By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
IN THEIR song “Betamax,” Sandwich configures ancient history as the time before MTV, MP3, DVD, cellphones and the Internet, when there was only “Betamax”. But there are those among us who remember even further back.
Watching Quentin Tarantino’s and Robert Rodriguez’s “Grindhouse” films (”Death Proof” and “Planet Terror”) with my popcorn in the air-conditioned comfort of the local cineplex, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the kids in the theater knew what a “grindhouse” was? How many of them could even imagine what it was like in these illicit dens of sin?
The quaint term for them was “second-run moviehouses,” but my parents called them “Sine Surot” (my mother even convinced me that was what the revolving neon “S”s around the theater marquees stood for). They existed in most towns, decrepit buildings with noisy old projectors that showed double features of foreign movies that had shown months, sometimes even years before, in first-run cinemas.
I grew up in Pasig, where the local fleapit was called Leleng (the town’s other theaters were Elma and Victoria, go figure). There was always a thrill of the illicit going there because, unlike the other theaters that were on main street, Leleng was tucked away behind the butcher’s section of the old public market. As a result, the street in front of it was always muddy, the stench of blood and offal hung in the air, and occasionally you could hear the death squeals of a pig being slaughtered. How’s that for atmosphere?
Inside there was always a gaggle of the local wastrels, many of them stripped to the waist because of the heat (yes, there was no air-conditioning), smoking cigarettes and fanning themselves. The air was stale with sweat and tobacco. The floor was sticky with unmentionable substances.
But the movies!
I must have been in the third or fourth grade when I first went to Leleng. School chums playing hooky, someone mentioned going to the movies, and before I knew it I was at the till, coins clutched in a sweaty palm. The first movie was forgettable, but the second one I can still remember, down to the theme music. It was “War of the Gargantuas,” a Japanese rubber monster movie from the late ’60s, and for days afterward it was all we could talk about at school.
I was hooked. Occasionally my parents would take me to see the blockbusters of the day: “How The West Was Won” and “The Sound of Music” at the Roman Super Cinerama “downtown,” and later at the New Frontier when it opened in Cubao. But my regular movie fix I got at Leleng.
These were the prime years for genre films: I saw scores of secret agent movies, spaghetti westerns, horror films, samurai and kung fu flicks, blaxploitation films and softcore erotica. Clint Eastwood in “Hang ‘Em High,” Lee Van Cleef in “Sabata,” Franco Nero in “Django.” Pam Grier in “Foxy Brown” and Tamara Dobson in “Cleopatra Jones.” Shintaro Katsu as Zatoichi, the blind swordsman. And unforgettably, Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as his nemesis Dr. Van Helsing in the Hammer vampire series.
I also began to frequent the Lion theater in Marikina, my mother’s hometown, then just a short jeepney ride away. It was a bit more upmarket than Leleng, being on main street, and my film viewing experience was greatly enhanced by the absence of meat stench and pig squeals. I remember three films in particular: King Hu’s “Come Drink With Me” with Cheng Pei Pei, the first modern wuxia (Chinese martial arts) film; Akira Kurosawa’s kidnap thriller “High and Low,” and “Die, Monster, Die!,” Boris Karloff’s last film.
This golden age lasted through my high school years, culminating in the “Bomba” era, when movie houses started screening softcore flicks with “singit,” unrelated hardcore sex scenes inserted between reels. Leleng began screening movies such as “The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood” while Elma and Victoria showed Tagalog films with titles like “Nympho,” “Nympha,” “Saging ni Pacing,” “Ang Magtatalong” and the notorious “Batuta ni Dracula.”
By then I was old enough to venture downtown by myself, where I also frequented sleazy palaces of decadence such as the Times and Esquire cinemas in Quiapo (famous for their Bruce Lee marathon screenings) and the Podmon, Roxan and Galaxy theaters on Avenida when I wanted to treat myself to a first-run movie. (Sadly, only the Times remains, grimly hanging on in the heart of Quiapo’s DVD district).
Unknown to me at the time, the local grindhouses were on their last legs. The first multiplex cinemas were starting to emerge, cutting into their already narrow profit margins.
Ironically, the death blow to the grindhouse came with the advent of the Betamax and video rentals.
Too late for me, though. I was scarred for life: my cinematic tastes formed for better or for worse by all those afternoons at the grindhouse. Once in a while, I’ll run across a DVD reissue of a film I first saw at Leleng or Lion, and those grindhouse memories come flooding back.
Check out the June 15 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.
