The more money a film has, the more constrained the art will be. But if the art is made for dirt cheap and filmed by the skin of the crew’s teeth, that often, unintentionally or intentionally, pushes boundaries and challenges cultural precepts. Art is not under any obligation to be of good taste, morally, or politically correct. Indeed, there’s a transgressive charm to movies that thrumb their nose at polite society, that revel in the more sexual, outlandish, taboo side of our existence.
The opening credits of the 1981 low-budget action film Firecracker roll over the stunning Jillian Kesner performing martial arts poses for the camera, cutting to a string of black cat firecrackers exploding. Credit to where credit is due, Ciro H. Santiago sure knows how to prime an audience’s expectations right up front.
Produced by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Firecracker is never as good as you hope but never as bad as you’d expect. Santiago, a name likely only familiar to die-hard genre buffs, was a prolific schlockmeister. As a Filipino director, he became a legend in exploitation and drive-in fares, from blaxploitation to women in prison movies. Legend has it that it was he who suggested to Andy Sidaris that instead of renting a plane for a shot, he should get a remote-controlled toy airplane and film that instead. Anyone who has ever seen a Sidaris movie will know what a foundational piece of advice that turned out to be.
Like Raymond Martino’s Skyscraper, Firecracker is not the sleaze fest it purports to be in its advertising. While the Tubi plot synopsis is accurate: A buxom martial arts instructor dishes out justice to ferocious gangsters while investigating the mysterious disappearance of her sister. Like Anna Nicole Smith, Santiago does not spend the reels of Firecracker leering at Kesner and instead allows her to be an independent, stubborn, gung-ho action star.
One of the many pleasures of Firecracker is watching Kesner kick ass. Now, while modern girl-boss cinema has all but diluted that term, it’s important to note that watching women kick ass has been a long and storied tradition of cinema, both mainstream and the fringes alike. It is only recently that younger people have been fooled that women bad-asses were “new” or meant that to be a bad-ass was to be a sexless, killing machine. It’s almost a grim joke that every generation is sold some new form of “women kicking ass,” as if the current generation invented it.
Thankfully, Santiago isn’t interested in politics. He’s only interested in making the seventy minutes fly by. He does this by utilizing an age-old style known as “relentless.” Two fight scenes happen during the movie’s first ten minutes, and I can not stress this enough: for no real reason whatsoever. But watching Kesner kick butt is a cinematic delight all its own.
Yes, there is the infamous topless fight scene between Kesner’s Susanne and her would-be-rapists. But even this scene has a sense of giddy prurience as it sets expectations on its head. Kesner’s dress gets caught on fences and nails, leaving her to run from her attackers in her underwear and heels; Santiago and Ricardo Remias’s camera shows us a slow-motion Kesner running towards the camera, her bra barely holding on. But then Kesner turns around, smiles at her attackers, and beckons them with her finger to follow her.
The scene flips the script from a mere tasteless rape scene to one where the heroine is only playing at being helpless. During the fight scene, when her attacker swings at her with a pipe only to miss and accidentally turn on a nearby table saw, savvy genre fans instantly know that the man’s face is about to meet the saw blade’s teeth-and he does – and it’s glorious.
Santiago and Remias aren’t out to shoot Lawrence of Arabia, yet there are moments in Firecracker that are nothing short of inspired. The camera work is kinetic as it follows characters around a room in a one-shot, or the way they revel in the simple beauty of cars crashing through objects with a clear-eyed simplicity. These men are working with no budget and even less time, and yet they undertake to have more visual flair than your average made-for-streaming slop.
A good thing, too, as the plot of Santiago and Ken Metcalfe’s script is a copy-and-paste mad-libs ripped from other exploitation films. Underground fighting matches to the death, undercover police operations, vengeance, and drug deals gone bad, topped by one of the most convoluted attempts to get rid of a middleman I have ever witnessed. Yet, the dialogue borders on pure camp, with characters delivering their words with an almost Dragnet-like dead-pan seriousness. “Check every, Tom, Dick, and Harry” is as cliche as “Stop, or I’ll shoot,” but these characters say it with a kind of distanced maudlin feel that elevates their lines. “Woman who walks into my place like she’s looking for something is not just another dame.” Now, that’s a line none has ever said, ever. But that’s the beauty of it: no one goes to the movies for things people actually say.
Firecracker is pure, unadulterated, goofy fun. Perhaps it’s how the film looks and feels so dingy; you can practically smell the blood and grime of the warehouses and abandoned cock-fight rings where most of Firecracker is set. Santiago keeps Firecracker moving like a Benny Hill sketch without the iconic music. Fight, talk, fight, talk, fight, exposition-sort of, fight.
Even the sex scene is unusual. An oddly kinky scene involving Kesner and co-star Darby Hinton, slowly cutting away each other’s clothes with shears. The sex scene is so weird because it’s hard to tell precisely whose fetish the filmmakers are indulging. I’m not complaining, mind you; I quite like it when a movie indulges in the fetish of the artist, especially when they are using someone like Kesner to do so. The sex, like their clothes, is cut to pieces by Gervacio Santos’s editing. But there’s a staccato tempo to the editing that makes the scene visually compelling, not just because of the nudity but because of how the cuts imply the sex and the pleasure.
Even the beginning of the sex scene is strange. Hinton and Kesner are locked in a hot, sweaty embrace, interrupted by Chuck’s cat. The cate means and darts around the room, obliterating the sexual tension. It’s then the cat breaks a mirror and flees the room. Kesner and Hinton look on, startled and bewildered. It’s never commented on, and the two brush it off and get right back to getting down and dirty.
But here’s the thing: Either it was staged, and then Santiago had to get a cat, set up the scene, light it, and hope the cat would go feral on cue. Or the cat was part of the scene, got a case of the zoomies, destroyed part of the set, and Santiago, genius that he was, understood that it might be the most authentic thing he’s ever captured on film and kept it.
I haven’t talked much about the story because it doesn’t matter. Though Dinton’s death scene is a howler, if only because the guy has no idea what’s happening or why, then when he does, he offers the lamest, most half-hearted apology, that getting stabbed in the eye-sockets by sticks is the getting off easy.
Firecracker is not some hidden gem. It’s fine, enjoyable, slightly below-average B-movie fare. Yet, a movie about a woman avenging the death of her sister, made by and with PoC, makes you wonder if, by today’s standards, Firecracker would be called woke. If Firecracker is woke, then it shows how art, while not meaning to be, is often, by its very existence, political. Not to mention, if something like Firecracker is dangerous, then these people are the least serious jack-asses ever to hijack a culture.
Images courtesy of New World Pictures, Shout! Factory, Monterey Home Video, and Tubi TV
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