Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Aztec Mummy, No. 2 - The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957)


One fact about this series which was barely pertinent to The Aztec Mummy now becomes inescapable: The Aztec Mummy trilogy was conceived all at once, and filmed as a single movie – in one month! Therefore The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (released later that same year) is an inarguably inferior film, merely quantitatively. Consider…

The Aztec Mummy is a perfectly functional rip-off of Universal’s The Mummy, told in the lurching, static idiom of an Ed Wood movie – in Spanish. But at least it’s identifiable as a complete movie, at feature length.

The Curse of the Aztec Mummy is only 2/3rds the length of the original. That’s a mere 63 minutes now…and around 25% of that is recycled footage from The Aztec Mummy.

On top of all that, The Curse of the Aztec Mummy epitomizes the “sequel as repetition” school. In Part One, an Aztec tomb was discovered, artifacts were stolen, and (surprise surprise) an Aztec mummy rose to retrieve them, and possibly kill a dude for fun. Here in Part Two…an Aztec tomb is discovered, artifacts stolen, you get the drill – by the same characters.


At least the villainous criminal mastermind known only as the Bat (Luis Aceves Catañeda) has an actual function this time, as now it’s his mania which fuels the activity surrounding Aztec mummy Popoca. And since the Bat was unmasked at the end of the last one – by both Popo and popo – and revealed as Dr. Krupp (dum dum dum!), he is functionally different now. Given a face – plus hammy, expressive eyes and a Satan beard – the Bat completely changes his temperament. Channeling a Bond villain’s worst neuroses ahead of schedule, the Bat runs an underworld gang of interchangeable Mexican mooks, casually cultivates something called a death chamber, and – he – never – stops – monologuing! Seriously, this Bat gentleman feels whatever need to filter the entire story through his own mouth, and when the story isn’t enough to sustain his time, he simply loops back around and starts again.

It must be said that this time out, I saw the movie dubbed into English – sadly removing a no-doubt insane vocal performance from Catañeda, but whichever voice actor they got could’ve been better served by a Speak ‘n’ Spell, so the entertainment value’s still pretty high. Credit K. Gordon Murray, a U.S. film distributor with the special distinction of being in the rarified Phil Tucker, Hal P. Warren circle without even ever making his own crappy movies. Rather, Murray snatched up other countries’ dreck (often Germanic kid flicks like Santa's Enchanted Villag and Rumpelstiltskin and The Living Coffin), dubbed ‘em and made ‘em his own. And at least this unintentionally comic approach makes the recycled footage somewhat new.

Anyway, the Bat was arrested at the end of the last film, so first order of business is rescuing him from his prison transport bus, much like Vin Diesel at the start of Fast Five. So the Bat’s chief minions, the Bear and the Lilac (I love these goofy names, and what they say about Mexican mid-century pop culture), direct a henchman-heavy assault. Cue the singularly most uninvolving shootout I’ve yet to encounter: Cops and robbers each lift up their (obviously prop) guns, then stand perfectly still and…don’t fire. Hell, even the sound effects (possibly Murray’s) underwhelm in the extreme, sounding exactly like pop guns.

It’s all so unimpressive, and my attention seriously wanes, when suddenly –


Holy shit, was that a luchadore?!

Indeed, El Ángel (Crox Alvarado) just drives on up in his mid-range coupe and runs right into the gunfight…bare handed. Ooh, he’s gonna win! Indeed, the awesome powers of Mexican wrestling overcome the Bat’s buffoons for a good long while, until the baddies have the good sense to switch from guns to fists, at which point they gain the upper hand, and knock out El Ángel. We’ll learn time and again that El Ángel is a profoundly incompetent luchadore superhero, easily beaten up and saved by children and whatnot, which seems not some attempted comic reversal of the usual El Santo idolatry, but a product of the sheer Mexican incompetence of director Rafael Portillo.

Character incompetence rules the roost. With El Ángel immobile, the goons are about to kill him, just as they’ve done to around a dozen police officers just now, when…the Bat says he has a better (read: worse) idea. In one of the dumbest death traps outside of Diamonds are Forever, he just tells ‘em to drive off – because El Ángel is asleep under the car’s wheels. Except… El Ángel awakes, completely unaware of his predicament, and rises as they drive off. So neither party handled that situation with too much aplomb. Get used to this.

Now…about luchadores. This is a gigantic separate genre in Mexican cinema, and one I’ll have to visit at some stage, thanks to the interbreeding of franchises that is El Santo, Mil Mascaras and Blue Demon. In fact, Mil Mascaras would eventually appear in Mil Mascaras vs. the Aztec Mummy, which is thankfully not a part of this Aztec Mummy franchise, for how convoluted that would make things.


