This essay is an excerpt from Spectacle Every Day: Essays on Classical Mexican Cinema, 1940-1969 (Les éditions de l'Œil, 2023), edited by Jorge Javier Negrete Camacho and Alonso Diaz de la Vega, and published on the occasion of the Locarno Film Festival's retrospective, Spectacle Every Day — The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema, curated in partnership with MUBI. Thanks to the authors, editors, publisher, and festival for permission to republish online.
Spectacle Every Day—The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema is now showing on MUBI from August 2, 2023.
For Api
La mente y el crimen (Alejandro Galindo, 1961). © Archive of the Mexican Film Institute.
It’s easy for any Mexican to get used to the way in which our country handles tragedies, misfortunes, accidents or any other scabrous aspects of everyday life. It would take just looking at the images from La Prensa—one of the widest nota roja newspapers (tabloids) in Mexico City, among a few others—in which scandals, blood or humor, sometimes all at the same time, are prominent.
But that is not the only point of access to that morbid world for any impressionable mind. Urban rock might be playing in the public transport speakers something like “A shot was heard/ It seemed like a cannon/ Like a monster/ It took his life away,” sung by El Haragán y Compañía in “Él no lo mató.” There’s also corridos—which have taken over the world in their tumbado iteration—magazines—that particular smell of ink on Semanario de lo Insólito—telenovelas —more than one villain will meet their end in bloody ways—the radio—the Mano Peluda show, with its stories about spectral creatures—the press—the witty chronicles of Eduardo “El Güero” Téllez, one of the classic nota roja writers—neighborly gossip—“probably someone put a spell on you”—or the violence inherent in all communities: whether big or small, we all have our share of delinquency anecdotes—among many other sources.
If we review Mexico’s modern history, we might see how each generation found their own way to get to the same point. There’s the violent photographs of Enrique Metinides, witness to the unforeseeable aspects of everyday life in mid-20th century, or the work of Mexican grabador José Guadalupe Posadas at the end of the 19th ccntury, filled with skulls, folklore and plenty of dark humor for the society of its time. We could even go further back, before Mexico was Mexico, to the different codices which survived the Conquest of Mexico and bore witness, with extreme detail, to the country’s violent past. Or maybe we could watch the present, where narco influencers or nota roja influencers (like Carlos Jiménez) and publications like El Blog del Narco keep feeding the morbidity of contemporary audiences.
I. MACABRE ORIGINS
Misterios de ultratumba (Chano Urueta, 1959). © Image courtesy of Alameda Films.
It’s no wonder that the history of Mexican cinema reflects, no matter the period, how the morbid looms over, whether with the intention of entertaining the audience or facing them with the reality of their surroundings—even though, in the last two decades, Mexican cinema has favored the latter, a logical answer to the increasing crisis of violence we live in. Let’s go back to the first films made in Mexico: Un duelo a pistola en el bosque de Chapultepec (1896)—shot by Gabriel Veyre, a Lumière Brothers envoy—that, despite being a recreation of a pistol duel inspired by a real event, misled more than one spectator into believing they were watching the end-result of a famous duel.
Something similar could be said of El autómovil gris (1919), perhaps the most famous survivor of the mostly lost Mexican silent cinema. This criminal saga—inspired by Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915)—in which a group of thieves dressed in military uniforms changed sides depending on who was in power, and took advantage of the chaos produced by the Mexican Revolution to rob the wealthiest homes, ends with the shooting of the criminals in the penitentiary, made up of real footage captured by director Enrique Rosas when he worked in newsreel productions. The documentary nature of those images only increases the impact of the film; the morbidity of the moment enhances the cinematic experience.
Although the cinematograph arrived in Mexico in 1896—one of the first countries visited by the Lumière emissaries—it was not until the arrival of synchronized sound with the film Santa (Antonio Moreno) in 1931 that we may speak of the beginning of the Mexican film industry. It was during those early years that, just months later, the first national horror film emerged, based on the quintessential Novohispanic legend, La Llorona (Ramón Peón, 1932). Every Mexican family has a member with a personal anecdote about the character—a woman who drowned her children and ever since wanders the streets at night stealing other people’s children; other sources suggest she might be the Malinche, who bemoans having aligned with Hernán Cortés—to scare the children around them.
