Great white diver (and hunter, one presumes) Matt Farrell (John Ashley) is kidnapped and brought to the private island of one Dr Gordon (Charles Macaulay), mad scientist. Gordon dwells on the island with his daughter Neva (Pat Woodell) and a small security detachment led by Steinman (Jan Merlin), a really unpleasant kind of guy – quite obviously meant to be a Nazi - Farrell will lock horns with repeatedly.
Gordon needs Farrell as another specimen for his mad science plan of creating an improved human race able to survive the harshness of the catastrophic future the good doctor is convinced is coming. Apparently, you do that by turning people into animal persons. Gordon has quite the menagerie of those by now, but is unhappy with the anipeoples’ tendencies to develop highly animalistic behavioural patterns and to flee further experimentation whenever the opportunity arises. Which is rather often, for Steinman may be brutal, but he’s not actually good at jobs more complex than simply gunning someone down.
Neva isn’t happy at all with her dad’s work – there’s also some shady business about her mother hinted at – and when she hits it off with Farrell, she decides to help him and the already transformed anipeople to stage an escape.
Even though I love the man’s project of making Filipino movies as exploitation fare for the international market to bits, I’m often not terribly happy with the actual films Eddie Romero directed. I have no problems with a certain sloppiness in the filmmaking that does tend to come with the territory doing things on the fly and on the cheap, but many of Romero’s films have a tendency to drag their feet for large parts of their running time I don’t enjoy.
Not so in the case of The Twilight People, a clear attempt at adapting H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr Moreau” while carefully excising every single thought, philosophical idea or moment of intellectual depth the original novel had, and adding a smidgen of The Most Dangerous Game. Romero and co-writer Jerome Small do this curiously well, so that this piece of Wells without a brain is nearly perversely great at what it does.
What it does is mainly present us with the misadventures of the animal people, a group of actors (Pam Grier!, Ken Metcalfe, Tony Gosalvez, Kim Ramos and Mona Morena) fitted out in ridiculous but also wonderfully grotesque make-up jobs, doing some improbably strange animal impressions that by all rights should be patently ridiculous in their earnest intensity but do in practice turn out to be pretty wonderful as well as somewhat creepy.
Best in show isn’t even Pam Grier, who can Panther Woman as well as anyone, or Ken Metcalfe, who is one weird antelope, but Tony Gosalvez. His portrayal of the, well, Bat Man (looking a lot more like Man Bat, actually) is so gleefully over the top, I can’t imagine anyone watching it not just feeling at least a smidgen of pure childish joy. The scenes where he learns to fly on his ramshackle wings, screeches joyfully and begins biting out the throats of bad guys clearly too flabbergasted to hit him with their guns, are absolute pearls of the funny and the grotesque. It’s no wonder he gets to fly off into the sunset at the end of the film, whereas the other anipeople die tragically.
The Twilight People’s more verbal actors don’t fare as well as the film’s true heroes: Ashley is the blandest, least lively manly man imaginable, Woodell is just kinda there, and Macauley only occasionally hits the proper note of ranting and raving. Only Merlin with his Nazi impression seems to get the kind of film he is in, and acts accordingly. The Filipino side actors are all pretty great, of course, as they always are.
Fortunately, Romero is pretty clear about which side his bread is buttered on, and only cares about the characters without special effects makeup as much as he needs to keep the plot rolling. So there’s rather a lot more rollicking monster movie nonsense and running through the jungle to enjoy in The Twilight People than scenes of John Ashley looking wooden.