Neutron
contra el Criminal Sadico (1964)
(Neutron versus the Maniac)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
Poor Neutron. In the absence of his arch foe Doctor Caronte and his death robots, he's reduced to fighting just whoever happens to be on hand. Fortunately for him, he lives in a world where everyday jobs like "hospital attendant" are taken by people like Nathonael "Frankenstein" Leon who are capable and more than happy to take him on. Sadly, this isn't all that's changed since we last saw Neutron: In addition to having a different mask (who decided that a single racing stripe was cooler than three lightning bolts?), his torso is more conspicuously oiled, and the two manly chums he buddied around with in the previous films (played by Rocambole himself, Julio Aleman and, um, some other guy) have been replaced by... Chucho Salinas? The plot here has Neutron trying to unravel the mystery surrounding a shadowy sanitarium and the murders committed by a masked, knife-wielding maniac that appear connected to it. More accurately, I should say that it's Carlos, Neutron's civilian identity, who is trying to unravel that mystery, since the film's Scooby Doo style plot really doesn't provide much call for a masked wrestler type. Because of that, those sparse occasions on which Carlos does don his Neutron guise seem somewhat arbitrary, as if he just wanted to continue his detecting while giving his nipples some air. It's been noted elsewhere that the modus operandi of the killer here is similar to that of the killer in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom - specifically in that he films the murders as he commits them - but it's of little consequence, since the standard whodunit structure, necessitating that we only get fleeting glimpses of the killer in the course of committing his crimes, makes this film about as far from Powell's intimate psychological portrait as you could get. (Not that you would expect that, mind you, but imagine how awesome it would be if this film actually was an attempt at a faithful remake of Peeping Tom with the addition of a masked wrestler. Such a missed opportunity!) Though Neutron is not technically a luchadore, Neutron contra el Criminal Sadico, out of the four Neutron movies I've seen, is the most like a standard lucha film, mainly due to the nature of its padding; for one, it has an actual wrestling match in it (and with Fernando Oses, no less), and it also has, like Santo's Espectro del Estragulador, a shitload of nightclub set musical numbers. One of those numbers is performed by an act called Hector Cabrera and His Gay Crooners, and I want someone to give me a medal for not making a joke about that. Neutron contra el Criminal Sadico is not an intrinsically terrible film, but it's certainly an odd showcase for the Neutron that we've come to know and perhaps love over the course of the three previous films. That Neutron is most in his element fighting against two-fisted, wrestling-masked mad scientists with cackling dwarf assistants and armies of oven-baked ape zombies. Dropping him in the middle of an old dark house mystery like this seems a little perverse. Though (spoiler alert!) I must admit that I admire the solution that this film provides for its central mystery: It was everybody!
Neutron contra el Doctor Caronte (1960)
(Neutron versus
Doctor Caronte)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
Neutron contra el Doctor Caronte is the third of five Neutron films and the final installment in the initial trilogy of films pitting Neutron against his nemesis, Doctor Caronte. Though more entertaining than the first film, the chatty Neutron el Enmascarado Negro, Neutron contra el Doctor Caronte is considerably more leaden with plot than the action-packed second installment, Neutron contra los Automatas de la Muerte. The story busies itself with a conflict between Doctor Caronte and a rival gang of spies, as well as a lot of puzzling over the identities of both Neutron and Doctor Caronte. This last bit took me by surprise, because I never expect the characters in these movies to even react to the fact that one of the other characters is wearing a mask, much less wonder who they might be beneath it. Still, despite some slow moments, the film has at its center probably the greatest - and, as would logically follow, the weirdest - of all the mad scientists in the wide, wide field of mad scientists to fill the villain's shoes in a lucha movie, the titular Doctor Caronte himself, who is of course joined by his freaky little dwarf assistant-and-maybe-boyfriend Nick and his army of home-baked zombie slaves, The Death Robots. So how could it be anything but awesome? This time around the Doctor has somehow managed to restore his laboratory to the same state of gothic ruin that it was in before it was blown up at the end of Los Automatas de la Muerte and has resumed his obsessive quest to capture the formula for the Neutron Bomb (which, again, apparently doesn't have anything to do with Neutron). It is up to Neutron to stop him of course, though the masked hero's presence doesn't seem to loom as large over this film as it did the previous one. As indicated above, this one is really Caronte's show - and not only do we get to root for the Doctor as he ruthlessly vanquishes the rival gang of spies, but also thrill as he demonstrates some wrestling prowess of his own in the process. Elsewhere the film gets a little bogged down in a love triangle involving the torch singing female love interest and a matching pair of fake-outs in which characters are revealed to be, in one case, Caronte, and, in another, Neutron and then turn out not to be after all. (I knew Julio Aleman wasn't Neutron, anyway, because how could he be both Neutron and Rocambole? That just wouldn't be fair.... And, say, didn't Neutron reveal his identity to his friends at the end of the first film, anyway? Maybe they weren't paying attention.) Still, once Caronte has somehow managed to take pretty much the entire cast hostage, the film comes through and provides appropriate closure to the saga, complete with a dramatic reveal of both principals' true identities (oh, god, please tell me I didn't just use "reveal" as a noun) and delivery in full on the implicit promise that we'd eventually get to see Neutron punch a midget. It's hard to imagine Neutron without Doctor Caronte - and, from what I understand, things would get a bit strange from this point on, with Neutron facing off in the next film against the title character from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.
Neutron contra los Automatas de la Muerte (1960) !