Mexican horror found its first classics in the early thirties with films like Fernando de Fuentes’ El fantasma del convento (1934) and Dos monjes (1934), Juan Bustillo Oro’s directorial debut, who was also the screenwriter of El fantasma del convento. Both films heavily delved into the macabre aspects of Catholicism and the fear of God and its sacred precepts, particularly the one warning against the sin of adultery.
Bustillo Oro, a man of letters and a connoisseur of the international cinema of his time, was also responsible for another foundational film of Mexican fantastic cinema, El misterio del rostro pálido (1935), where accusing religion is replaced by unholy science. In this film, the experiments of an amoral scientist pass judgment on his innocent son, condemning him for the rest of his days.
El medallón del crimen (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1955). © Courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM.
Like his contemporaries, Juan Bustillo Oro had to accommodate himself to the genres that were most popular: comedy and melodrama. However, he did not neglect others considered "risky" for the time, such as the psychological thriller in El hombre sin rostro (1950), El asesino X (1954), and the astonishing Mexican noir El medallón del crimen (1955). In the latter, an innocent man is accused of a murder and must survive the criminals who committed the crime and framed him.
The case of Bustillo Oro, a producer, screenwriter, and director of several of his own films, found a parallel in another figure of the time, the cinematic heartthrob and avid businessman, Abel Salazar. Salazar, an immensely popular and successful actor since the forties, quickly took on a leadership role by financing his own vehicles for self-promotion, in which he enjoyed portraying jovial and likable heroes.
During the first half of the fifties, Salazar produced El monstruo resucitado (1953), entrusting the direction to Chano Urueta, a pioneering filmmaker in the genre with the film Profanación (1933). El monstruo resucitado is the first of the great Mexican horror films that mark the genre's revival in the fifties.
Set in the Balkans, it tells the story of a fearless reporter, played by the beautiful Czechoslovak actress Miroslava Stern, who becomes the obsession of a deformed mad scientist, portrayed by Spanish actor José María Linares Rivas. The scientist creates an automaton that kills at his command. It is interesting to note that Salazar, in this film, abstains from acting and, as a producer, collaborated with one of his trusted directors in his upcoming golden era. He also worked with Gunther Gerszo, a Mexican plastic artist and set designer of Hungarian descent.
With these splendid credentials, it is no wonder that Salazar's splendor in pure horror cinema would soon follow. The first step towards achieving that was the establishment of his production company, Cinematográfica ABSA (1955), through which he produced and acted in several landmark Mexican horror films, including the legendary El vampiro (1957).
Filmed in 1957, this adaptation of the vampire myth, directed by Fernando Méndez, begins with an unforgettable scene: the thin and elegant figure of actor Germán Robles, dressed in a tailcoat, gazes chillingly towards the window of a woman lying in bed, unaware her dark fate in the arms of the undead Count Lavud.
The set design by Gunther Gerszo creates gloomy and claustrophobic spaces in every corner of the fictional Hacienda de los Sicomoros, where the film takes place. These achievements in set design are in line with the sinister atmosphere achieved by cinematographer Rosalío Solano; together they create a film with Gothic undertones set in the Mexican countryside. This setting was the perfect backdrop to portray the historical context of desolation and exploitation by wealthy landowners over the poor population in the years leading up to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). It exemplifies for the Mexican audience the figure of a monstrous and mundane aristocrat, representing a decadent and stagnant era that refuses to die.
However, in El vampiro there is something that conflates the film with Mexican national identity: the adaptation and incorporation of the endemic myth par excellence, la Llorona, into the Balkan vampire legend. This is freely adapted through the character of Aunt María Teresa, who is believed to be dead during the first third of the film. Her mournful wails and a lullaby resound throughout the decrepit hacienda serve as a reminder and homage to the first great figure of terror in Mexican culture during the colonial and post-colonial era.
