand out.

I'm not sure why it took me so long to watch another Pirro movie, but I was almost instantly glad I did when I found myself smiling throughout the opening few minutes of this one. After the camera spends some time prowling around a castle, we meet a young vampire named Dupah (played by the director) and are immediately bombarded with a bunch of sight gags. Dupah keeps a poster of Farrah Fawcett on his coffin lid, sleeps with a stuffed Frankenstein monster doll and wears bat pajamas. He then makes his way to the bathroom and brushes his fangs with Close Up toothpaste and a toilet brush (!) As that's going on, we venture out onto the city streets at night. A hooker is approached by an older potential client. She asks, "You wanna party? You got the bread?" and the man instantly pulls a loaf of bread out from behind his back (lol, Jesus!) An older male vampire (Hugh O. Fields) and his vampire daughter, Yvonne (Marya Gant), then kill both the hooker and her pimp.

After siphoning blood out of the hooker's neck into a plastic baggie, the vampires take it home to give to Dupah (the older vampire's son and Yvonne's brother) for breakfast. He drinks it with a straw while watching vampire cartoons. However, the vampire dad is getting fed up with always having to be the "bloodwinner" (hehe) and his son's laziness, squeamishness ("Bite people? Ewww!") and refusal to work. "You should be out at night roaming the streets... attacking young ladies... Look at you! You're a full grown vampire and you've never bitten anyone in your life! When I was your age, I sucked more blood than a California landlord!" The dad then instructs Yvonne to take Dupah out and show him how it's done.

Yvonne relates a flashback to their missing, even more useless brother Sphincter. He's played by Eddie Deezen, the original production's star when filming began in 1981. Deezen quit midway through filming, which forced the director to re-script the film, dub him (he's given a similarly annoying nasal voice) and use what footage he did shoot of the actor in the form of flashbacks. One of those shows Yvonne taking him to a bar where he strikes out again and again, finally running across a cross-wielding bible thumper and member of a "Judo for Jesus" club who decides to use her skills to "beat the Holy Ghost into him." Sphincter gets knocked out and doesn't wake up until morning, and we all know what happens when vampires are exposed to sunlight.

Dupah and Yvonne stumble upon a couple - Delores (not Lois) Lane (Lori Sutton) and the afro'd Ernie (Steve Dorsch) - exiting a theater showing "Enema Vampires." Ernie acts like a dick and then storms off just because Delores professes to love horror and vampire movies. (What? Is he nuts?) Dupah then makes his move. While Delores may be a hot, bubbly blonde who works at a health spa, she has a darker side when it comes to all things romantic and gets turned on by vampires, castles, biting, large fangs and Gothic atmosphere and imagery. Even more perfect. Could this possibly be Dupah's dream woman? He agrees to swing by her work the following day so they can hang out again. But, wait a minute, isn't he supposed to be vampire-ing?

It soon becomes pretty clearly what parallels this is attempting to draw between a vampire's first time feeding and a human's first time falling in love / losing their virginity. Dupah is even coached by the skull of his late brother, who gives him a bunch of bad pointers that end up backfiring. As Dupah is trying to navigate the relationship and goes back and forth as to the right time to put the bite to his new girlfriend, we meet a bunch of other oddball characters, the best of which is Delores' roommate Misty (Bobbi Dorsch), an extremely confused girl who can't decide if she's some kind of New Age kook or an airhead Valley Girl ("Like, where ya been like?"). Either way, she's dumb as a box of rocks and thinks a Slinky is a Rubik's Cube and test patterns on TV are a "boring" movie.

While there are plenty of dumb laughs and amusingly quirky bits (including a random Sonny and Cher musical performance [?] at a pool party) to be found in here, other parts are just plain bizarre and didn't strike me as particularly funny. Some, in fact, is downright uncomfortable, like the overdubs on some of the black actors. There's also a head-scratching Jacuzzi scene where Dupah encounters both a lost spy wearing a full tuxedo in the water (John McCafferty) and a cursed "Queerwolf" (Paul Farbman) who comes on to him and later shows up in drag. One thing that does manage to shine through here is the director's love for classic vampire movies. Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi get name dropped, Dupah takes Delores to a screening of Count Yorga, Vampire, Elvira is seen on a TV set hosting The Fearless Vampire Killers and there's a gorgeously-shot black-and-white fantasy sequence complete with light strips over the eyes and lots of smoke. Z movie regular / former Ed Wood movie alum Conrad Brooks and Katina Garner (HACK-O-LANTERN) show up briefly in a bar scene.