(Neutron versus the
Death Robots)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
To be honest, I've been avoiding Neutron ever since watching his first film, Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro. As much as I like the old black & white, early 60s lucha movies, I found that particular one a bore, mainly because it featured a whole lot of talk and very little Neutron. Still, someone must have enjoyed Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro, because the character was brought back for no less than four more features. And that fact has made Neutron a little hard for me to avoid. Finally I decided to just suck it up, tuck in, and not come up for air until I'd watched the lot of them. My starting point was Neutron contra los Automatas de la Muerte. Now, given that Los Automatas de la Muerte is one of those instant sequels, filmed back to back with the first film and with the same cast and crew (as was the next film Neutron contra el Doctor Caronte), I had little hope that I'd be seeing much variation from el Enmascarado Negro. But the happy fact is that, because Los Automatas de la Muerte starts right where El Enmascarado Negro left off, and the previous film did all of the work of establishing all of the characters and situations, Los Automatas de la Muerte has the luxury of dispensing with all of that and simply cutting to the chase, which it does in fine style. Probably the best thing about Los Automatas de la Muerte is that it affords us ample opportunity to really savor the wonder and strangeness that is Neutron's nemesis, Dr. Caronte. As perfect a specimen of a hysterical megalomaniac as you could ask for, Caronte prowls his vast laboratory in an outfit that bespeaks of a certain career ambivalence, equal parts wrestling togs and surgeons scrubs, affectionately leading his freaky uni-browed dwarf assistant Nick by the hand as he proclaims and declaims in a booming voice about his various dastardly designs. Caronte needs lots of human blood in order to keep alive the collection of talking, disembodied brains, harvested from captured scientists, from whom he hopes to learn the secrets of the much coveted Neutron Bomb (which, as far as I can understand, is not a bomb that just kills Neutron, but more like a regular bomb, only better somehow). To do this he will use his army of Death Robots, a bunch of faceless, ape-like zombies in coveralls that Caronte appears to, um, bake in giant pizza ovens. Now, granted, there's not a lot here that we haven't seen before (well except for the robots being baked in pizza ovens, which is... well, holy shit), but the fact is, when something like this is done right, you really feel like you're watching a maniacal villain in a wrestling mask having a conversation with a roomful of disembodied brains harvested from kidnapped scientists for the very first time. And, what I'm saying is, Los Automatas de la Muerte really does it right. This is quite a well made film, exhibiting all of those qualities present in the most well appointed and technically proficient of the early lucha films: Rich black and white photography, moody night-for-night shooting, and camera work that makes the most of some impressive and atmospheric set designs - basically the same Film-Noir-meets-Universal-monster-movie look we see in great early Santo films like Santo en Museo de Cera and Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro. On top of that, the action in Los Automatas de la Muerte is virtually nonstop - and always outlandish. My favorite scene has got to be the one in which a fleeing Death Robot, on the brink of being captured by Neutron and his pals, commits suicide by pulling off his own head. But there's a lot of competition in that department, especially when you have so many scenes featuring little freaky Nick scurrying around and barking orders at the Death Robots in a screechy, overdubbed voice (there really is something genuinely disturbing about the little dude). Happily, the film ends on an uncertain note, cluing us in that Dr. Caronte and Nick will be back for the next installment (cluing us in further is the fact that the next installment is called Neutron contra el Doctor Caronte, so duh). That I'm actually looking forward to that, despite all of my initial ambivalence, is a testament to the amazing, life-transforming power of Neutron contra los Automatas de la Muerte.
Watch a clip on YouTube! (No audio)
Neutron contra los Asesinos del Karate (1964)
(Neutron versus the Karate
Killers)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
It would be nice to end this Neutronathon on a relative high note - and since the penultimate Neutron film, Neutron contra el Criminal Sadico, kind of made me want to scream, that shouldn't be too hard. Or should it? Though optimistic going into Neutron contra los Asesinos del Karate, I did have some fears, based on having recently watched in quick succession both La Mafia Amarilla and Blue Demon Destructor de Espias, that the film, due to its subject matter, might contain some of the same odious (but admittedly at times hilarious - though in a totally guilty way) Asian stereotyping that those films did. Happily, that turned out to not be the case, since the film's karate gimmick is simply used as an exotic means of committing mayhem for the villains, who - though they do include in their number one actual, honest-to-goodness Asian - are not represented as being any kind of "others". At the same time, I'm not so sure if the discipline of karate itself was all that well represented, since the filmmakers seem to have taken it as simply a Japanese term for "Yelling while hitting". Still, how could you really lose with this set-up? A premise in which you pit Neutron against a bunch of Karate-chopping assassins has just got to deliver more thrills than the previous film, in which Neutron played Scooby Doo to an elusive, knife-wielding phantom. Unless, of course, you play the story as a mystery rather than an action film, opening the film with a brief montage of the assassins' crimes and then spending the rest following Neutron's alter ego Carlos as he tries to track them down through dogged detective work. Which is what they do, by the way. Granted, Carlos' investigation does lead him to a shady karate school run by German Robles - a set-up which makes possible the gratifying spectacle of Fernando Oses beating up Chucho Salinas. Otherwise, however, Neutron contra los Asesinos del Karate manages the downright impressive feat of taking a concept that involves a masked wrestler and a gang of unstoppable martial arts killers and turning it into an incredibly talky and boring motion picture. Neutron's mask appears to have gone through yet another mutation since the last film, and it's one that leaves him looking disconcertingly like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction. Given that, you've got to feel for the guy who, during an early scene in the movie, awakens to find Neutron standing at his bedside, bondage mask, oiled naked torso, tights, and all. Neutron assures him that he's a friend, but I wouldn't have found that all that comforting:
Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro (1960)
(Neutron, the Black
Mask)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
Neutron represents one of two distinct types of Mexican wrestling movie heroes. There are those like Santo and Blue Demon, who are real professional wrestlers simply bringing their ring personas to the screen, and those like Neutron, who are purely fictional characters portrayed by an actor (in this case, Wolf Ruvinskis). Of course, there is also Superzan, who, though not a real wrestler, appears on screen alongside real wrestlers, which, to me, actually constitutes some kind of a hoax. Anyway, Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro, the first of a series of Neutron films, starts off with some slick looking, Saul Bass inspired animated credits that look you right in the eye and promise you that you're about to watch the coolest movie ever. What is then delivered is a film very light on Neutron and very heavy on long and consecutive scenes of verbal exposition. This was especially hard on monolingual old me, because I watched the film on an unsubtitled dvd. And maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps the dialog in Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro is really great, brimming with droll wit and thought provoking philosophical insights. But it appears to me that it's mostly just people filling in whatever new character has just shown up (which happens a lot) on what's happened in the movie so far. In fact, our introduction to Neutron comes via one character holding up a photo of him and explaining to another character who he is, after which we don't actually get to see Neutron for well over half an hour, when he suddenly shows up and punches a bunch of cops in the face (yes, subtitles would definitely have helped). Neutron, though he in every other way matches the luchadore m.o., does not actually wrestle in this movie. And, though I'm otherwise no big fan of the lucha cinema practice of stopping the movie midway for a ten minute wrestling match, I actually think that, in the case of El Enmascarado Negro, that would have served nicely to break things up. I've heard that subsequent Neutron movies are better, so I'm not giving up on the series. After all, even this entry, despite it's longueurs, has a few things to recommend it. For instance, I liked that, rather than giving us just one mad scientist, it gives us a tag team. One of them, Dr. Caronte, wears a wrestling mask, while the other one, Dr. Walker, should, because his face looks like someone poured a can of menudo on it and let it harden. I also liked the army of ape-like zombies that Dr. Caronte has at his command, because the scenes in which they appear come the closest to suggesting the kind of creep show thrills that, in much greater quantity, would have made El Enmascarado Negro much less of a chore to sit through. If ever a movie needed some scantily clad vampire women - and/or a cyclops - this one is it.