El vampiro gave a place to Mexican horror cinema on the international market and became an icon in its own right over the years. It gained such recognition that the iconic genre magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland featured it on the cover of issue 124 (April 1976), with artwork by American artist Ken Kelly.
El espejo de la bruja (Chano Urueta, 1962). © Archive of the Mexican Film Institute.
Following El vampiro and its immediate sequel, El ataúd del vampiro (both filmed in 1957), a handful of films would further elevate Cinematográfica ABSA and its producer to international prominence. These titles, widely remembered and now restored in 4K digital remastering, include El barón de terror (Chano Urueta, 1961)—internationally distributed as The Brainiac—and La maldición de la Llorona (1961). These films formed a cycle of 100% Mexican Gothic horror, with El espejo de la bruja (1962), based on a script by the young Carlos Enrique Taboada, who would later become a pillar of Mexican horror cinema,1 occupying a special niche within this cycle.
El espejo de la bruja (1962), a film that jumps between genres with a particular bravado, and directed by Chano Urueta, is a fine representative of Mexican Gothic—right next to El vampiro and Misterios de ultratumba (1959)—that plays with many cinematic references.
Elena (Dina de Marco) finds out through her housekeeper/personal witch Sara (Isabela Corona) that she will die soon because her husband, Eduardo (Armando Calvo), wishes to formalize his affair with the naive Deborah (Rosita Arenas). Despite the warning, it’s impossible to change fate and Elena will have to return from beyond the grave, with the help of Sara, to destroy her former husband’s happiness.
The relationship between Urueta, Salazar and Taboada, cemented throughout several productions, is defined by its wish to take those elements that made foreign genre films work and approach them from a Mexican perspective. Here, for example, it’s very clear that the film is influenced by Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), combined with the elegant sordidness in Franju’s Eyes Wthout a Face (Les Yeux sans visage, 1960)—Eduardo is a doctor who doesn’t fear experimenting with corpses—but there are also the mischievous extremes from Wiene's The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, 1924), and, to top it all, a witch who possesses an altar of indigenous appearance, which sets the plot in an unspecified location in Mexico.
The fact that eighteen years later revered filmmaker Arturo Ripstein alluded to the character Sara in his film La tía Alejandra (1980), in which Isabela Corona also plays a villainous witch, testifies to the importance of what Urueta, Salazar and Taboada achieved.
II. MUCHA LUCHA: SWEATING THE RING
Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro (Alfonso Corona Blake, 1962). © Archive of the Mexican Film Institute.
In many ways, discussing Mexican wrestler cinema, or lucha libre films, has become a cliché when referring to Mexican fantasy and/or horror cinema. Unfortunately, it has fallen into this category due to the lack of knowledge about this film subgenre and, perhaps, also about the sport itself and the enormous folk tradition it represents for the Mexican people. The tradition of Mexican wrestling dates back to the mid-19th century and is essentially a blend of French catch wrestling, American wrestling, and more recently, Japanese puroresu, combined with a good dose of grandiose theatricality.
Without delving into its history, which would take many more pages, it's worth mentioning that this mixture of sport and fairground spectacle became a modern popular coliseum where good and evil clashed in fights where sweat and blood washed away the sorrows and worries of the roaring audience, who chanted the names of their heroes. Contributing to that liberating frenzy was, to a great extent, the mystery imposed by the satin masks that transformed the "common man" into sons of Hercules and Minotaurs, engaging in two-out-of-three-fall matches without time limits.
The popularization of luchas from the arenas to the homes of the Mexican middle class was a consequence to the advent of television, a new magic lantern that brought together hundreds of families who found in wrestling events the new popular heroes who would soon jump onto the silver screens.
The end of WWII and the arrival of television at the end of the forties were the first symptoms of the slow decline in which Mexican cinema entered throughout the fifties, when it had to compete with Hollywood, fully recovered after the war and anxious to take back the lost exhibition markets.
The situation inspired Mexican filmmakers to diversify, to reduce costs and to take risks in order to keep the audience in their seats, sometimes adapting—or cannibalizing—hits from other countries. It’s no surprise that both horror and cabaret films—subgenres filled with morbid stories and moralizing endings as it was demanded—bloomed in that context. Neither was it surprising that luchadores became big box office draws thanks to their stunts in and out of the ring.
