The Twilight People screens tonight, Wednesday September 29th, at 11:55 p.m. as part of the "Weird Wednesday" series at Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 320 East Sixth Street in downtown Austin.
Submitted for your approval is 1973's oddity The Twilight People, starring John Ashley, best known as Frankie Avalon's rival in such films as Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, who had gone from his '60s glory days as the Ralph Bellamy of Beach Party pictures to starring in a series of made-in-the-Philippines exploitation films.
The Twilight People is pretty much The Island of Dr. Moreau on a grindhouse budget, or as the poster art for the movie so eloquently put it, "Animal desires... Human lust. Test Tube terrors... Half beast... all monster."
The Alamo's programming genius Lars Nilsen encapsulates the film's appeal:
"I’m glad nobody told Filipino B-movie god Eddie Romero that he should really have a budget if he wanted to make a movie about an island full of monstrous half-human, half-animal beasts. Then we’d be deprived of the spectacle of the ghetto goat-boy, the badly-conceived bat man or the embarrassed-looking panther woman (played by Pam Grier!). Also, Romero probably would have done something foolish with that extra money like hiring somebody other than John Ashley for the lead role. Ashley had parlayed a semi-successful stateside career as a teen actor and rockabilly singer into what passed for super-stardom in the Philippines, where he produced and starred in countless action and monster films as “the white guy”. He’s generally pretty bad, but he will start growing on you after a while, like an exotic island fungus. The whole film exudes an ambiance of sleazy tropical languor that’s quite appealing in its humid way."
Yes, have no fear, Pam Grier is here, but with a lot less screen time than her Blaxploitation classic, Coffy, released later that year. Grier contracted a serious illness during a shoot in the Philippines that nearly killed her, so it's troubling to think that the world was almost deprived of an icon so that movies like The Twilight People could be made.
According to IMDB, the budget for this epic was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000.
But, If you like your movies steaming with the sweaty, vaguely evil ambiance of the Philippine jungle, and involving mutants and mad scientists, you'll dig The Twilight People the most.
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a classic of a different kind!
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