Cortechba Overrated

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Comeuppance Reviews A frightening new gang is running wild on the streets of Manila and terrorizing the citizens. They are all bald and wear bizarre leather costumes. Imagine a cross between Buddhist monks and Zipperface-style leather freaks, and you're just about there. A good cop named W2 (Alonzo) gets into a scuffle with the gang and...wait. The guy's name is W2. W2. There's also a guy in the movie named R2. In real life he's played by Bing Davao, so we don't know which is cooler. So the good guys are like tax forms meet Star Wars. When W2 shoots the evil gang leader's brother, said leader, Nosfero (Montero) wants him dead, and that seriously puts a crimp in W2's new marriage with W2's Wife (Gutierrez) (her name in the movie is credited solely as "W2's Wife" - but then again, if you were W2's wife, isn't that all you'd want to be known as?). After Maj. Medina (Gamboa) takes away W2's badge and gun, he goes on a solo mission to stop Nosfero and the evil gang, which he discovers is a cult. When he finds out they kidnapped a bunch of schoolchildren, and are about to enter into a million-dollar opium-smuggling deal, he really snaps into action. Find out just how he does it as W2...IS WAR.God bless the Philippines. They provided us with so much cinematic entertainment in the 70's and 80's, and this is one of their more off-kilter entries. It's a bit like Cobra Thunderbolt (1984) (which is Thai, but who's counting?) meets Search for Vengeance (1984). Much like how the centerpiece of Cobra Thunderbolt was our beloved Lt. Molly and her shooting a machine gun at the baddies while riding a jetpack, here the main focus is clearly the gang/cult and their wonderful attire. It's like a Mad Max situation, but the movie gives no indication it takes place in the future. Is the Philippine economy really doing that bad? It can't be, because their film industry seemed to be doing gangbusters then...but that didn't stop Nosfero and the gang from being the "biggest pot producer in Asia" to graduating to lucrative opium deals. They sure got a ton of extras to be in the gang, and we can see the lure. Not the drugs -- the outfits, of course.It's even explained that people follow Nosfero because he has strong powers of hypnotism. And all this time we thought it was his fashion-forward sideways ponytail. Also, the higher-ups in the organization get cool single-name appellations like Pendragon and Voltar. In order to beat them, W2 slaps some metal siding on his car - and himself, becoming, quite literally, a knight in shining armor - and rolls into battle. The final 30 minutes or so of the movie is one extended battle sequence/climax. It goes from a strange curio with wacky dubbing and odd people in the first half to an out-and-out exploding hutter, with blow-ups, guard tower falls, and the works in the latter half. It all has a funky, 70's-style score from Ernani Cuenco, and director Milan is handy with wide-angle lens effects. He also directed the hard-to-find and awesomely-named Ultimax Force (1987).Released on the great Paragon label during the VHS era, it has also, interestingly enough, received a DVD release on the Telavista label. Both U.S. formats used the original title, simply "W", not to be confused with the Twiggy movie of the same name. You could walk into a video store in the mid-80's and find two movies called W, one on Paragon and the other on Lightning. It truly was an amazing time. We were really spoiled back then. But much like W2, W continues to survive.

Silent_Larry OK; "W" is pretty awesome. The bad guy commands a 1,000 man army of skinhead biker thugs who occupy a huge prime piece of undeveloped beach real estate, which apparently functions as a hideout somehow. They're all dressed in Mad Max style crazy-guy clothes, and behave like an untouchable bad-ass gang who rule the badlands in a dystopian future. All that sort of clashes with the fact that the rest of the film's universe seems to be set in contemporary Manilla. Well, never mind.The bad guys' day job is opium smuggling. They divide their downtime between assaulting normal-universe Manilla, and doing calisthenics on their expansive beach estate. Despite them running around all crazy-like in Mad Max couture for the first 3/4 of the film, and regularly having fun with various weapons and pyrotechnics on their "secret" beach compound, the cops can't seem to locate them. Maybe it's because the cops have like 30 employees total, and only one of them is any good at taking on the bad guys. He is the titular agent "W", or, as we find out in the course of the film his full title, and no kidding; "Agent W2"!Oh yes, do get out your file of IRS jokes for your riffing session.Well, things do not fill out well for W2 in the first half of the movie. After W2 offs a gang member in self defense, we are treated to the obligatory "your badge and your gun" scene; who could expect anything less? I must say the plot surprised me by going in an unexpected direction during the course of the bad guys messing up W2's honeymoon. I don't want to drop any spoilers, but be prepared to fish out your "short form" jokes from the IRS joke file.It all comes to a head with W2 leading the cops in an assault (FINALLY!) on the beach "hideout". The skinhead army looks almost impressive in ranks on the beach. They are however, lined up in rows of ten, so it's pretty easy to count that they number around 140; a tad less than 1,000. But again, never mind.Obviously for this job, some armor is in order. One welding-and-hammering montage later and viola! Agent W2's '75 Camero is now an assault tank! A bit of sheet metal replacing windows is all it takes to fend off the bad guy's (quote) "latest high powered guns", which luckily cannot penetrate the unarmored pieces of the mighty Camero, such as doors, hood, radiator grill, and tires.The bad guys have a few bad-ass vehicles of their own; my favorite are what seem to be motorcycles crossed with Professor Fate's rocket car from THE GREAT RACE. Yay!The editing is as choppy as I've seen in other Pinoy films of that era, leaving one wondering if they just never got around to filming certain connecting scenes. Lots of action, and from the look of a few of the sequences, one can easily imagine that one or more stunt person/s may have been seriously injured.The only thing that could have improved this flick would have been the presence of the great Weng Weng himself. But wait! We do get a least one "prone man firing weapon while sliding on horizontal surface"! Maybe it's a Pilipino thing(?).Thumbs up from me! ("W Is War" has been released on DVD as "W", and you may have better luck searching for it as such.)

TOBOR, THE GREAT This film is something unbelievable. It is so, so, so, so, so, bad that you would probably start to laugh instantly. A lonely agent, worried about the corruption in his own work, tries to stop a kind of Darth Vader Buda who wants to dominate the Middle Orient with an army that you must see to believe it. There are two awful and freak dwarfs (the bodyguard), an intellectual bold (he talks and talks, but never fights), Pentagon!!! (the best soldier that finally dies like a fly on the wall) and a bunch of dog heads that made themselves all the dangerous action scenes, in which, I guess, many, but many people were seriously injured, trying to imitate Mad Max battles. But what about the main actor. Wow! He penetrates with a blinded car and a gun into the enemy fortress and with the intention of beating thousands and thousands of bad people. And the enemy never had the idea of shooting a bullet straight to his wheels car. Well... there are some many good scenes...: the rituals, the conversations, the love dramas, the fights. One of the worst films of all times, and one of the bizarre masterpieces made in Europe.