Dwarf Zombies Invade Manila article

Dwarf Zombies Invade Manila: A Set Visit to Bruno Mattei's Zombies: The Beginning (2007)

Article by Andrew Leavold [previously published in Leavold's book The Search For Weng Weng (2017)]

"Hi Dude! Got news for you! Bruno and company are in town and will be staying for three weeks for pre-prod. See ya soon! Cheers, James" (email from Big Jim Gaines, 9th February 2007) 

I was flat broke, and Trash Video was limping along like a wounded dog. So what else could I do? I borrowed more money, and arrived in Manila on my 37th birthday, the smell of gunpowder from Chinese New Year still heavy in the air. 

Before I knew what was happening, I was standing outside a film studio in Paranaque. 

A sign on RSVP Studios’ door said “La Perla Nera” (“The Black Pearl”), Bruno’s financiers. 

Through the door’s glass window Big Jim was huddled in a corner in conference with grey-haired producer Gianni Paolucci. The former production manager for Flora Films on Bruno’s Eighties films shot in the Philippines, Gianni now funded much lower budgeted genre films for the direct-to-DVD market, and the strain of pre-production on such wretchedly small amount of money, even by Filipino standards, was evident in the way Gianni’s wiry frame was bent.  

On one side of the room, behind a table, sat Bruno.  

I couldn’t believe my eyes – here was the director of Zombie Creeping Flesh, one of my favourite Italian B films making a new zombie film IN MANILA. My mind went directly back to those formative film-watching years of the Eighties, wallowing in Bruno’s insane mash-up of George Romero clichés, ludicrously over-the-top gore effects, and Mondo footage of New Guinea tribes (the nursing mother eating maggots from a real corpse’s eyes gets me every time) poorly matched to “jungle” footage shot outside Barcelona. Here in Paranaque the maestro, too, was clearly stressed; Bruno chewed gum the entire visit, and according to Jim was complaining about stomach pains all the way to Manila.

On the opposite side of the room stood a phalanx of dwarf actors. Of course! They turned, saw me holding my camera, and waved. What insane manner of audition I’d wandered into, I couldn’t begin to fathom. 

Seated next to Bruno was his lead actress Yvette Yzon, also in The Jail and Island Of The Living Dead, and at the time Gianni’s girlfriend. Next to Yvette was Cecille Baun, head of the local prosthetics crew, and the creative brain behind most of the Philippines’ film beheadings, bullet wounds and geysers of blood. There were other Italians talking loudly and waving their hands about, and Bruno’s translator – Italian to English, Italian to Tagalog – was never beyond earshot. All were in a heated multiple car crash of a conversation across three corners of the room. Time to make myself scarce. 

Outside the studio entrance, one of the American actors was enjoying a cigarette and the relative calm. I introduced myself. His name was Gary ‘King’ Roberts. On his business card he was simply listed as ‘King’, and the cell number for his Water Sports Resort in Laguna. Another expat living the life of royalty. 

‘King’ was also one of Bruno’s leads in Island Of The Living Dead alongside Yvette Yzon and Big Jim, as a member of a party of treasure hunters who land on a cursed island, home to 300 year-old satanic priests, Conquistador zombies, and a host of increasingly bizarre assailants (including the toothless queen of Filipino Horror extras, Lilia Cuntapay). Our new friend ‘King’ can’t act his way out of a bag of fake blood, but has a beefy, physical presence, is dubbed by a professional over-actor, and being Caucasian helps. In the sequel Bruno and Gianni offered him a bit part as a zombie experiment, as a sly nod to Island...; Big Jim, having also died spectacularly in the first film, is resurrected in Zombies: The Beginning in a similar fashion. 

I asked ‘King’ how he found the Italian film crews. “They treat the people nice. Fair pay… for the Philippines.” He smiled wryly. “A little yelling here and there.” 

Down the corridor, towards workmen banging and sawing away, was Number Two Studio, recently converted into a maze of laboratory sets with dissection tables and rows of empty cages. At the back were a number of interchangeable hallways hung with cables, painted to look like the sides of a concrete bunker. 

Tacked to the wall were the striking full colour production sketches of the completed sets. The artist, production designer Claudio Cosentino – young, mild-mannered in an Italian version of Louis Theroux kind of way, took me on a tour of Number Two. “Bruno want to put inside woman zombie,” Claudio said, pointing to the cages. He motioned to me. “You come...” He guided me down one of the corridors, past a keypad destined to explode. 

You’ve worked on many of Bruno’s films? “1992, I started work in Italy. I shooting all the movies with Bruno in the Philippines – Mondo Cannibale, Land Of Death [both 2004], The Jail, Island... 1 and this one.” All on low budgets? “Very, VERY small!” 

We ventured into the laboratory room. “I want you to see something.” He picked up a microscope made out of tin cans. “See this? No budget, but… Invention, many things!” Next to him was a bank of ‘computers’ made from discarded keyboards. “It’s all good, huh? Low budget, but it’s beautiful. You have to...” He pointed to his forehead. “...have it all in the mind.” Next, the explosives timer crafted from a brick-sized mobile phone. He laughed once again with manic glee. “It’s cinema!” 

What’s the story of the sequel? I asked Claudio. He laughed at the thought. “It’s very hard to explain. It’s in the mind of Bruno… VERY crazy story.” 

