T.N.T. Jackson, for which you see the U.S. promo poster above, is a mid-budget blaxploitation flick shot in the Philippines and Hong Kong, built around clumsy martial arts, a flimsy plot, and shoddy acting. But it has Jeanne Bell. Playboy magazine had made Bell a centerfold in 1969. From there she launched a movie career, with T.N.T. Jackson coming ninth in her filmography. She plays Diana “T.N.T.” Jackson, who learns that her brother was killed by Hong Kong drug dealers and seeks payback. While the plot is nothing special, Bell certainly is. She was twenty-five and wore a bouffant hair-do when she first appeared in Playboy; in T.N.T. she was thirty and had blossomed into an unforgettable beauty with a frosted afro, kicking and chopping her way across the movie screen. All the fight scenes are hilarious, with their cut-rate choreography and claw-handed posing, but they're fun to watch, especially the one in which she kicks the shit out of a bunch of guys while wearing only panties. That bit seems to us a clear homage to Reiko Ike's totally nude fight in 1973's Sex & Fury, another movie that surpasses its limitations by piling on style and attitude. Is T.N.T. Jackson actually good? No—but we bet it'll make you smile. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1974.

Above is an Italian poster for the American financed, Philippine shot sexploitation actioner The Big Doll House, which starred Roberta Collins, Brooke Mills, Pat Woodell, Pam Grier, and Judy Brown. This wasn't the first women in prison movie—those had been appearing for decades—but it was the one that got the ’70s prison sexploitation ball rolling in the U.S. It offers a full slate of whippings, waterboardings, overheated isolation, and bizarre snake tortures, orchestrated by the evil wardeness Christiane Schmidtmer. Collins leads the beautiful convicts' eventual escape from bondage and hers is the most memorable character in the ensemble, though all the personalities are interesting. Don't get us wrong—the acting is of course atrocious, and the production values aren't high, but that didn't bother us and it didn't bother American audiences either. They made the movie a hit and the women-in-prison conveyor belt quickly cranked out other Filipino bondage productions like Women in Cages, The Hot Box, The Woman Hunt, The Big Bird Cage, and many others. The Big Doll House wasn't the best of the lot, by any stretch, but hey—being a trailblazer matters. We think it's worth a viewing.

Hot Rod Gang falls into that category of movies that are better known for their poster art than for the actual film. And the poster art is definitely brilliant—no dispute there—but the movie? Not so much. John Ashley plays a hepcat who gets in trouble for reckless driving and, due to the pursuit of the local strongarm cop, has to adopt a new identity. Thrown onstage by happenstance, this new identity—Jackson Dalrymple—becomes a rock and roll star. Where’s the hot rodding, you wonder? The movie is really a musical comedy with a bit of racing wrapped around, while uniformly atrocious acting bogs down the whole enterprise. The main attraction is watching early rocker Gene Vincent play himself and put on a couple of numbers. The film also features other, less adept, probably dubbed performances, including several by Ashley, who you may remember for his run of Mystery Science Theatre-worthy 1970s horror/action epics shot in the Philippines. In the end Hot Rod Gang all comes together in a rumble and a chase. We can't recommended it, but it’s amusing if you’re in the right frame of mind. Oh, and we almost forgot—our copy kicked off with the ad you see below. Hot rods indeed.

The Big Bird Cage finds writer-director Jack Hill at the top of his form as he sticks star Anitra Ford in a Philippine jungle prison where an evil warden uses the female inmates as slave labor to process sugar. Pam Grier and Sid Haig are revolutionaries who want to recruit women for their cause, so Grier infiltrates the prison and primes the women for a big break out. This is one of the most remembered of 70s B-romps, a sleazefest filled with iconic scenes such as Ford being suspended by her hair, and seven-foot model Karen McKevic slathering her body with grease and dashing naked through camp. The classic poster is above, a brilliant production photo appears below, and if you’re looking for actual reviews, well, there are about a thousand online. Wild, weird, and oh so incorrect, The Big Bird Cage premiered in the U.S. today in 1972.

We’ve seen hunters battling giant crocodiles on the covers of pulp magazines, but yesterday, it happened for real. On the southern island of Mindanao, in the Agusan del Sur township of Bunawan, hunters snared a giant crocodile measured at twenty-one feet and more than 2,300 pounds. That makes it the biggest specimen ever captured in the Philippines. Gleeful mayor Edwin Cox Elorde posed with the creature, and, after one hundred villagers managed to wrestle the trussed croc into a fenced enclosure, announced plans to use it as the central attraction in a planned ecotourism theme park. While the capture and exploitation of the animal bothers environmentalists (including us), and we can just picture this future theme park (not a pretty image), Bunawan crocodiles’ free days frankly were numbered from the moment one of them bit the head off a ten-year-old girl back in 2009. When more people narrowly escaped being croc chow, and two reptiles ate the head off a carabao (water buffalo), the push to capture the animals intensified. Yesterday, hired hunters succeeded. Up next: the croc's inevitable escape and vengeful rampage.

Update: Lolong, which was the name given to the croc, has died. After living an estimated century in the wild, he lasted less than a year in human hands. Figures. Locals plan to display him stuffed so they can keep cashing in on him.

We were going to post about this earlier in the week, but then changed our minds. But today we’re feeling wordy, so here you go. If you follow boxing, you know Manny Pacquiao. He’s a punching dynamo, one of the toughest guys in the world, and has been on the sports pages for months due to the drama surrounding his on-again off-again bout with undefeated Floyd Mayweather. If you follow politics, you know by now that Pacquiao won a seat earlier this week to the Philippine parliament. He’ll be representing Sarangani province, which is on the island of Mindinao. Pacquiao won his post by beating a wealthy and entrenched political clan, and in defiance of those who predicted his congressional bid would fail the same way his 2008 attempt did.

But this time Pacquiao was more organized, disseminating his anti-poverty message at a grassroots level, and outspending his opponent Roy Chiongbian. In fact, some observers have suggested that Pacquiao’s massive spending doesn’t square with his message about poverty, but we don’t particularly see that. Pacquiao spent what was needed to win and now claims that because he used mostly his own money he owes no favors to special interests. In our view, politics is about nothing but favors to special interests, and if you’ve spent millions of your own money your first thought might perhaps be to make some of it back. Just saying is all. But we admit to seeing events through an American prism. We don’t want to sell Pacquiao short—he’s passionate, seems sincere, and worked hard for his win. In politics, it’s sometimes possible for sincere outsiders to storm the palace. Maybe Pacquiao is one of those outsiders. And there’s always this: if he turns out to be just another corrupt corporate shill, Sarangani voters can always fly Floyd Mayweather into town to beat the shit out of him.