Watch a clip on YouTube! (No audio)
Night of the Bloody Apes (1968)
(U.S. version of La
Horripilante Bestia Humana)
IMDB
Available from Amazon
In my fantasy you are begging me to review Night of the Bloody Apes. "Please," you moan. "Tell us about the dirty lucha movie. The one with boobies." Needless to say, I am unmoved by your tears - did I mention that you were weeping? - and toy with you mercilessly. "What? You mean Now, Voyager?" "NO!", you wail. "The one that's just like Las Luchadoras contra el Medico Asesino, but with titties! Good God, man! The titties!" It's at this point that I realize that, as much as I pride myself on being a hardened sadist, there are depths of self abasement that even I find a little nauseating. And so I relent. It's a classic control fantasy, really, one where I take all of the feelings of powerlessness and suffering that I endured at the hands of Night of the Bloody Apes and project them onto you. And seeing as you've been such a good sport about it - I mean, you're still reading, aren't you? - it's only fair that I give you the thing that I've imagined you asking for. Even though, in reality, you probably want it less than a sack of cold sores and Monday mornings. The plot of Night of the Bloody Apes is one of lucha cinema's most often told tales. It made it's first appearance in 1956 in the sublime Ladron de Cadaveres, then reappeared in 1963's Las Luchadoras contra el Medico Asesino and then continued evolving downward until it came to rest within the damp confines of La Horripilante Bestia Humana aka Night of the Bloody Apes.* In all three movies, monstrosity ensues when a mad scientist performs a gorilla to human organ transplant. In Ladron, only the local constabulary are available to combat the rampaging beast man, but Las Luchadoras introduces a pair of civic-minded wrestling women, with policemen boyfriends in tow, to aid in the fight. Night of the Bloody Apes, while more similar to Las Luchadoras than Ladron, strips things down by only featuring one policeman-dating wrestling woman, and, while she wears a cute devil girl outfit and appears in a couple of gingerly choreographed wrestling matches, she ultimately proves to be of absolutely no consequence to the plot. However, it's not what Night of the Bloody Apes gives us less of that distinguishes it, but rather what it adds to the formula. It was a practice in the Mexican film industry at the time to occasionally spice up films for import release by inserting bits of female nudity that were not available in the domestic versions. Night of the Bloody Apes, the U.S. cut of La Horripilante Bestia Humana, is a rare extant example of one of these sexo versions of a lucha movie, though there were apparently others made. It strives to increase its appeal to decadent foreign interests by also inserting numerous shots of explicit gore, including some pretty nauseating footage of real surgery. These scenes are actually quite extreme for the time, though the staged shots are also laughably inept, combining the hasty no budget improvisation and stark utilitarian prurience of H.G. Lewis with the curiously liquid notion of bodily integrity exhibited in The Story of Ricky. Bodies break apart and separate like warm loaves of bread, an eye-gouging exposes the shockingly high foam rubber content of the human head, and, best of all, a "scalping" scene is accomplished by dragging a stage blood soaked toupee across the head of a Dr. Phil look-alike, revealing the grizzly horror of his male pattern baldness. Most of these shots are inserted pretty clumsily, and the resulting abrupt transitions between them and the typically affable goofiness of the lucha movie that contains them can make watching Night of the Bloody Apes a jarring experience for those used to being lulled by the genre's familiar tropes. (The film was directed by Rene Cardona and - when it's not shoving grue in your face - has the same colorful production look as other of his luchadore films from the time, such as La Mujer Murcielago.) As for the nudity, as much as I'm wholeheartedly in favor of there being more female nudity in Mexican wrestler movies (and, come to think of it, maybe less of the male kind), it pains me to say that it being so inextricably intertwined with the gore in Night of the Bloody Apes makes it pretty unappealing. Other than in some boudoir scenes of star Norma Lazareno, all of the female bodies that are bared here are so done in the process of being broken. Granted, in some of these scenes there's certainly amusement to be had from the Benny Hill like ridiculousness of the ease with which these women become relieved of their clothing in the process of fleeing or fending off the monster. But it's just not titillating. Still, there is something bracing about the very sleaziness of Night of the Bloody Apes for me. Having become perhaps overly familiar with the formula of these movies, it was nice to see it get such a violent shake up here, and, in the process, to be reminded that all the cartoonish violence and juvenile innuendo usually on display is just a family friendly face put on some darker, more complex impulses roiling behind the camera's eye. That's the kind of thing we depend on extreme cinema for, and it's something that it often does best when it's at its crudest.
*It would go on to be resuscitated for one last run-through in 1973's Santo y Blue Demon contra Dr. Frankenstein.
