Originally appeared in Fangoria magazine #43 (1985) pp.56-60, 64
EDITOR'S NOTE: During one of the episodes of The A-Team, Dirk "Face" Benedict poses as a movie producer who tries to coax a money-man into financing a movie to be called Beast of the Yellow Night. The potential backer is played by A-Team producer John Ashley, and the scene is an in-joke tip of the hat to Ashley's horror/exploitation career that began 25 years ago.
As an AIP teen star, Ashley appeared in such 50's kids-in-trouble pictures as Motorcycle Gang, Hot Rod Gang and, for Filmgroup, High School Caesar. In 1958 he was introduced to horror movies in How To Make A Monster and continued to thrive in the genre until the early 70's. In between an occasional A-picture assignment like Hud and his regular appearances in AIP's Beach pictures, Ashley worked with such zero-budget luminaries as Richard Cunha (Frankenstein's Daughter) and Larry Buchanan (The Eye Creatures), and went on to carve a lucrative niche for himself in the Philippines as both a star and producer in a unique series of horror pictures that included Mad Doctor Of Blood Island and the forementioned Beast Of The Yellow Night.
The first picture I did there, which was made as Brides Of Blood Island, was for a company called Hemisphere. I was going through my first divorce when a casting director called me and said, "Listen, would you like to go to the Philippines and do this horror film?" I said, "Yeah, why not?" - l wanted to get out of town anyway.
The original deal was for four weeks, I think. So l went over there and started doing the film. They ran into some financial problems in the course of making the movie. We got about halfway into the picture when all of a sudden my agent called me and said, "We didn't get your check for last week, so don't go to the set." I had gotten to know Eddie Romero, who was the producer/co-director on it, very well, and I liked the Filipino people a lot - it was like a second home to me. I explained it to Eddie and he said he didn't blame me. So basically I would sit around - we wouldn't shoot until my agent would call me and say, "Okay, I just got another week's pay, go ahead and work another week… Four weeks wound up to be 10, 11 weeks.
I finished the picture, came back and was living in Oklahoma, running some motion picture theaters. I had really forgotten about Brides Of Blood; I thought it would probably never get released. Some time later, a distributor friend of mine called me from Kansas City, and said, "I've got a picture opening here in town that you did in the Philippines. Would you come up and make some appearances at the drive-in?" This guy was a friend of mine, so I said sure. We went out and did all that, then he said, "Have you ever seen the movie?” I hadn't. So we sat in his car after one of the autograph sessions and watched it. He said, "Jeez, what'd this movie cost?" I had no idea, but I told him it couldn't have been that much. Brides Of Blood wound up doing some business; they had some kind of gimmick with rings, a packet of green blood, stuff like that. My distributor friend called me again and said, "Listen, if I can come up with a group of investors and make a deal with you, would you go back to the Philippines and do another one?" I said yeah; if the money was there and he could get it together, I'd be interested. So that's really how it started. We then did Mad Doctor Of Blood Island and Beast Of Blood, both for Hemisphere.
How many pictures did you eventually make there?
In the Philippines? I think I did about 12 or 13 over there. They're a little confusing because the original titles have since been changed for television.
What were the budgets on the last two Blood Island pictures?
Certainly not in excess of $120-125,000. I remember the most expensive Filipino production I was involved in was Savage Sisters, which cost $230,000 or $250,000.
Yes, we always did. They were very good, particularly in the early days, because the scripts were so generic. Later on, when we started doing Savage Sisters and others which involved a military posture within the film, we had some minor problems there, but normally we had great cooperation. Several times when we were down there shooting, martial law was in effect and they had curfews. We were able to make arrangements with the government to allow us to work after hours.
But at this point, you still had no financial involvement?
Not until Beast Of The Yellow Night. The fellow who owned Hemisphere in New York was rather ill, and Eddie Romero just said to me, "Look, why don't we do these together? I'll furnish the below-the-lines costs, you guys come up with the above-the-line.” So I did. Corman had just started New World, and Beast Of The Yellow Night was one of the first releases that they had out.
Did you enjoy playing the monster in that movie?
It was a lot of fun to do. I used a double in a lot of the long shots, but in the scenes where the beast was talking, obviously that was me. But I didn't make the transformation until near the end of the film, which was about a guy who made a deal with the Devil for his soul. As he gets worse and worse, finally there's this transformation.
I agree with you. It was a screenplay that Eddie Romero had written, and it certainly was the most cerebral, if you can call any of these pictures that. Incidentally, Eddie Romero is now the president of the Philippine Motion Picture Academy, and they are now involved in trying to do a co-production in China.
Didn't Roger Corman visit you down in the Philippines while you were doing this one?
