a.k.a. Mars Ravelo’s Darna and the Giants
company: Tagalog Ilang Ilang Productions
year: 1974
runtime: 109′
country: Philippines
directors: Emmanuel H. Borlaza
and Leody M. Diaz
cast: Vilma Santos, Divina Valencia,
Helen Gamboa, Rossana Marquez,
Loretta Marquez, Desiree Destreza

Narda (Vilma Santos) lives in a typical rural village in the Philippines with her grandmother and little brother Ding (Don Don Nakar).  One evening they witness a saucer-shaped spaceship flying overhead.  Soon spacemen are wandering the surrounding countryside kidnapping locals and vaporizing those who try to escape while reports of attacks by giant people begin pouring into local news stations.  Narda discovers that the evil alien warrior woman X3X (Helen Gamboa) is responsible, kidnapping earthlings to turn them into a destructive giant slave army with hopes of conquering the planet.  It’s up to Narda’s alter-ego, the super-woman Darna, to stop X3X’s terrible  scheme.

Dramatically speaking, DARNA AND THE GIANTS is more consistent (and coherent) than the later DARNA AT DING (the only other of the series I’ve seen to date).  The early narrative focuses on the home life of Narda, the romantic advances of a local young man and the bothersome antics of Ding.  There’s quite a lot of singing here (Narda’s wooer is a musician), including an amusing moment where the cast spontaneously erupts into a Tagalog reworking of Singin’ in the Rain while doing household chores.  There are the expected comic interludes, like a guitar-toting suitor realizing he’s been serenading a homosexual man as opposed to an attractive rural woman, but fewer than one might imagine, and once the aliens have landed things take a more serious turn.

DARNA AND THE GIANTS actually shows us the aftermath of a giant attack before introducing the giants themselves, with Darna and Ding visiting an impromtu outdoors hospital for the many victims.  It’s not a happy sight, as a husband watches his wife die in agony and a young woman searches futily for her lost mother.  When the giants are revealed they turn out to be intolerable bullies who fight amongst themselves before being sent out to frighten the local population into submission.

And frighten they do!  The giants prove to be a nasty bunch, crushing people beneath their feet and using uprooted power poles to swat at them like bugs.  Houses are picked up and shaken about with their occupants still inside, only to be tossed casually aside when the giant’s attention is otherwise diverted.  The death on display is quite graphic for all-ages entertainment, and ensures that our sympathies are squarely with Darna when she flies in to give the over-sized miscreants their just deserves.

Of course the real villain of the picture is the dastardly X3X, whose brain exists externally in a special container so as to prevent its power from being hampered by any physical strain her body might endure.  While the giants are indisputably nasty, it is her bastardization of science that has given them their super-human stature and her dreams of planetary conquest their motivation.  X3X’s own vileness is assured once she reveals her favorite leisure-time activity – watching her elf-eared alien minions slowly crush helpless victims beneath a weighted plate of spikes.

The eventual comeuppance paid X3X and her giant slaves is fitting and violent.  One giant has his eyes ripped out, allowing him to stumble into a nest of hot high tension wires, while another is carried off by his hair and dropped into the mouth of an active volcano.  Perhaps more interesting is the fact that several of the giants are allowed to repent their sins (the sight of a church amidst the devestation is enough to put the fear of God into them) and escape Darna’s wrath, only to fall victim to the telepathic powers of X3X in their efforts to stand up to her.  You can rest assured that after all the death and destruction witnessed (and there is a lot) that X3X gets hers as well, decapitated both figuratively and literally.

I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a simple political message to DARNA AND THE GIANTS.  The film was released just two years after president Ferdinand Marcos instituted martial law in the Philippines.  The resulting censorship of opposition opinions in the media (scripts for films had to be screened by the government before production was allowed to begin) would have prevented direct opposition to Marcos’ methods to be espoused, but the simple story of a giant army trampling on the rights of the general populace could easily have slipped by as pure fantasy.  Even if not directly relatable to that contemporary situation, the conflict undoubtedly played well with a country occupied in the past by everyone from the Spanish to the English to the imperial Japanese.

This was the big Christmas season release for Tagalog Ilang-Ilang Productions, and it’s obvious that a good deal of money was put into it.  The plentiful special effects moments were devised by effects man Jessie Sto. Domingo and special photographer Tommy Marcelino.  The giants are brought to life through simple photographic effects and, more frequently, the use of massive forced-perspective setups requiring hundreds of extras to run about in the background while the giants stand among scaled miniatures in the foreground.  It all looks pretty quaint by the industry standards of today, but the shear enthusiasm of those involved is deserving of admiration all the same.

I imagine this was quite a succesful domestic release in its time, the star power of the beautiful Vilma Santos being more the enough to guarantee healthy ticket sales.  The rest of the cast is full of recognizable industry regulars.  Divina Valencia [PUSSY CAT, QUEEN OF THE WILD BUNCH] receives second billing in spite of her few lines, but has definite screen presence as a giant in a Viking helmet.  Max Alvarado, who seems to be in just about every Filipino film production since 1950, has a prominent role as a giant as well – a role he would reprise in the fantastic opener for DARNA AT DING.

I’d love it if some enterprising American distributor (Severin?  Synapse??  Mando Macabro???) would pick up the Vilma Santos Darna films for English-friendly home video releases, but for the moment we must settle for tape-sourced VCDs that are often hard to come by.  That’s not to say that DARNA AND THE GIANTS is impossible to see at present – quite the contrary.  You just have to know where to look and be willing to overlook a considerable language barrier.

So, is DARNA AND THE GIANTS worth the effort to see it?  I’d say definitely.  It’s a weird and wonderful little sci-fi fantasy yarn and Vilma Santos is as charming as ever.  Highly recommended.