Watch a clip on YouTube! (Warning: NSFW ...and gross)
All of the perpetrators of La Mafia Amarilla return - along with their mustaches - for Noche de Muerte; In addition to Blue Demon, we have his two crime fighting associates - leggy blonde (Tere Velázquez) and bumbling oaf (Tin Tan) - the very Maurizio Merli-esque Inspector Ponce, and director Rene Cardona Sr. at the helm. Again the tone is that of a straightforward urban crime thriller, complete with some nice Mexico City location shooting and Blue Demon continuing to rock the sharp suit and tie (though alternating this time with a kicky ascot) in his role as a big city private eye. There is also a sequence showing Blue Demon's workout, which is very humbling for those of us who feel like we're keeping in pretty good shape for our age, but I digress. The plot this time involves criminal acts being perpetrated by a Blue Demon impostor, which must have seemed like a pretty fresh idea, seeing as it had only been used previously in Blue Demon contra las Diabolicas and Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos. Oh, and in Las Momias de Guanajuato - I almost forgot that one. As a result of his double's nefarious doings, Blue must go on the run from the law while trying to both establish his innocence and bring justice to the gang of despicable thugs who are behind the ruse. I really have nothing bad to say about La Noche de Muerte; It's a very competent entry in the genre of guys with blow dried hair and mustaches having shootouts and car chases with one another. And I certainly can't count among its faults that it lacks the astonishing racism of La Mafia Amarilla. Still, I must admit that Amarilla's many instances of stunningly archaic racial stereotypes added a certain spice to its otherwise pretty conventional proceedings, an odious attraction that kept me watching just to see how much more appalling it could be. So I guess that what I'm getting at, as horrible as it sounds, is that Noche de Muerte fails at having the technical or moral failings that would have made it of special interest to me (or, in lieu of those, a monster, robot, cool underground space age laboratory, or scantily clad female assassins). I did like that Blue has a match with an opponent in a fuzzy, leopard-print mask, because I thought for a moment that it might be one of Los Jaguares (though no such luck). I also liked that Blue's impostor, like Blue himself, tools around the house when no one else is around with his mask on, though, unlike Blue, he chuckles evilly to himself while doing so. All in all, I'm certainly not writing this one off. It's probably one that would be best for me to revisit once I've had some Spanish lessons.
Watch a clip on YouTube! (No audio)
Operacion 67
(1966) !
(Operation
67)
IMDB
Available
from Amazon
Operacion 67 and it's follow-up, El Tesoro de Moctezuma, represent a kind of a mini-saga within the larger Santo saga. These films were the Santo answer to the James Bond craze, and as such they are the most streamlined and well appointed of the Santo films. They are, in fact, the first Santo films shot in color, something that their comic book colorful set design takes full advantage of. Though Operacion 67 marked a step up from Santo's recent poverty row past, it may have been a bittersweet victory for him, given that he was asked to share top billing with an upstart young pretty boy named Jorge Rivero. Mitigating this, I imagine, was the fact that, in order to ape the tone of the Bond films, the film had to provide Santo with an abundance of adoring, scantily clad women, so that he could display a callous indifference to them. In so doing, Operacion 67 effectively slammed the door once and for all on the more saintly Santo that we see in the films of the early 60's. Never again would we see the lone, celibate-by-all-appearances Santo lurking around his lab, waiting for duty to call. Future films would more likely see him spending his downtime out on a double date with Blue Demon or lounging by the pool attended to by his sexy maid. Such radical innovations aside, Operacion 67, being a spy film from the 60s, has the same plot as seemingly every other spy film from the 60s. Said plot begins with the bad guys committing some kind of spectacular crime, after which the film's super agents are put on the case. These agents' unbelievably badass reputation so precedes them that, as soon as they set foot in whatever exotic location it is that their assignment is to take place, the bad guys immediately begin trying to kill them by every impractical means possible. The bulk of the film is then taken up by a series of action set pieces in which the villains repeatedly try to kill the heroes, until, finally, by means of their very efforts to kill them, the villains lead the heroes straight to their secret lair, which they blow up. Thus the agents are freed from having to do any of the actual spying that they were hired to do by the fact that the villains have been throwing themselves at them since day one. It seems to me that the villains might just relax, lay back in the cut for a while, and find out for certain if the agents' reputation is really warranted before risking exposure by going after them so aggressively. It could turn out that they just have really good PR, that they're not all that competent, and that they might give up after a few days and go back to wherever they came from. A little patience can really pay off, especially when you have a lot invested in a spectacular criminal undertaking. Anyway, by saying this I'm not suggesting that I think the plot of Operacion 67 should be any more complicated. If it was, I wouldn't be able to understand it, because it's not in English and the dvd doesn't have subtitles. Regardless of this language barrier, Operacion 67 is a lot of fun - fun in the same way that a lot of the James Bond knock-offs from this period are fun, only inestimably better, because it has a masked wrestler in it.