Yeah. He called me and told me about this picture [The Big Doll House] that they were going to do in Puerto Rico. I told him, "You ought to come down and take a look at the Philippines. I mean, it's all right here "- 'cuz the picture was set in a jungle, and in a women's prison. So he flew to the Philippines, took one look and asked me, "Would you stay around and exec-produce the show?" So two of my partners and I put up the above-the-line, Roger put up all the rest of it, and I stayed and supervised that one. Then I went ahead and did Black Mama, White Mama for AIP; then, back to Roger for Woman Hunt. That was originally a screenplay called Women For Sale, and it was very much in the Big Doll House/Big Bird Cage syndrome - white women being kidnapped and sold into the white slave trade. Then The Twilight People. When Larry Woolner, who had been working for Corman, split, part of their split was, he got The Twilight People. He distributed it, and it did well.
Isn't The Twilight People one of your personal favorites among the Filipino horrors?
I think so. I just remember it was a lot of fun to do, and there weren't a lot of problems on it. And we did it so quickly! We were sitting around one day at lunch, Larry Woolner and Corman and I, in an Italian restaurant up near Corman's old offices on Sunset. We had walked down from his office, and were having salad. One of us said, "Well, what can we do now?" And somebody said, "What about The Island Of Dr Moreau?" And, "We can't do that, but what about half beast-half human?" And we just sat over lunch and made the deal. We wrote the script and, like a month later, we went over and shot it. It went very smoothly. It came back and did real well, real quick.
Eddie Romero had directed a very similar picture Terror Is A Man, back in 1959.
Conceptually, it was Roger, Larry and I who said, "Let's do Dr Moreau," but I do remember Eddie saying that he had directed a picture called Terror Is A Man, and that there were some similarities.
Probably only because he ripped off Dr Moreau, too.
Exactly. Everybody rips off somebody.
Was makeup a major expense on The Twilight People?
No, as a matter of fact, it wasn't. There was a local makeup man in the Philippines named Tony Arteida, a very, very creative fellow. All that stuff he did right there for us with moulds and appliances. The guy that we hired to play the Ape Man, he had that Neanderthal look to begin with [laughter]! And, strangely, it was not time-consuming - I mean, we never seemed to be waiting for the makeup to be put on. And I remember when I first saw the film, I thought, jeez, it worked better than I thought it would when we were shooting it.
What were your budgets on some of these later pictures?
The Twilight People was like $150,000. We got up to around $200,000 on Beyond Atlantis, because we had a lot of underwater stuff. And then Savage Sisters was the biggest of the bunch.
Censorship problems in the Philippines made that one of the places where your films could not be shown without major cuts.
True, we did have some censorship problems in the latter stages. In the beginning, we didn't; it was pretty open. Later on, after the Philippine government began to crack down on the local films, they determined that our films were imports to their market and they could not set double standards.
There was some talk about that, yeah, 'cuz I really liked the script and I thought maybe I would direct it. Then the production end of it got so spread out that I felt that for me to attempt to produce, direct and appear in it would really be difficult. So I changed my mind.
Did a better-than-average cast help that picture at the box office?
Interestingly enough, Beyond Atlantis was not a success, because we attempted to break the mold. Our original concept was to find these people underwater, and for the most part they were going to be at least topless. We got into the script -which was really a rip-off of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre - and Larry Woolner all-of-a-sudden said, "I think maybe we've got something here that's a little bigger than what we've been doing." And then we got Pat Wayne involved; one of the provisos of Pat doing it was that it had to be PG-rated. We had to make a decision: if we wanted Pat, who was very right for the role, then we couldn't go with an R rating. So we went ahead and got Pat, and George Nader, and did it as a PG. I still believe that, had we done it a little harder, it probably would have done better. At least we'd have had a picture that was a little more exploitable.
One of the things that trapped us, I think, was that underwater footage is very tough to get, but when you do get it, it's gorgeous. But watching it is like watching slow motion. You spend all this money and time, so you feel like, “I don’t want to take it out of the picture.” I think that slowed the film down a lot. We also had a lot of problems with getting apparatus that these people could wear that wouldn’t fall apart underneath the water, and the eyes on the fish people were very hard to do on the budget that we had. It wound up slipping a little bit from the original concept but we just decided, “Let’s try it.” It was a bad call. I think that’s the only picture that I had money in, that didn’t make it.
A few years later, you wrapped up your Filipino sideline.
The last thing I did in the Philippines was my involvement in Apocalypse Now; Coppola and his people used my Philippine company as a kind of base of operations, so that they could deal through me. While I was killing some time waiting for that to start, I did a local Filipino film that has never been released over here. It is a wild film – we did some things in there that you can’t do anymore. For example, I played a doctor – I always seem to wind up playing doctors! We had a scene in which we got a human body, did an examination and then literally took the body apart. We did it with an actual human corpse – we made a deal, arranged to get a dead body from one of the prisons, and exhumed it. It was very graphic, very gory. A local guy released it in the Philippines, then went to Hong Kong to redub it and do some work on it. He ran short of money, I think, and never could put it together.
