Director: Eddie Nicart
Writers: Greg Macabenta from a story by Cora Caballes
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org, Cinema Insomnia
Interpol Agent 00, aka Weng Weng, is assigned to hunt down a group of terrorists kidnapping and killing Manila industrialists. Will Weng Weng stop these terrorists before they achieve their extortionist goals or will he fall victim to their diabolical plans?The only thing of note about this movie is it stars Ernesto de la Cruz, aka Weng Weng, a 2’ 9” Filipino martial arts actor. He was born with primordial dwarfism and currently holds the world’s record for shortest person to have a starring role in a movie. This is a sequel to For Y’ur Height Only, Weng’s first appearance as Agent 00 (and maybe a second movie called Agent 00, though I can’t confirm that it exists).
The series spoofs/rip-offs of James Bond films and I have to include that slash because, frankly, I’m not sure which the movie is doing. Were these cheap Filipino James Bond rip-offs that they decided to cast Weng Weng in or did they intend these as Weng Weng vehicles and decide it’d be hilarious if he were a less-than-a-meter-tall James Bond? It’s hard to say because it’s certainly ripping off spy movies left and right, but it doesn’t seem to play up Weng Weng’s size as a joke. There are scenes where characters react, but it’s never a big reaction. Instead it’s, “Who’s this little person? Oh, you’re the guy from INTERPOL. Okay.” Everything’s played completely straight which makes all of it that much more absurd. So, kudos I guess.
What do I say about this movie? I fell asleep while watching it, but I’d eaten the better part of a pizza so there were extenuating circumstances. Also, I watched the Cinema Insomnia version because I bought a Roku specifically for the precursor to OSI 74 and I’m a Patron of the channel through Patreon. However, I almost never watch it (or anything that’s not a Misery Mill movie), so I decided to scroll through the shows and movies they had on offer and find something from the Misery Mill list. That led me to the Movie Nightmares’ version of Sisters of Death and this movie getting the Insomniac treatment. So while I’m ostensibly supposed to be talking about the movie, I’m more interested in talking about Cinema Insomnia and horror host shows in general, but that’s a much longer post than I intend right now.
The movie in brief: Weng Weng foils a kidnapping of a prominent Filipino businessman and afterward gets the details that it’s part of a series of kidnappings and ransoms. One man was murdered, another released after he paid the 2 million Pesos. Weng is sent to the Philippine Consul of Industrialists (PCI) who have just received a video from the kidnappers. A man in a white hood claiming his group are nationalists, not terrorists, *ahem*, says he wants 1 billion Pesos total from the members of the PCI in one week or he’ll start killing them one by one. Then the tape explodes.
Weng Weng works the case, gets targeted by the gang running the operation, and eventually starts to suspect that Manolo, the head of the PCI, is actually organizing the whole scheme. Nothing really leads to this conclusion, or to anything else in the movie to be honest, but he’s right. Manolo uses his influence to try to get Weng pulled from the case, and does, but that makes no material difference. Weng gets captured by the gang, is nearly killed, but is saved at the last minute by a random woman that’s fallen in love with him. He hides on the gang’s boat, grabs the money when it’s handed off, and fights his way to freedom, revealing Manolo’s role in it all. THE END.
This is one of those films that just sort of washes over you. It’s just action set piece after action set piece strung together with terribly dubbed dialogue. So there’s certainly a camp pleasure in just how bad it is as well as an exploitation pleasure in seeing this little person involved in these big fight sequences. As I said before, it’s all played pretty straight, but it’s hard not to see something absurd in a car chase that involves a man riding a pocket bike that looks, on him, like a full-sized motorcycle. It’s clunky, but knowingly silly, which tends to point up the silliness of the source material itself. The problem, in other words, isn’t taking Weng Weng seriously, it’s taking James Bond seriously.
As I said, I watched the Cinema Insomnia version of this, which I kind of enjoyed. The movie was uncut so, with host segments and ads, it was 2-and-a-half hours long. In other words, the movie exhausted me, the show didn’t. As Jonathan Ian Mathers of Neurotically Yours said of Cinema Insomnia itself, the joy of horror host shows is less the movies than the hosts themselves, and he’s right, especially when it comes to z-grade public domain flicks like The Impossible Kid. Mr. Lobo, the host, does a good job and the host segments are compelling, maybe moreso than the movie. In this episode, Mr. Lobo is forced by one of his sponsors to host this film along with their client, rockstar Slob Zombie. Apparently it’s one of Slob’s favorite films. Only the movie, literally, stinks and Slob is nowhere to be found. As the show goes on, Lobo starts to receive ransom videos from a terrorist aping the terrorist from the movie, who says he’s holding Slob hostage. The gags go from willfully goofy (“Slob Zombie”) to warped gags representing a deep knowledge of b-movies, and I dug them.
What I enjoyed most, though, was that there were actual gags and a personality. There was a sensibility that informed what was happening. The show includes vintage ads as well as OSI 74 ads and actual sponsors, and I don’t begrudge any of that. Vintage ads just aren’t my aesthetic even though these were chosen because they related to the content of the movie. So, again, there’s clearly a sensibility and aesthetic underlying all the decisions. How well it works for you comes down to a matter of taste, but this worked for me and if I can swap out a Cinema Insomnia version for one of the straight versions of a Misery Mill pic in the future, I definitely will.
Also, as I alluded to above, the movie seems to be public domain. I’ve added an MPEG-2 copy from my dvd to archive.org here. As I said, the movie’s fine. Maybe set it up as a double feature with some other cheapo Filipino films like Black Cobra 2 or 3. Definitely riffable and pleasantly absurd on its own.
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