Watch a clip on YouTube! (No audio)
I haven't talked a lot about what I have to do to get some of these harder to find movies. After all, it's not like I can just walk into Wal-Mart and buy them. To get them I have to do things... well, things that I'm not all that proud of. I don't want to describe all of those things here, because I'd hate for my Mother to read something like that. (Because you know my mother is all about reading The Lucha Diaries. ...Right.) In the case of Pasaporte a la Muerte, though, I had to have the brain of an ape - an ape that had watched Pasaporte a la Muerte - transplanted into my body and then use my power of speech to describe the movie to the ape, which now had my brain, so that the ape could use my typing skills to clumsily hammer out this review with its big stubby ape fingers. It's complicated. Anyway, Pasaporte a la Muerte, a direct sequel to Blue Demon Destructor de Espias, stars Blue Demon, Carlos East and the delectable Maura Monti as a team of secret agents who must battle an evil scientist with the apparent ability to cause natural disasters and a tuxedo wearing android who shoots cartoon rays out of his hands. If that sounds great, it pretty much is. This and Destructor de Espias are obviously Blue Demon's answer to the pair of James Bond knock-offs (Operacion 67 and El Tesoro de Moctezuma) that Santo did with Jorge Rivero back in 1966, and the swinging super spy tone of those films is here enhanced by the colorful comic book look used in Blue's previous classics Blue Demon contra las Diabolicas and Blue Demon contra Cerebros Infernales. There was clearly less of a budget to play with here than on the Santo/Rivero films, apparent in the predominantly set-bound look and overall talky-ness, but there's a pervasive sense of campy fun that manages to keep things moderately engaging despite that. And, as far as those sets are concerned, some of them are actually quite cool - in particular the evil Professor Marcus' space-age underground laboratory, which is about as slick as you could hope for with nothing but a bunch of plywood and silver spray paint to work with. Less successful are the film's attempts to paint Blue Demon as a rakish and worldly ladies man, simply because it's so much easier to imagine Blue drinking beer and barbecuing in the backyard than it is him sipping martinis and tangoing on the Riviera. Also, an opportunity was lost, I feel, to have Maura Monti in a catsuit karate chopping people Emma Peel-style, but I guess you can't have everything - and when what you do have is an android that looks like Daniel Baldwin in a tuxedo shooting animated beams out of his hands like a Taoist priest in an old Shaw Brothers movie, you should just be thankful and shut the fuck up. Pasaporte a la Muerte is also notable for me for being the only lucha movie I've seen in which the wrestling sequences form a parallel narrative. The first match we see pits Blue Demon against the normally chrome-domed Nathonael "Frankenstein" Leon in a ridiculous hippy wig - which is shorn from his head when he loses! The remaining matches see Leon trying to avenge this humiliation, at one point coming very close to unmasking Blue in the ring before finally getting trounced once and for all near the film's conclusion. This, the inclusion of both Maura Monti and my favorite luchadore, Blue Demon, and the goofy sixties tone combine to make Pasaporte a la Muerte, if not a great lucha movie, at least a sufficiently entertaining one, and well worth me being the shambling man-beast I was forced to become in order to experience it.
El Poder Negro (1973)
(Black Power)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
Out of The Big Three, it makes the most sense that Mil Mascaras would be the one to venture into the blaxploitation genre. Not that he's any blacker than Santo or Blue Demon (or black at all), but his penchant for wearing leopard print and gold lamé definitely makes him the most pimp-tastic. Mil, however, is less the focus of El Poder Negro than his co-star, Sergio Oliva, and Oliva offers quite a lot to exploit; Dark, massive and glowering, he appears genetically designed to frighten white people. Yet El Poder Negro is less Superfly and more a lucha version of On the Waterfront - with a glutinous dose of telenovela melodramatics shoveled in for good measure. In it Oliva portrays a virtuous - and freakishly buff - dock worker whose incorruptibility runs him afoul of a bunch of thugs who are running a smuggling racket out of the docks. When Mil Mascaras' tag team partner dies in the ring, he enlists Oliva to take his place (under the name "El Poder Negro", which is at least more PC than other potential titles, like "The Big Black Dude") and must protect him from said rudos to ensure the longevity of their partnership. It's tempting to sympathize with the thugs here, as they're mostly none-too-young and - being thugs - look like they smoke and drink too much, while Mil and Oliva are gigantic, muscle bound, and good enough at hurting people to make a comfortable living at it. We know that sooner or later the two wrestlers are going to get the clue and team up to beat the tar out of these guys and, given that, the set-up offers about as much suspense and eventual surprise as watching a kid poke a hornet's nest with a stick. This, combined with Mil's minimal role and the aforementioned soap opera elements, makes watching El Poder Negro a bit of a chore. The fact that Mil Mascaras, having already headlined a series of presumably successful lucha movies, took supporting roles in melodramas like this and Una Rosa Sobre el Ring is just one of the things that make his film career something of a mystery to me; the other is that he never (until very recently) got the name-in-title treatment that Santo and Blue Demon did. I realize that he was a movie star first, and didn't come to the screen with his wrestling stardom established, but he was just so good at the movie star part it seems criminal for him to (a) not get the "Mil Mascaras contra" treatment in the title and (b) be in a movie as boring as El Poder Negro. The least this movie could have done was live up to its title and give us some funky wah-wah guitar and Rudy Ray Moore-style fake kung fu, but sadly even those questionable pleasures are absent.
Profanadores de Tumbas (1965) ?
(Grave Robbers)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
In a small room, a woman in a black leotard and fishnet tights go-go dances suggestively as two men play a classical piece on violin and piano. There is no audience in the room. The woman smiles serenely toward us as she dances, and the camera zooms in to focus on her hips as they undulate sensually – if incongruously – to the rather staid music. Suddenly the violin, under its own power, leaps out of the violinist’s arms, and the violinist finds that one of the strings has dislodged and wrapped itself tightly around his neck. As the violinist strangles, the violin dances a few feet across the floor and then explodes. The woman screams. And the scene ends. Now, if not for the go-go dancing, you might think that I was describing a scene from some early surrealist film – and with that and other scenes like it, the Santo film Profanadores de Tumbas could easily hold its own against the anarchic absurdity of classics like Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’or. In addition to the killer violin, we’re also presented with a scene in which a wig tries to strangle its owner and then continues to hop across the floor once it has been cast off. In another, a table lamp bleeds and drives its owner mad by flashing rapidly on and off and emitting weird sounds. All of this lunacy is accompanied and complimented by the jagged editing, disjointed narrative flow and weird, minimalist sets that are typical of the four micro budget features Santo did for producer Luis Enrique Vergara in the mid sixties. (This is the third of the Vergara films, which were shot back to back within roughly a one year period with mostly the same cast and crew – see also my reviews of Atacan las Brujas and El Hacha Diabolica.) While the film overall is a bit slow and repetitive, it leaves you – in a way similar to even the most mediocre David Lynch movies - with some weird and weirdly unsettling images that stick with you long after the finer details of the plot have been forgotten. And to put an exclamation point on the proceedings, the climax is absurdly violent, featuring bodies torn apart by machinery, thrown into boiling pits of acid and shoved face first into blast furnaces. I haven’t seen anywhere near all of the Santo films yet, but it is very difficult for me to imagine that there is another in the series that’s any weirder than Profanadores de Tumbas.