So what brought you back to the States permanently?
I had maintained a residence in the Philippines and I would be there three, four months a year, then back to Oklahoma where I had my theatres. The theatre business changed radically. I needed more time to devote to the theatre end of it, and so I just couldn’t afford the luxury of being able to take three or four months off.
That year, 1968, was when the first of the Filipino horror films was released. How did you end up working in the Philippines?
I didn't even know where the Philippines was when the offer came. I was just getting a divorce from Debbie (Walley) at the time. I got a call from a friend of mine, Fred Roos, who was a casting director then. He said there was this movie they were shooting in the Philippines. They sent me a script, and I thought it would be interesting to do. I really wanted to get out of town for a while.
I didn't know anybody at Hemisphere, the company that made this movie. It was a joint venture of a Filipino named Eddie Romero and a guy who lived in New York, a former Oklahoman named Kane Lynn.
It was an interesting experience. They were having financial problems during the course of shooting. They would work a few days, or a week, then they'd run out of money. It was a day to day decision whether I would work or not.
So I made the movie and came back to the States. It wasn't released for two or three years. In the meantime, I had gotten into the theatre business in Oklahoma. One of the guys that was a sub-distributor, Bev Miller, had a company called Mercury Films. He called and said he had booked The Brides Of Blood into some drive-ins and a couple of indoors down in Kansas City. He asked if I would come down and make a personal appearance.
I was very curious to see the movie. So I went, and we looked at it. And Bev turned to me and said, "Do you know what this movie costs?" And I said, "Less than a hundred grand." He thought that was amazing, that there was an awful lot of production values with the jungle, the natives, the boats. And he said, 'There's a lot on the screen for that."
They released the movie and it did a little business. Bev called me and said, "I have a bunch of guys who are all sub-distributors that are willing to put up some money to do another one of these movies. Would you go back and do it?"
By this time, I had formed a lot of friendships and had bought a condominium in the Philippines. A couple of associates came to me and said, "This seems to be working. Why don't we do this ourselves?" That's when I began to put the limited partnerships together.
On the first two films you made in the Philippines, Eddie Romero is credited as co-director with Gerry de Leon. How did that work?
Gerry was an older man, kind of the John Huston of the Philippine directors. Eddie had been a student of his, had come up under his tutelage. When Eddie put The Brides Of Blood together, he felt it was something Gerry had a real feel for. Gerry had a lot more experience doing horror stuff than Eddie. So, Eddie directed the scenes that did not involve horror. Then, for the chlorophyll monsters and the camera zooming in and out, Gerry did that stuff.
What did you think of Sam Sherman's marketing plays, such as the green blood distributed to audience members as an oral vaccine against becoming a monster?
The marketing tool that worked first, on The Brides Of Blood, was a little engagement ring. You could take your girlfriend to the drive-in, get a ring and see the movie. The ring thing was a real good gimmick, and definitely helped. The green blood didn't really do much. They went to the well, I think, once too often.
In a interview I read, Sam Sherman mentioned that he had tasted the liquid they used for the green blood, and that it was awful.
I never tasted it. I saw people taste it, and I didn't notice anybody wincing. The guy who came up with the gimmicks was Kane Lynn. Kane was also responsible for the infamous computer fight between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano. Kane was involved in Brides..., Mad Doctor..., and Beast Of Blood. From The Beast Of The Yellow Night on, it was Eddie and I. Kane had died of cancer.
For shooting, it was maybe six to seven weeks. The thing about it, it was very inexpensive to shoot over there, so you could take a lot more time. Today, the time frame for a two hour TV movie shot here is roughly twenty days. In the Philippines, you could indulge yourself, take a little more time, and hopefully get a little more production value. For post-production, it was another four to five weeks, depending on whether we were doing nothing else but the one movie.
Normally, we would complete the shooting, then Eddie would do a rough cut and come over here to the United States. Then whoever it was we were doing business with, Roger Corman, Larry Woolner (at Dimension), or Larry Gordon when he was at AIP, we would screen the picture for them, get their input, and Eddie would go back to the Philippines to make final changes.
At that point we would decide if we wanted to score the picture in the Philippines, which was unbelievably inexpensive. More often than not, we were attempting to keep costs down as low as we could. Normally, we did all the post-production in the Philippines. Sometimes we went to Hong Kong, because there was a lab there that made us a real good deal.
Who wrote the initial draft of The Woman Hunt?
Jack Hill. (The Charter Home Video release has full credits: Screenplay by David Hoover, based on a story by Jack Hill and David Hoover.)
Right. He directed The Big Doll House for you.