When I screened Zombies: The Beginning with Big Jim to a Halloween crowd in Fort Bonifacio, the local audience didn’t know what to make of Bruno’s convoluted plot. Yvette’s character …. is rescued from a raft, from the ending of Island Of The Living Dead. We’re then introduced to an entirely new scenario, in which Yvette’s crew of treasure hunters were in fact employees of Tyler Incorporated, a multi-national corporation now experimenting on the living dead found on Hidden Island. They have lost contact with the new facility and Yvette accompanies Tyler Inc’s private security army via a file-footage submarine – this could in fact be Bruno’s The Hunt For The Dead October – to rescue its employees. In Tyler’s labyrinth of hallways and laboratories – and, yes, cages filled with pregnant experiments howling for blood! - the living dead pick off Yvette’s team one by one, as she uncovers the island’s horrifying secret. If one was lazy, Zombies: The Beginning could be written off as a loose remake of Bruno’s Zombie Creeping Flesh, with elements of the underground chase in Rats: Night Of Terror for extra flavouring. But no-one, myself included, could have guessed the film’s sanity-testing conclusion. 

A crusty-looking Italian crew member with grey hair and polo shirt came up to me, dragged deeply on his cigarette and said, "I worked with Dario Argento." 

"Really?” I was intrigued. “On which movie?" 

Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Ferranti smiled, obviously recognizing a horror fanboy. "Il Gatto A Nove Code," he said smugly, took another drag and walked away.  

The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971). I was mightily impressed. What he DIDN’T mention were his other credits as key make-up artist, from Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), Joe D’Amato’s Absurd (1981), and Bruno’s own Zombie Creeping Flesh and Rats: Night Of Terror. Put simply, his paintbox was responsible for some of the most repellent images in Italian exploitation cinema.  

Claudio beckoned me to follow him once again. “You come with me, Number One Studio, is OK?” 

“I have to ask, Claudio...why the dwarves?” 

“Dwarves?”

“The little guys, auditioning for Bruno?” 

“Ah! Is a baby zombie. Right? Is new idea of Bruno.” 

We entered the studio entrance, and immediately an emaciated local with one tooth tried to wrap his open mouth round the camera lens and groaned. He was evidently successful in getting his zombie role. 

Near the far wall was a curved series of horizontal slats, behind a low stand. Claudio held up his production sketch of what looks like a helium-filled cauliflower floating above a pot plant, surrounded by a web of pregnant women with metal duct tubes attached to their abdomens.  

“The Zombie Brain controlling!” he said proudly. I couldn’t believe my senses as I stared aghast at Claudio’s sketch. But there it is in the finished Zombies: The Beginning: Claudio’s apocalyptic vision – via Bruno – of a Zombie Super-Intelligence controlling swarms of the living dead, while overseeing a massive zombie fetus farm and talking world domination. In the film’s climactic moments, cone-headed, black-eyed zombie babies (or ‘zombinos’, I suggested to Bruno) crawl through Cecille Baun’s moat of muck as the Cauliflower Brain pulses and taunts Yvette with its end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it message. It sounds tacky beyond belief, yet through Bruno’s cracked lens, the scene is a latex and tinfoil version of Bruegel, and yet another modest triumph of imagination over resources.  

Claudio pointed again to the sketch. “Is Bruno brain, that one.” He smiled conspiratorially. “You don’t talk about that, eh? Is secret!” 

Bruno and I chatted for a while in the office about his Philippines adventures until that moment. Bruno chewed and looked impatient. Sitting across the table from me, Bruno eventually fixed his glassy stare on me and said, via his interpreter, "You've come from Australia to talk to me for your film. Why do YOU like my movies? They are shit!" 

I thought for a moment - this is one of those rare times where you get to say to one of your favourite filmmakers exactly what their work means to you - and came out with this: "Bruno, you may think your movies are shit. And sometimes they are. But there's always a moment you've never seen before in other movies - I call it the 'Bruno Moment' - that's so bizarre, so over-the-top, that it takes the film to a whole new surreal level. THAT's why I love watching your movies." 

He studied me for a while, then beamed and loudly announced, “Multo benne!" According to Jim he was in the greatest of moods for the rest of the afternoon. 

Less than three months afterwards, Big Jim emailed me the tragic news: we lost Bruno. His health deteriorated after a brain tumour was discovered, and he passed away on May 21st 2007. 

In retrospect, watching Bruno prepare for his final film was in fact observing the last gasps of a dying breed of filmmaker, and a peculiar type of film for which conventional wisdom dictates the term “hack” was invented for. I for one admire Mattei and Paolucci’s sheer chutzpah in attempting to recreate that classic era of exploitation cinema, a quixotic battle at, as Mattei’s older films have a very specific aesthetic in the sound, the look, the grain of the 35mm film, the clothing, the sets, the soundtracks. The newer films Bruno directed for La Perla Nera are more than just cheap imitations of already poverty row knock-offs; they’re even cheaper, more primitive, with an awful TV show clarity that only digital filmmaking from the mid-2000s could produce.  

Drawing on Bruno’s excessive back catalogue, Paolucci’s films deliberately plunder past glories and aside from upping the previous films’ gore quota, Bruno provides very few concessions for the new millennium’s younger audience. So, was Gianni trading on a post-modernist nostalgia for the disreputable genres Mattei was notorious for? Was his producer and old comrade exploiting Bruno’s name, his reputation, for whatever it’s worth these days, or his ability to make a silk lounge out of a sow’s ass? Was he merely throwing his old friend a bone, keeping both of them in work? Whatever the motive, the partnership proved fruitful, and in their own maddening way, La Perla Nera’s films are a satisfyingly logical coda to Mattei’s career. And, love them or despise the, you have to admit, we’ll never see that kind of filmmaking again, as those guys, like bats on an electrified fence, are starting to drop one by one.