The final two Santo films, El Puno de la Muerte and La Furia de las Karatecas, are not so much two stand alone films as they are one unaccountably long Santo movie that's been cut in two. I saw La Furia de las Karatecas first, and in my review I mentioned that I was uneasy about what El Puno de la Muerte might contain, based on the fact that las Karatecas alone didn't contain enough elements to comprise even one proper film, much less two. Well, now I am back from the muddy trenches of lucha cinema to report that El Puno de la Muerte contains pretty much all of the same elements as La Furia, and with much of the same padding used to plump it up into feature length. As with La Furia, the star attraction here is Grace Renat, a woman with freakishly enhanced, watermelon-shaped boobs that, in an obscene mockery of all that is natural and holy, stand out from her chest at a perfect ninety degree angle. Renat plays a pair of twin sisters who appear to come from some kind of showgirl planet where wars are settled by the comparative size and brilliance of their leaders' tiaras. As the evil and most nearly naked of the sisters, she consults an oracle that appears to be a child's C-3PO Halloween mask fixed to a mirror and periodically turns into a tubby, disoriented monster with symmetrically spaced, hair-sprouting moles all over its body. This evil Grace can accomplish her evil acts only through lots of ritual dancing - the type of ritual dancing that might be practiced by some kind of cargo cult whose only exposure to the concept of dance was through Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" video - and it is this fevered hoochie dancing that makes up the majority of El Puno's padding, an impressive feat given the severe back problems that Renat undoubtedly suffered as a result of her condition. The good and more clothed - though still mostly naked - Grace is meanwhile ensconced in a palatial mansion guarded by a cadre of anemic looking karate dudes (one of whom, presumably, is the owner of the "Fist of Death" referred to in the title), where she protects a virginal blond space girl who the evil Grace wants to capture and sacrifice to the glowing piece of space rock that is the subject of her most orgasmic booty dancing. As for Santo, well, he was in his mid sixties by this point, and most of his action scenes involve him riding in various forms of transport, starting with a badass Corvette, then, in rapid succession, a private jet, a fan-boat (the film was shot in the Florida Everglades), a prop plane, and then a regular motorboat. This makes up the entirety of Santo's scenes during the movie's first half, though there are some snippets of action thrown in. For instance, there is a very brief fight with some of Evil Grace's goons who attack Santo and his party as they're boarding the prop plane and - whoa! That guy just got cut in half by the propeller! I've never seen something like that in a Santo movie. Who directed this one... Lucio Fulci? Anyway, most of the real two-fisted action is handled here by Tinieblas, playing Evil Grace's right-hand man, who has one pretty good fight against Good Grace's army of karate guys (who, to be fair - and as much as I want to mock them - do actually seem to be practicing something that has at least some tangential relationship to real martial arts). Perhaps it was all the Scotch and Benadryl, or the carbon monoxide leaking from my faulty gas heater, or the repeated self-inflicted blows to the head, but for some reason I found El Puno de la Muerte somewhat more entertaining than La Furia de las Karatecas. Sadly, this was dampened considerably by what looked to be a probable instance of animal cruelty taking place in the film's final third. And just what is up with that, exactly? This was never an issue with any of the early Santo films, but I've come across it more and more as I've delved into his movies from the mid 70s onward. Could it be that Santo was only kept alive by means of animal sacrifices at this point? In any case, while the rest of El Puno de la Muerte could conceivably provide some modicum of trainwreck entertainment value, it goes without saying that there's nothing about it that could possibly justify any living thing losing its life in the course of its creation. Well, okay: if you told me that the guy who got cut in half by the propeller was real, I might think that was cool - but, come on, you shouldn't go around attacking 65 year old men like that, even if the director is yelling at you to do it. That guy totally had it coming.
El Robo de
las Momias de Guanajuato (1972)
(The Theft of The
Mummies of Guanajuato)
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This is the first sequel to Las Momias de Guanajuato, and, while Santo and Blue Demon are nowhere to be seen, the producers were at least able to afford Mil Mascaras’ salary and keep him aboard for one more go around. Helping out this time are Blue Angel, who looks like a Chippendale’s version of Captain America, and El Rayo de Jalisco, who’s on hand to confuse those of us familiar with La Sombra Vengadora by wearing a nearly identical costume. What I love about this one are the interstitial bits featuring a shock zoom on a leering skull. It’s very reminiscent of something you’d see in a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon. In fact, the whole movie has sort of a Scooby Doo feel to it. The wrestler’s gal pals, I’m happy to report, are in on the action this time and, whenever it’s time to go poking around in a spooky tomb of creepy lair, the whole gang goes along - even when they lose the advantage of stealth by doing so. The mummy make-up is especially puke-y for this one, and the climactic mummies vs. wrestlers battle is satisfyingly action-packed. Up until that final battle, however, all of the wrestlers’ physical confrontations are with the midget henchmen. Now, I’m a big fan of the whole midgets vs. wrestlers thing, and in cases where the wrestlers in question are not exactly at their physical peak, I see the utility of such pairings. However, it does seem like kind of a wasted opportunity when you have three wrestlers as obviously in their prime as those featured here and you spend most of their screen time pitting them against opponents who are one sixth their size. At the same time, it’s truly hilarious to watch a big, muscle bound lug like Mil Mascaras try to pretend he’s being taken down by a gang of clamoring little people, so, given the choice, I guess I’ll take the hilarity. I also like that the main supporting characters here are a street kid and an older homeless man (the boy’s father? - without subtitles I can’t be sure), and that those characters aren’t played for pathos like they typically would be in an American film. These are clearly characters that the audience is meant to identify with, rather than pity. These two witness the titular robbery and end up going to Mil Mascaras and his crew after the proper authorities scoff at their story. This indicates a big change from the days when Santo functioned as an adjunct to the police. Here the masked wrestlers are presented as those who the people turn to when official justice fails them.
