FILMMAKER BOBBY A. SUAREZ PASSED AWAY, 67

The Philippines has lost another of its B movie legends.

Andrew and Bobby at the Suarez residence in Bulacan - January 2008

 

Australian filmmaker Andrew Leavold, a huge fan of Pinoy cinema, just relayed this sad news that Bobby A. Suarez (b. 1942) passed away last February 7 due to cardiac arrest. He was 67. Suarez was in and out of the hospital due to his heart condition. He also underwent a kidney operation.

Suarez, a film producer, director and screenwriter, was best remembered for his works in the 70s and 80s in B-movie action films like the The Bionic Boy (1977), They Call Her…Cleopatra Wong (1978), Dynamite Johnson (1978), One-Armed Executioner (1980), Searchers Of The Voodoo Mountain (1985), American Commandos (1986), among others.

movie ads courtesy of Andrew Leavold blog at:

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"VIDEO 48" FEATURED IN THE SUNDAY INQUIRER MAGAZINE

In the July 5, 2009 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, a supplement of the the Philippines Daily Inquirer, two film sites, Video 48 and Andrew Leavold: The Search For Weng Weng were mentioned in the article, "Pinoy Cult Films: The Cinema That Wouldn't Die" by Eric S. Caruncho. (Thanks Eric for the write-up)

Part of the article...

Thanks to the Internet and the efforts of obsessive fanboys and girls – many of them outside the Philippines – these films are beginning to get some kind of recognition (“respect” may be too strong a word).

Quentin Tarantino, for one, has openly acknowledged his cinematic debt to a number of Pinoy exploitation movies even as he combines grindhouse aesthetics with A-list Hollywood production values.

A recent international film festival actually held a screening of the camp midnight movie classic “Temptation Island,” perhaps a signal of wider acceptance of Pinoy cult cinema.

It is on the worldwide web, however, where these movies continue to live a preternatural half-life, as downloadable torrents, or legal online DVD purchases, and enshrined as the content of lovingly constructed websites and blogs, ripe for rediscovery.

• A good place to start is http://andrewleavold.blogspot. com/, a weblog maintained by Australian Andrew Leavold, who runs a video rental place in Brisbane where one can presumably find many of these films, and who actually made a documentary titled “The Search for Weng Weng.” The film follows him as he retraces the tiny footsteps of the “For Y’ur Height Only” star from his birthplace in Baclaran to his final resting place at the Pasay cemetery. Leavold’s blog contains a wealth of information on Tagalog movies, including extensive filmographies of Dolphy, Fernando Poe, Tony Ferrer, Roberto Gonzales, Ramon Zamora and others, as well as a mouth-watering archive of cult Tagalog movies. Leavold’s obsessive attention to the minutiae of even the most obscure films should put us natives to shame.

• Thankfully, we have a local counterpart in http://video48.blogspot.com/. Maintained by one Simon Santos, the site offers a somewhat more balanced view of Philippine cinema, including as it does more mainstream films and fewer of the more extreme type (although it has its share of Pinoy movie arcana, offering for instance, proof of the existence of a 1987 bold film actually titled “Diligin ng Suka ang Uhaw na Lumpia”). It also covers Tagalog komiks and other aspects of Filipino popular culture, with an equally obsessive attention to detail. With a wealth of archival material including news items, photographs, movie posters and scanned artwork, video48 is a true labor of fanboy love. (click images above to read the article in full)

http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/sim/sim/view/20090704-213838/Pinoy-Cult-Films-The-Cinema-that-Wont-Die