The director managed to get this a limited theatrical release, a VHS release (from Simitar) and frequent cable TV airings, which is pretty very impressive considering this was shot on Super 8 for less than 2,500 dollars. It went on to gross half a million and is supposedly the cheapest movie ever to play on USA Up All Night... which is really saying something! Pirro also made Deathrow Gameshow (1987), which was shot on 35mm and had the uncommonly high (for him) budget of 200,000 dollars, plus other Super 8 ultra low budget horror comedies with catchy titles like Curse of the Queerwolf (1988) and Nudist Colony of the Dead (1991). Pirro now self-distributes all of his own movies on DVD on his website.

★★1/2

Gabi ng lagim (1960)

... aka: Night of Terror

Directed by:

Tommy C. David

Larry Santiago (segment removed)

Pablo Santiago

Felix Villar

If we're to believe many sources, it was the British film Dead of Night (1945) that helped to popularize the horror anthology format. However, there are quite a few glaring problems with that assessment. Firstly, Germany made a number of popular horror anthologies way back in the silent era like Eerie Tales (1919), Destiny (1921) and Waxworks (1924); to name a few. Second, Dead of Night did not seem to spawn any immediate imitators. Had the film actually made this format popular, there would have been an explosion of similar films shortly after its release. Instead, there are only a couple of anthologies here and there throughout the entire decade of the 50s. (This, by the way, is no slight on Dead of Night itself, which is an influential film in its own right. I'm just putting things into perspective here.) A much larger crop of these didn't emerge until the 60s and 70s. Typically, Hammer and Amicus are singled out then for boosting their popularity, yet the groundwork was clearly laid out for them already with a pair of prior box office hits: Roger Corman's Tales of Terror (1962) and Mario Bava's Black Sabbath (1963).

One country that almost always gets entirely left out of the conversation is the Philippines. There was Katotohanan o guniguni? / "Truth or Illusion?," Mga alamat ng sandaigdig / "Legends of the World," Pagsapit ng Hatinggabi / "The Arrival of Midnight" and this one released in 1960, plus Mga daing sa libingan / "Cry from the Grave" and Konsiyerto ng kamatayan / "Concert of Death" released the following year. All six of these (and there may be others I don't even know about) predate the 1960s wave of US / UK / European anthologies by several years. But it doesn't stop there as anthologies have sustained their popularity to this very day in the Philippines. The Shake, Rattle & Roll film series, for instance, has become one of the most enduring franchises in Filipino film history, spawning fifteen entries to date.

Unfortunately, none of the 1960s Filipino anthologies are likely to have ever made it out of the country and the Philippines did about as good a job preserving their older films as Thailand. In other words, not a very good job at all. Most of these are lost and likely gone forever. Gabi ng lagim appears to be the lone survivor from the list of 60s titles above and is, in fact, one of the only surviving purely Filipino genre films from this entire time period. Even so, it didn't fully survive. The only available print is missing one of its stories: the opening tale directed by Larry Santiago and starring Ramon Revilla and Cecilia Lopez. We actually get to see a brief snippet of this removed scene (plus credits) before it suddenly just cuts to the second story. I'm not sure what happened here or why it was removed.

Up first in this reduced 73 minute print is the segment is from Felix Villar, who'd go on to co-direct DEVIL WOMAN (1974) and its sequel BRUKA, QUEEN OF EVIL (1975). A coffin washes ashore near a cemetery, the lid flies open, birds fly out, it explodes in smoke and a caped vampire count (Tony Gosalvez) emerges. He resurrects a beautiful young woman named Melissa (Myrna Delgado) and sends her in the direction of a village where she can have access to all the fresh blood she desires.