Yes. Because I had done it over there, I got approached by Roger Corman to do a picture for New World. He put up the above-the-line (costs incurred in a film production before actual shooting begins, including negotiable components like the story, screenwriter and producer's salaries, the producer's expenses, and the salaries of the stars and the director). I put up the below-the-line (salaries for the remainder of the cast and the technical crew, all equipment and studio rentals, location rentals, travel expenses, catering, and other day-to-day production and post-production costs). The Big Doll House did extremely well. And when that happened, everybody started jumping on the Philippine band wagon. (Slight pause). There's probably one movie that you're not aware of. I have only seen it once. Just before I got involved with Francis (Coppola) on Apocalypse Now, I was approached by a local Filipino film company to do a film. I didn't speak Tagalog in it, but it was with one of their top female stars. It was released in the Philippines, but not in the States.
What’s the title of it?
Its original title was Witchcraft, but the title was changed to Black Mamba.
Do you have a copy of this film on video by any chance?
I don't know if I do or not. I have seen it, so there was a copy of it. They were going to remix it and try to get the quality a little better.
I noticed that a lot of the dialogue is looped on films made in the Philippines.
Practically all of it. It's a very noisy country. There are roosters everywhere, air traffic, you name it... But I did see Black Mamba, because they sent it to me to look at. They wanted my opinion on what they could take out, to shorten it. I gave them some notes, and to be honest with you, John, I don't know whether I sent the tape back, or whether I still have it.
What's it about?
As I did in several films, I play a doctor. He gets involved with a woman who practices witchcraft. She has the capacity to turn into pythons and various bizarre stuff. She has a young child that she has targeted to be the next victim. The doctor is involved in trying to rid her of this curse. There are a lot of dream/hallucination sequences.
But the people that financed it... Over there, it's a different industry. You will get a guy who has some money and decides he wants to make a movie. And he'll make one movie and go broke, and you'll never hear from him again.
That's basically the case with the man who was behind Black Mamba. He was a Chinese in the advertising business. He was getting ready to do some work on it here, to have it released on video. That's when I saw it. I made some comments, and they needed my authorization to do some things, which I gave them. This was several years ago. I've never heard anything more from them.
The great lost John Ashley film.
I'll look around. If I can find it, I'll send it to you. (Unfortunately, in spite of the best efforts of both J.A. and his wife, the tape could not be located.)
You mentioned that several of the Filipino films were done back to back. Which films were made in conjunction with one another?
Black Mama White Mama was made at the same time as The Twilight People. Not day for day, but they overlapped. The Woman Hunt overlapped a little with Beyond Atlantis. I acted in Black Mamba while we were also shooting Savage Sisters.
In reference to several Ashley/Romero films, there are elements of the stories which are feminist. The Woman Hunt and Savage Sisters, as well as Black Mama White Mama and Beyond Atlantis to a certain degree. Although all were marketed as exploitation films, there are these feminist elements. Was that...
Calculated? No. I think, at the time, there was a trend to... actually, even earlier, with The Big Doll House. Seven women, very aggressive and free thinking. I think, in that genre, that a female character that is structured to be strong is a lot more palatable.
Savage Sisters was originally to be called Ebony Ivory And Jade. And too, Black Mama White Mama was initially called Chains Of Hate. It was The Defiant Ones, but with two women. I bought it as a treatment from Jonathan Demme. I think I paid him $500 for it. I remember when AIP called me and wanted to change the title. I thought Black Mama White Mama was really left field. I didn't care for it. As it turned out, that was the most successful theatrical film I have ever done, in terms of hard dollars in my pocket.
But the title change... we were looking for a hook. By the time we finished Ebony Ivory And Jade, the last couple of martial arts films that had been released had not done that well. There had been a lot of martial arts in the movie. AIP came up with the idea of the "Liberation Army". The whole big bogus thing at the time was Patti Hearst, so that’s the Liberation Army. The whole campaign for Savage Sisters was designed around that aspect of history.
I hadn't considered that aspect of history, that situation. Speaking of history, you received an award from the Filipino Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. How does the inscription read on the plaque?
It's back in my workout room. Basically, it was presented to me by Imelda (Marcos). I am the only non-Filipino to ever get it. It was given for my constant support of the Filipino movie industry, for my contribution to employment, etc. and to an enlightened new society. It was for bringing money into the country and opening up the market for Filipino movies over here in the States.
Who were the principals involved in your production company, Four Associates?
Eddie Romero, myself, Bev Miller, and another friend of mine named David Cohen. The Beast Of The Yellow Night was the first film that group did.
I have not seen Sudden Death. Was that film done stateside?
No, that was done in the Philippines. Eddie directed it. The script was written by a black writer named Oscar Williams. We shot it in Manila.
I knew Oscar. Bob, Oscar and I got together. Oscar wrote it for Bob Conrad and Jim Kelly. You remember the black martial artist.
Yeah. He was in Black Belt Jones with the gorgeous Gloria Hendry.
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