The 1976 “grindhouse cheapie” Quentin Tarantino eventually grew to love: “This cruddy little flick”
Despite what his reputation may suggest, it isn’t always love at first sight between Quentin Tarantino and a grimy grindhouse flick, with one of them taking its time in worming its way toward his heart.
It’s a scenario every self-professed cinephile can identify with: sometimes, you watch a movie for the first time, and it doesn’t set the pulse racing, but when you watch it again, and in certain cases, again and again and again, it eventually evolves into a favourite, which is exactly what happened to Tarantino.
Of course, he’s seen more obscure 1970s B-movies than most people, and anyone with such a vested interest in one of cinema’s cheapest and gnarliest offshoots will have inevitably sat through some amount of shite, and even by the standards of the time and the subgenre, The Muthers is a jack of all trades.
It’s not only an exploitation film: it’s a Filipino exploitation film, written and directed by a Filipino filmmaker that was shot on location in the Philippines, which also happens to be both a blaxploitation picture and a women-in-prison story, ticking several boxes all at once, all of which didn’t appeal to Tarantino the first time he saw it.
“Now, while it’s true I have a soft spot in my heart for Filipino cinema in general, and director Cirio Santiago in particular,” the two-time Academy Award winner explained. “My affection for his 1976 women in prison flick, The Muthers, has grown over the years, until this cruddy little grindhouse cheapie has actually become one of my favourite movies.”
The narrative follows Jeannie Bell’s Kelly, who sets out to extricate her sister from a women’s prison, only for her rescue mission to go awry when she ends up incarcerated in the very same facility. Fortunately, as a thief and smuggler, she’s got some skills, and with the offer of immunity on the table if she can shut the prison down, the added incentive fosters the seeds of rebellion and escape.
“So, why is this cruddy little flick one of my favourite movies?” Tarantino asked, before answering his own question. “It’s the playful execution of a preposterous story that’s key to the film’s charm.” It sounds like a backhanded compliment, but in comparing the cast’s performances to children play-acting, the filmmaker found something more to love about The Muthers every time he rewatched it.
He knows it’s not a good movie by conventional metrics, and he knew that the first time he watched it, but as he kept revisiting the schlocky action thriller, a quote from Joe Dante couldn’t help but enter and re-enter his head, to the point that Tarantino used it to define how much the movie had grown on him over the years.
“Is it a good film?” he paraphrased. “What does that mean anyway? But is it a great film? Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, yes!” The Muthers is far from a work of filmic art, but as a breezy 80 minutes of exploitation fare, the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction mastermind grew to love it, to the point where it now sits pretty as one of his all-time favourites.
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