Not many situations reach the intensity of a good wrestling match. The electricity of Arena México, brimming with people betting on máscara contra cabellera (masks vs. scalps), is truly unforgettable, even more so when one of the biggest legends in wrestling is involved. If television took away eyes from film, its presence turned wrestling into a mass phenomenon, eventually capitalized by Mexican cinema.
It was on the silver screen that men and women behind the mask became superheroes, detectives, avengers and did whatever it took to end crime, because, just as in real life, police were of little or no use for the citizenry’s' issues. This was an ideal environment to let loose a wild combination of genres and cinematic influences: a bit of film noir, some sci-fi, a pinch of humor and anything that came across the imagination of everyone involved. As Mexican film critic Rafael Aviña says in ¡Queremos ver sangre!: Historia ilustrada del cine de luchadores, this is a genre in a “permanent state of delusion”.
Three titles arrived in 1952 to the cinema marquees, making wrestling the central theme of the stories, although from different perspectives: the noir melodrama La bestia magnífica (Chano Urueta), the wild comedy El luchador fenómeno (Fernando Cortés), and El Enmascarado de Plata (René Cardona), an adventure serial in the purest American style, in which the legendary Santo, a wrestler known as The Silver-Masked Man due to the color of his iconic mask, had no bearing.
It is fair to say that there are two precedents of wrestling in Mexican comedy films. The first one is Padre de más de cuatro, directed by Roberto O'Quigley (1938), a ranchera comedy of errors. A decade later, there was Gilberto Martínez Solares’ No me defiendas compadre (1949), in which Germán Valdés Tin Tan comically fights for money. In both cases, it must be noted that wrestling was merely a sketch for the comedians, without the sport contributing to the central storyline of the films.
In addition to that first cycle of wrestling films in the early 1950s, another film was released the following year, Joselito Rodríguez’s El Huracán Ramírez. It represented a reverse phenomenon compared to the known ones: Huracán, a character with a striking blue mask and white designs, was purposefully created as a cinematic hero. However, he became so charismatic on screen that he went on to star in his own saga (four more films in subsequent years) set in a gritty environment of gangsters. Eventually, he transitioned into the professional wrestling ring, with Daniel García Arteaga entrusted by the director himself to safeguard and defend the iconic mask.
Rodriguez's skillful direction jumps from one genre to another with ease, making this a true family picture. There’s something for everyone. Lucha libre is depicted in a documentary fashion, which gives the audience the impression of following every stunt on live TV. The cinematic language in wrestling movies would refine gradually, just as the elements of its narrative cocktail would stop caring about logic. If Huracán Ramírez is kind of a regular Joe—with enemies anyone could find on the street—the next masked avengers threw their kicks against all kinds of creatures, mad scientists and murderers.
A few years later Ladrón de cadáveres (1956) raised the stakes significantly. Its images have a very distinct influence of German expressionism, American film noir and the monster classics from Universal—which makes set decorator Gunther Gerzo the film’s MVP. The film’s villain is a scientist obsessed with controlling the human mind despite his experiments not being as successful as he hopes due to the fragility of human bodies. The solution he comes up with is murdering the wrestlers who attend a popular gym and stealing their corpses. This splashes newspaper covers: the disappearance of muscle-bound dead men scandalizes the public, forcing authorities to intervene, since that seems to be the only way to force the police into doing their job. Detective Carlos “El Patuleco” (Crox Alvarado) convinces his friend, Guillermo “El Cabezón” (Wolf Ruvinskis)—just arrived after a five year absence—to infiltrate the wrestling scene in order to solve the case. It’s a relief that Guillermo had always dreamed of becoming a professional wrestler, which makes him accept the dangerous mission in a heartbeat.