Claiming to be ill and in need of a quiet, relaxing place to stay away from the city so she can recover, Melissa shows up at the home of Mang Ambo (Francisco Cruz); a poor, hard-working widower. Also living in the home are his children; teenage daughter Lita (Cielito Legaspi) and younger son Enteng (Vic Santiago). A couple of hired hands; Celso (Amado Cortez), a pathological liar trying to woo Lita with tall tales about how he'll be rich once a wealthy relative of his in Manila dies (any day now...), and idiot Kiko (Dencio Padilla), a klutz, drunkard and glutton, are also always hanging around.

Despite being cold, aloof, antisocial and, well, dead, Melissa's looks soon attract the attention of both the village mayor, who offers to marry her, and Kiko, who's delusional enough to believe he can court the mysterious beauty. However, Melissa is almost always holed up in her bedroom; only emerging at midnight to wander outside. Of course, she's been feeding on human victims all that time. After claiming three male victims, she finally sets her sights on getting the virginal blood of Lita and then plans on heading off to the next village with the vampire count.

Tale #2 (directed by Tommy C. David) starts with a crazy, disfigured old hag hobbling through a cemetery, digging up a grave (with her bare hands!) and then instructing the revived inhabitant of the coffin - Arnulfo - to "avenge the wrongs done to us!" A young woman named Carina (Yolanda Guevarra) then wakes up screaming in her bed, awakening her husband Nanding (Jose Romulo) and child in the process. Whew. It was just a dream. Or was it? Carina feels as though something is pulling at her legs and looks down to find them covered in blood, but it's not her blood as she's not cut. The blood leads up to a rocking chair, which starts rocking all by itself. And then the lights go out. And a window opens. Seems we have a haunting on our hands... by hands!

A pair of disembodied hands appear in a doorway and a voice announces itself as Arnulfo. The ghost claims he had his hands chopped off before being murdered and Nanding was involved. Nanding is able to drive the spirit away with prayer but that's only a temporary fix, as is bringing in a spiritualist to help. Accused of a murder he did not commit, what Arnulfo really wants is to get his hands on the real murderer; a lowlife named Rafael (Paquito Diaz), and restore his once-good name in the process. Rafael runs some kind of criminal / prostitution ring and is such a nice fella that, in addition to murder, he also pimps out his own girlfriend. After both are visited and terrorized by the ghost (who usually just shows up as hands but sometimes appears as an armless ghost), Rafael and Nanding go to the cemetery only to find Arnulfo's casket empty. Nanding eventually learns of Arnulfo's innocence and attempts to help the ghost seek justice.

Finally, we get a (supposedly) comic haunted house tale from Pablo Santiago. Seven teenage boys (played by members of the Lo' Waist Gang) are dropped off at a spooky old mansion that belongs to one of their grandfathers. They plan on spending the night and searching for a treasure rumored to be hidden inside while they're there. The doors open by themselves to let them in and then slam shut once they are (never a good omen, eh?) and they're scared by cobwebs, cockroaches and a spooky drama program they accidentally play on the radio (this anthology is actually based on a DZRH radio serial of the same name).

The boys dance, walk around holding hands and scream like girls (!?) An old school ghost in a white bed sheet holding a skull shows up and then disappears, as does another ghost. One guy "accidentally" strangles himself and they finally locate a treasure chest but a reanimated corpse is inside. After failing to scare the ghosts away with a cross, they flee the house. There's an extremely predictable Scooby Doo twist at the end as to the identity of the ghosts, which involves a young Fernando Poe Jr. (THE BLACKSMITH). Filled with terrible slapstick gags the Three Stooges would have rejected, this at least amusingly comes full circle and links itself up with the previous stories. The rest is mostly useless.

While none of these tales are anything special, the first two are entertaining enough and have their own perks. The first has a likable cast and, once she gets going, an energetic female vamp. The second story wastes no time jumping right into the ghost stuff and and is filled with highly variable but fun special effects. As for the last story, best I can say is that it's much shorter than the other two. I've read it was a Philippine tradition to stick a lighthearted comedy segment at the end of otherwise-serious horror anthologies, so that probably explains why it's there. I'd imagine if this final segment had been cut instead of the first one the film would have been all the better for it.

Apparently a box office hit in its home country at the time, advertisements for later films from the same producers boast about this one's success. I'm not aware of any home video releases, not even in the Philippines. In 1980, there was a follow-up of sorts: Gabi ng lagim ngayon ("Night of Horror Today"), which was also based on the radio serial.

★★