Rocambole contra la Secta del Escorpion
(1965)
(Rocambole versus
the Cult of the Scorpion)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
I admit it: I've been dying to revisit Rocambole ever since being introduced to him in Rocambole contra las Mujeres Arpias. That stupid "this way, ladies" chest emblem of his just can't fail to bring a smile to my face - and, as such, it serves as a happy reminder that my prolonged serial consumption of lucha movies hasn't rendered me completely insensible to such absurdities. Rocambole, to recap, is kind of like Batman if Batman's secret identity was Mandrake the Magician. He's also somewhat similar to European pulp characters like Diabolik or Kriminal in that he seems to sometimes operate on the shady side of the law, only fighting for good when it dovetails with his own interests. In this sense he offers a little bit of something for everybody - if by "everybody" you mean geeks. Rocambole contra la Secta del Escorpion, the second and final Rocambole film, is one of these "and tomorrow we'll shoot the sequel" films, obviously made in very close proximity to - if not concurrent with - the previous one and with a lot of the same cast and resources. Unfortunately, it has less of the colorful comic book atmosphere and none of the outlandish fantasy elements of Contra las Mujeres Arpias. The Cult of the Scorpion, despite the visions of cloaks and sacrificial daggers that its name evokes, is actually a gang of dapper international assassins who are more the type of villains you'd expect in a low rent James Bond knock-off from the period. To complicate things, German Robles, who plays one of the main baddies, is virtually identical to Julio Aleman, the actor playing Rocambole, a fact which adds an extra level of challenge for those of us trying to figure out what's going on without the aid of understanding the spoken language. The action is also a little lighter this time around. Still, it's worth soldiering through, because in the frenetic last five minutes of the picture, Rocambole delivers fully on the promise made in his debut, vanquishing his foes with a deadly combination of ventriloquism and karate and zestfully beating the crap out of a woman in the process. Now that's the Rocambole I wanted to see. Contra la Secta del Escorpion is also interesting for being one of those films that presents sort of a who's who of lucha movie regulars from the period, among them everybody's comic relief second banana Chucho Salinas, waxy font of villainy Carlos Agosti, serial toady Nothanael "Frankenstein" Leon, and the probably-not-really-blonde Gina Romand. In summation: Rocambole didn't really do very much in Rocambole contra la Secta del Escorpion, but he still looked really silly doing it, which is really all that I was asking for.
Rocambole contra las
Mujeres Arpias (1965)
(Rocambole vs. the
Harpies)
IMDB
Available from Mexicine DVD
Judging from the costume worn by the titular hero of Rocambole contra las Mujeres Arpias, I'd have to guess that Rocambole is Spanish for "check out my junk". You can make your own call based on the picture that accompanies this review, but to me that emblem on his chest looks like an arrow showing us the direct route downtown. For this and many, many other reasons, las Mujeres Arpias is a truly silly movie, one that I'm sure will provide lots of amusement for those who can put aside - or revel in - its backward gender politics. How could you expect any less from a film whose super hero sports a uniform incorporating a truckstop novelty tee-shirt? I only wish that Rocambole's sidekick wore a costume as well, so that he could have one of those sex position zodiac symbols on it. Anyway, you've got to wonder what's up with this war between the sexes we see playing out in lucha films. We've so far seen masked wrestlers set upon by female vampires (both women and girls), witches, mini-skirted femaliens, just plain diabolical women, and now... harpies? In keeping with this spirit, Rocambole contra las Mujeres Arpias taps into female villainy at its very root, giving us bad guys who make a group of chorus girls literal slaves to their vanity by injecting them with a fugly-making drug and then bribing them to commit crimes with the promise of a temporary antidote. Of course, not a one among these women - even Rocambole's trusty girl friday - is willing to sacrifice her beauty for the moral high ground, and so the harpies are born. To be fair, we're not just talking about run of the mill, every day fuglitude here, but rather the kind of full bore, mirror cracking, oatmeal-faced fugilaciousness that makes adults and babies alike cry in terror and confuses dogs into thinking they should bury the one afflicted. (Not to put too fine a point on it.) Entrenched in the Wrestlers vs. Women film cycle as it is, contra las Mujeres Arpias sets itself apart from the pack by not providing male henchman for the physical tussles with the hero and instead has Rocambole actually slugging it out with the women themselves (or, in most cases, obvious male doubles in bad drag). These fights are actually quite brutal and, Rocambole, not the nicest of masked Mexican movie heroes, actually seems to be getting off on it a little bit. He just really likes to hit people, it seems, and it's a testament to just how thick the cheese is sliced here that this never manages to come off as repellent as it probably should. Rocambole contra las Mujeres Arpias is one of those movies that skirts the margins of what can really be considered lucha cinema, and, to be honest, I'm mainly including it to mix things up. Rocambole, like Neutron, is a fictional character (loosely based on a 19th century French pulp hero, it seems), and, while his look and fighting style are similar to those of a luchadore, he's not presented as a professional wrestler. Instead, he's essentially a traditional super hero who, when he's not in his ridiculous costume, wows nightclub crowds as a stage magician who's sort of a one man Ed Sullivan show, punctuating the pulling of bouquets from his sleeve by exhibiting his skills as a ventriloquist, knife thrower and escape artist. It may just be a function of his troubling resemblance to Bob Saget that makes actor Julio Aleman's suave take on this alter ego come off as more smarmy than was probably intended. But it just makes it all the more enjoyable when he has to put on that stupid looking costume. It's like his punishment for being creepy. Do I recommend Rocambole contra las Mujeres Arpias? Well, yes; just as I implicitly recommend any film that I don't specifically say should be avoided. Like a lot of these movies, it clearly has issues, but if there's a cry for help in there somewhere, I wasn't able to hear it over the sound of my own laughter
.
BACK!