The film, directed by Fernando Méndez, is key, as Jorge Ayala Blanco says in La Búsqueda del Cine Mexicano, for understanding the mechanisms that would fuel the cinematic adventures of Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, better known as “El Santo”: “a film of humor and wrestling, maybe as estimable as El vampiro, by the same filmmaker, in which a whole mythology is gestated and later retrieved in Santo films (…) [with their] world populated by manic female stranglers, evil brains, space travelers, grave robbers, mad wise men and deformed henchmen…”
Aesthetically, Ladrón de cadáveres set the path for later films developed in the wrestling ring. DP Víctor Herrera leaves aside the television influence to give dynamism to the fights, emulating the experience of actually attending an arena, as shown in the thrilling sequence in which it is revealed that Guillermo stepped through the Professor’s (Carlos Riquelme) laboratory and is now a brute with an urge for violence. In a clear nod to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), the creature turns against its maker.
The dynamic would constantly return in wrestling films, with its abundant mad scientists. There’s, for example, the villain of Neutrón, el enmascarado negro (1960), who designs a neutron bomb to force the world to reach world peace—mmmh… OK—or the one featured in Blue Demon vs los cerebros infernales (1966), anxious to create a super brain. There’s also the antagonist in La horripilante bestia humana (1968)—the plot is a Ladrón de cadáveres rip-off—a doctor who transplants the heart of a gorilla into his leukemia stricken son with fatal consequences.
But wrestlers not only fight men of science—despite being lunatics, they keep being realistic to a certain degree—or criminals—the ring was also stalked by stranglers, kidnappers, mafia men, murderers, etc—they also fought supernatural antagonists, including the emblematic villains from Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro (1962), led by Lorena Velázquez as vampire queen Zorina.
In this film, directed by Alfonso Corona Blake, well-meaning Santo must stop a group of vampires before they perform a millenary ritual involving a young girl called Diana (María Duval); the film was inspired by other sorcerers and witches of international fame like the antagonists in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960). Most national productions of this kind would take inspiration from this particular Santo film with slight variations—among them, the superior Santo vs Las lobas (1972), in which the silver hero truly sweats behind the mask.
Santo also fought against male and female beings from outer space who had no qualms about engaging in a good match as a mere preamble to their desire to dominate our planet. However, their efforts were always thwarted by the flying leaps and wrestling techniques of El Enmascarado de Plata, who occasionally stood shoulder to shoulder, on special occasions, with the other masked-Aztec Hercules: Blue Demon aka El Demonio Azul.
The history of this subgenre had its share of highs and lows and even though these films have never recaptured the popularity reached in the fifties and sixties, every once in a while some of its elements show up, delighting contemporary audiences.
III. SINISTER PLEASURES & MACABRE LAUGHTERS
El caso de la mujer asesinadita (Tito Davison, 1955). © Courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM.
One could reasonably think that death and humor don’t match, but that memo never got to the nota roja publications. One of its main characteristics is including jokes or innuendo in their headlines, besides adding the biggest amount of scandalous details in the texts—as if the explicit photographs weren’t enough. Like in 1956, when shoemaker Agapito Sandoval killed his wife and her lover in a jealous rage and then took his own life, which the editorial team at La Prensa cheekily titled “Passional Tragedy at Álamos.” There is a constant sway between tragedy and archness, which seldom considers the victims.
In comparison to the macabre jokes of such publications about tragedies in real life, the black humor used by Mexican cinema in the fifties is much less aggressive and, one might say, quite witty. That was especially true for marital problems. In those years marriage was a social institution in the midst of radical changes brought upon by postmodernity. A successful marriage takes more than the man being a duly provider and the woman being a diligent housewife. The ideal couple is an aspiration and ideal love just a precious wish. If we mix all this—adding the traditional nota roja—with the heritage of American film noir and its seductive femme fatales, murder plots, betrayals, etc, the resulting movies would be—as indeed they were—cheekily morbid.
Let's take, for example, what happens with the protagonist in El caso de la mujer asesinadita (1955), directed by Tito Davison, and adapted from a play by Miguel Mihura and Álvaro de la Iglesia. In the film, Mercedes (Gloria Marín) lives in a lush house with her husband Lorenzo (an idiotic Abel Salazar) and their servants. One night she dreams that her husband falls for his new typist, Raquel (Martha Roth) and decides to poison her to take her out of the way, while a member of the Sioux tribe called Frank (Jorge Mistral), recites messages praising the quiet life in the prairie. When she wakes up, Raquel shows up at her door, anxious to start her work with Lorenzo. Will the dreamed murder take place? Was it a premonition?
