When ‘bomba’ sex films were a staple of Philippine cinemas and their female stars graced magazine covers
- Cheaply made and with female characters who were either sexual predators or rape victims, bombas thrived in pre-VCR era despite Catholic Church opposition
- In spite of their trashy quality, the bombas also often represented the hardships and misery of everyday life for Filipinos during the Marcos dictatorship
Surprisingly for a country known for its strong adherence to Catholicism, the Philippines was a major producer of sex films throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
The “bombas”, as they were known – the term best translates as “bold” and roughly means scandalous – were a mix of soft-core and hard-core pornography, and their female stars became well-known celebrities who frequently graced the covers of newspapers and magazines.
Although the bomba films became increasingly explicit, they were a mainstream phenomenon, and attracted students and regular audiences to cinemas, as well as men in search of a cheap thrill. Famous bomba stars included the singularly named Yvonne, and later, Anna Marie Gutierrez and Pepsi Paloma (real name Delia Smith).
Hundreds of bomba films were made over the years, with titles like Climax of Love, Unfaithful Wife, Scorpio Nights and White Slavery. Although frequently attacked by the church, the bombas and their stars became a fixture of Philippines cultural life which was only ended by the increasing availability of home VCR (video) players in the 1990s.
According to Luigi Conti’s essay Bomba: The Birth of a Genre, a number of factors were behind this explosion of screen sexuality. The sexual revolution that was taking place across the globe in the late 1960s and early 1970s played a part, as did the relaxation of censorship rules in the Philippines in 1967.