Una Rosa Sobre el Ring (1973)
(A Rose in the
Ring)
IMDB
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Una Rosa Sobre el Ring is a straight up melodrama, a soap opera set in the world of lucha libre. Mil Mascaras appears in it, but it's really no more than a cameo, and he doesn't venture outside of his professional wrestling role to right any wrongs, heal the sick, or hurl any vampire midgets into other vampire midgets. In short, I have absolutely no business writing about this movie. Sure, I did watch it, but I've also watched open heart surgery on the Discovery Channel, and I don't feel like that makes me any more qualified to comment on the quality of its execution. The problem is that the dvd of Una Rosa Sobre el Ring, like about half of those that I've watched in connection with compiling these diaries, has no English subtitles, so I had no idea what was being said, and wasn't entirely clear on all of the relationships between the characters. If the cast of characters had included a mad scientist, or a mini-skirted femalien, or a werewolf, or a diabolical criminal mastermind, or an evil, disembodied brain, it would have been a different story, because those, for me, are part of a universal language. If you at least give me a mad scientist and a burly guy in a wrestling mask, I can pretty much put all the rest of the pieces in place. But the trials and tribulations of everyday life? The vagaries of the human heart? Come on! I'm a guy! I need you to spell that shit out for me! Don't make me guess at it, otherwise I'm just going to get it wrong and piss you off. Anyway, the little that I can with certainty tell you about Una Rosa Sobre el Ring is that it stars Crox Alvarado as an aging luchadore haunted by the death of an opponent in the ring. But, hold up; now that I've said that, I realize that I can't really say with certainty that his role was that of an "aging luchadore". It may have just been age inappropriate casting, with his obviously very advanced years not intended to be a focus of the story. In any case, I definitely can say that a remarkable effect is achieved at the film's conclusion when Alvarado dons his mask and enters the ring against Mil Mascaras. His formerly pendulous man-maries are suddenly rock hard, and he seems to gain a few inches in stature. It's almost as if it's an entirely different person in the role. Una Rosa Sobre el Ring also features a lady who becomes a nun, an impoverished orphan who gets slapped upside the head a lot by a mean guy who takes his panhandling money, and a guy in a suit who is repeatedly shown punching a buff guy with a club foot in the face and knocking him out, which I think is meant to be comical. I could further pad this review by mentioning that its an Agrasanchez production and then go on to enumerate all of the technical failings that go hand in hand with that - but I just got finished jumping all over Agrasanchez in my review of El Hijo de Alma Grande and I'm exhausted from the effort. Well, almost exhausted. The sound looping in this film is really atrocious, giving us a 10 year old newsboy who has the voice of a 35 year old man, a crowd of people who visibly applaud yet emit no sound, and physical blows that sound full seconds after they're landed. As far as the onscreen production values go, the fact that the film focuses a lot on people who are desperately poor works well within the typical Agrasanchez film's budgetary restrictions. They're not so good at realizing a super villain's high tech lair, but a squalid hovel they can do. As far as the story goes, as I said, I really can't say. But there's a lot of exaggerated gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair going on that suggests to me that, were it's dialog understandable, Una Rosa Sobre el Ring might just be a lot of fun to watch. Not fun enough to prompt me to invest in those much needed Spanish lessons, mind you, but fun nonetheless.
Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida
(1969)
(Santo versus Blue Demon in Atlantis)
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That title promises so much. It's also very practical. You can be certain that no one ever had to ask what Santo versus Blue Demon in Atlantis was about, since the title, following a strict journalistic model, provides us with the who, the what and the where (with the how - by wrestling - being clearly implied by the stars named therein). The reality, however, is that, other than the special effects sequences, the action in this film is pretty generic. Furthermore, all of the special effects sequences are lifted from Japanese kaiju movies (as in, the actual footage from those films is inserted into this film), so there's just not that much new to savor here. The film starts Santo and Blue's onscreen partnership off on a bad foot, it being one of the many that presents Blue as an evil-doing pawn of the bad guys (here it's the actual Blue, who's been hypnotized by the Atlantians, though other films would use the device of a cloned double or impostor). It also gives us one of the most blistering examples of pointless filler in lucha cinema history by showing us several minutes of Santo sitting and watching black and white footage of a musical number from another film on television. If ever a film was screaming a warning to its audience that it wasn't worth their time, this is it. (What was the poster's tag line? "Bring a book"?) Atlantida also suffers by comparison to Operacion 67, because it tries to go for the same James Bond feel, but without the panache and relatively lavish budget of that earlier film. On the mitigating side, there are some good fights and some decent underwater footage, but, unless you're OCD like me, I'd skip this one and move on to Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos. Now that's a picture!
Read my super-deluxe review of Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida at Teleport City!
Santo contra Capulina (1968)
(Santo versus
Capulina)
IMDB
Available from Amazon
If I ever had any reason to believe - or hope - that this compulsion of mine would burn itself out before I had watched every blessed Santo film ever made, the fact that I just watched Santo contra Capulina has put it to rest once and for all. You might have thought that it would be El Aguila Real or Santo Frente a la Muerte, but no. It's Santo contra Capulina that truly demarcates my personal point of no return. Certainly lots of non Spanish-speaking Santo fans like myself have watched unsubtitled Santo films, but they don't watch this one. That's because they're smart, and they realize that, because Santo contra Capulina is a comedy, and they wouldn't be able to understand a single word of it, the only viewing experience it could offer them is a numbing and pointless repetition of childish mugging, exaggerated hand gestures, people running in fast motion, and cloyingly whimsical music. But, um, not me. So, I'm not going to make any judgments here. Santo contra Capulina may, in fact, be the greatest comedy of all time. The greatest movie, even. Who am I to say? Of course, there is the fact that its musical score consists entirely of a wacky-fied rendition of the theme from Exodus played constantly and repeatedly throughout its entire running time, but there are conceivably contexts in which that would be pure genius, and my lack of access to the film's spoken language may just be preventing me from getting that. Also, it does seem like the style of comedy practiced by Santo's co-star Capulina is very broad and physical in nature, and that its apparent unfunny-ness may not be a result of the language barrier. After all, translation isn't everything; understanding the meaning of this film's title, for instance, does not make it any less misleading, as Santo does not, as that title would seem to promise, give Capulina the beat down some might think he so richly deserves. The worst he does is call him "idiota" and maybe playfully box his ears (the robot Capulina doesn't count). But, you know what? None of that really matters to me right now. Standing here on this new threshold, all I can think about is the future. My future. For it's now beginning to dawn on me that, as much as I've tried to bargain with myself, I really am going to watch El Misterio de la Perla Negra, the unbidden and cruelly unnecessary follow-up to Santo Frente a la Muerte - just as, inconceivable as it may seem, I am going to watch those last two Santo movies from the 80s starring that woman with the freakishly large breasts. What I need to do now is accept those facts and prepare myself to deal with their inevitable consequences.