Parallel to the intrigue, a love story is born between Mercedes and Frank, who is not actually a Sioux tribesman but Lorenzo's new partner, who, thanks to telepathy, manages to communicate without uttering a word. The situation doesn’t make much sense but it works thanks to its candor and the innocent way in which Mercedes finds love. She’s worried about dying poisoned, despite the fact that her feelings for Frank are quite strong. For Mercedes, if dying means being able to enjoy that great love, eternal rest becomes a wish. The film comes across as a mix between the screwball of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Suspicion (1941).
El esqueleto de la señora Morales (Rogelio A. González, 1960). © Courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM.
That evil emerges from where we least expect it is an irrefutable truth. That it leaves behind a gloomy trail of terror and death, is also a fact. But, while this happens on screen, we, the viewers, experience a guilty sense of amusement and suppressed laughter, something wickedly enjoyable. In El esqueleto de la señora Morales (1960), this ludic-macabre sensation is felt due to the highly capable Mexican director Rogelio A. González (known for some of the most important comedies in our cinema) and its screenwriter, Luis Alcoriza (a long-time collaborator of Luis Buñuel in a significant part of his Mexican work), based on The Islington Mystery, an original story by the British author Arthur Machen.
Described as the only black comedy in Mexican cinema, the story presents us with the embittered Morales couple. Gloria, the wife, lives in devout yet bitter chastity, dedicating her life to serving the church, while Pablo, her patient but still enamored husband, pursues taxidermy as his vocation, much to his wife's displeasure. But patience has its limits, and the emasculating life alongside Gloria increasingly drains her husband, who meticulously plans the perfect murder.
El esqueleto de la señora Morales, brilliantly starred by the internationally acclaimed Mexican actor Arturo de Córdova, the great actress Amparo Rivelles, and a solid cast of supporting actors, brings to the stage a series of situations typical in a middle-class comedy: a mature yet still beautiful wife who spares no disdainful gestures towards her husband, sabotaging every aspect of his life, whether taxidermy, amateur photography or his friendship with the neighborhood children in the absence of their own offspring. Despite being in love, he endures the mistreatment from his devout wife, more concerned with pleasing her confessor priest.
Although the relationship seems unlikely, many couples experienced such tensions during the fifties and sixties, just as the country did, crushed between the desire for modernity, represented by the cities, and the inflexible, rigid rules of rural environments. This is what makes Alcoriza's provocation so effective: many Mexicans have witnessed this plot develop in their own homes and know the dire consequences of prolonging it.
Alcoriza wants to make us think about the possible justifications for murder and leaves each audience member to answer such a question, because divine justice—or is it just fate?—solves the matter in the case of the affable taxidermist whose wit almost lets him get away with murder.
Since we’re talking about justice and punishment, a good example of this desire to embrace modernity would be the documentary La mente y el crimen (1961), in which noted filmmaker Alejandro Galindo explores the detailed investigation by the Mexico City police department after an anonymous young woman’s body is found. Keeping his most melodramatic trends, as well as some very heightened social prejudices, the filmmaker behind Cuatro contra el mundo (1950) pontificates on the professionalism of the police, always ready, committed and efficient to aid the citizenry. If this image weren’t so far from reality, the documentary could be something more than a curiosity within Galindo’s oeuvre, and all Mexican cinema from the sixties.
IV. DANGER, WOMEN IN ACTION!
La mujer murciélago (René Cardona, 1967). © Permanencia.
While the role played by women is significant in films previously mentioned, such as El esqueleto de la señora Morales or El espejo de la bruja, it wasn't until the sixties that women took on a completely active role, as seen in the film series Las Luchadoras contra el Médico Asesino (René Cardona, 1962), Las Luchadoras contra la momia (Cardona, 1964), and Las lobas del ring (Cardona, 1964). In these movies, the gender of the athletes is simply switched, and some romantic situations are added to showcase beautiful actresses who were not actually wrestling specialists. The sport itself is often used as a mere pretext for filler scenes, as seen in the case of Las sicodélicas.
Directed in 1968 by Gilberto Martínez Solares, this Mexican-Peruvian co-production features four stunning international actresses: Maura Monti from Italy, Amadee Chabot and Elizabeth Campbell from the United States, and Isela Vega from Mexico. They portray a quartet of small-time criminals who are adopted by an unscrupulous millionaire. She owns an elite insurance agency and a funeral home, and she orchestrates the deaths of her exclusive clients through these hired assassins. However, when one of them falls in love, it seems that it may put an end to their shady business dealings. The fact they keep ordering pisco because the film was shot in Peru, gives it a special eccentric touch.
As we pointed out before, throughout the filmography dedicated to lucha libre, women were not just acceptable villains or mere eye candy for the heroes, but peers who could also wear a mask and get into the ring, ready to to take part in the action as shown in the aforementioned films. Even more psychotronic is the pinnacle of Mexican camp, La mujer murciélago, directed by René Cardona in 1967, just a year after Leslie H. Martinson directed Batman (1966), the first feature film about the comic book character created by Bob Kane. While the scriptwriter for Batman, Lorenzo Semple Jr., relied mostly on the television series he himself had written rather than the comic books, the presence of Adam West and Burt Ward as the duo of Batman and Robin was enough to keep the attention focused.
On the other hand, the Mexican version takes a hybrid approach, combining elements of Batman and the female counterparts of Santo or Blue Demon. The story revolves around several wrestlers who have been found dead on the Mexican beaches of Acapulco. With the police overwhelmed by the crimes, they are forced to turn to the legendary Bat Woman, a masked vigilante who roams the world and is known for being immensely rich, using her fortune in service of the law.
It should be noted that the mysterious Bat Woman, portrayed by the Italian diva Maura Monti, spends the entire film chasing villains while dressed in nothing but a tiny blue bikini that matches her cape and mask, identical to the one worn by Adam West in the original American version.
Lucha libre as a backdrop, the suggestion of an unthinkable menage à trois in the still morally conservative Mexican cinema, a disfigured mad scientist, and an amphibious monster complete the picture of one of the most deranged films in the history of our cinema... that fantastic Aztec fantastique that continues to dazzle audiences wherever it is shown.
At the end of the sixties and early seventies, new directors appeared in Mexican cinema—closer to the idea of auteurism and fresh out of film schools—which meant a gradual separation between national film production and its audience, at least in its most industrialized version, due, in part, to the weakening of film unions and the overwhelming presence of American productions in Mexican screens. Despite this, there has been no shortage of filmmakers ready to tackle the local taste for the morbid or the intensity of stories that take place in every corner of the country—after all, a filmmaker like Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu had a fruitful career following the melodramatic trends of national cinema. It's just a matter of, literally, opening one’s eyes to notice how the morbidity oozes between frames.
Thanks to rediscovery and (perhaps exaggerated but entirely sincere) reevaluation, we now have digitally remastered copies and exhibition-quality prints that have never been seen before, allowing the new generations of unscrupulous cinephiles, eager to defy the boundaries of academicism to enjoy them and, if they so desire, reward them with applause or laughter—yes, we now know that laughing with them and not at them is a sincere homage—to the efforts of dozens of creators and artists who not only believed in the morbidly impossible but also filmed it.
1. Carlos Enrique Taboada (1929-1996) is widely known and revered both within and outside of Mexico for his tetralogy of horror films: Hasta el viento tiene miedo (1967), El libro de piedra (1968), Más negro que la noche (1974), and Veneno para las hadas (1984). Veneno para las hadas holds the distinction of being the first horror film to win the Ariel de Oro [Golden Ariel] (the Mexican equivalent to the Oscar) for Best Picture and the Ariel de Plata [Silver Ariel] for Best Director. Taboada's contributions to Mexican horror cinema are highly regarded, and his tetralogy has left a lasting impact on the genre.