Just accept for now that lucha movies were enormously popular in Mexico – I believe they were even before the Spanish conquistadors arrived. As such…it’s still odd for a luchadore to just appear out of the blue (demon) in The Curse of the Aztec Mummy, to then rise alongside the Bat as this entry’s main character. Odd since The Aztec Mummy, whatever its flaws of cheapness, is incontestably a horror movie, and a relatively serious one at that. This is full-on comic book pulp nonsense here…that’d have huge implications in Mexican B-cinema, as it seems at some point every wrestling star would have to battle mummies. Weird, the sort of influence a movie like this can have.

For what it’s worth, the recurring Aztec Mummy characters have a deeply hard time grasping the concept of El Ángel the luchadore – essentially, he’s Superman, only mortal (just as the Bat unintentionally spawns from movies which inspired Batman). He wears a mask to preserve his identity (he also sleeps in it, et cetera, which begs the question). He randomly drives around in his jalopy and fights crime. Why this all inspires a multi-minute exposition break is beyond me, except this is clearly S.O.P. for these Aztec Mummy movies. And most laughably, El Ángel gifts young Bobby (née Pepe) a two-way wristwatch communication device, ala Dick Tracy – which is hilarious since A) our cell phones are eons beyond this now, and B) this is such a Junior G-Man cereal box prize bit of nonsensical juvenilia, which’d’ve been anachronistic anywhere but Mexico in 1957, truly showing this franchise up as the fever dream of a mescaline-crazed producer (Guillermo Calderón). This series is nuts!

Now, when El Ángel isn’t expositing, the Bat is. He narrates to his politely assembled goons the whole plot of The Aztec Mummy – how a vacant gal named Flor (Rosa Arenas) visited a past life as an Aztec, revealing the location of an Aztec ruin and the treasure therein. Also mummy. Cue an extended needless flashback to The Aztec Mummy’s sacrifice/mummification/King Kong-rip-off sequence, still getting their peso’s worth from that routine. And now the Bat intends to rob this same Aztec tomb.


The Bat’s motivations shouldn’t be too complicated, especially since the bizarre moral universe of the Aztec Mummy series simply dictates that tomb robbing is “bad,” full stop. Hence his villainy. But still, let’s try to run through the whole of the Bat’s mad genius reasoning underlying his intended stone temple piloting:

• The Bat wants to experiment. Repeated dialogue (only now in English) indicates he really just wants to graft things to things, and hence to rule the world. Okay then.

• The Bat needs to fund his experiments, because “things” don’t come cheap.

• To do so, the Bat needs to acquire Aztec treasure™, because somehow that’s the only way for a madman to get money. And that’s with many dozen henchmen under his belt, mind you.

• Directions to the Aztec treasure™ are written upon an Aztec breastplate and bracelet, and it’s these which lie in the sought after tomb. Hence first the Bat must find the tomb.

• Ignoring the fact that in Part One the Bat was at the tomb, he’s apparently forgotten where it is. Therefore he must kidnap Flor and hypnotize her just as Dr. Almeda once did, only now it’s added on that Flor is suddenly immune to hypnosis…unless the Bat has “a drug” (no greater specification than that, because these movies are damnably unscientific). Really, this is all an excuse to recycle Part One’s reincarnation nonsense, something the filmmakers were clearly enamored of.

• And then, once the Bat has the breastplate and bracelet, he must kidnap Dr. Almeda (Ramón Gay) to translate it for him.

• To ensure Almeda’s cooperation (do note the English translation can never get “Almeda” straight, calling him in turn Alamanda, Alandan, Almeda and Alamor), the Bat must kidnap more of Almeda’s family, you know, to torture.

• At some stage, all this also necessitates the acquisition of many, many poisonous snakes.

Wait…what is this movie about?!


Naturally, this is a damned lot of random, arbitrary nonsense to pile on, all of it needed to retell the same mummy tale as before, and to allow a luchadore story to be grafted onto it, like one of the Bat’s unseen experiments. Along with selective ignorance of the natural world, this story demands a fantastic degree of amnesia for nearly every character. Among other things, the Bat is damn well aware of Popoca’s (the mummy’s) threat, yet does nothing about this.

I mean, at the very least you could translate the mummy’s items without removing them from the tomb – because it’s only once you’ve stolen that Popo is on your tail (heh heh!). Or you could always just take a picture of the artifacts, translate them at your leisure, and that’d be that. Oh well…


Let’s assume by now in the movie the Bat has retrieved the breastplate and bracelet, and returned to his evil lair. Meanwhile, he’s already captured El Ángel several times, and El Ángel has escaped several times. And the Bat has freely handed out his lair’s address to Almeda’s entire extended family, all a part of his “brilliant” plan. Yet he’s still surprised when these characters burst into his lair to stop him, except…except these good guys, knowing for days where the Bat resides, never alerted the cops. Really, everyone is functioning according to some strange, unstated B-movie code of honor, working overtime to keep the villainous Bat a menace until the formulaic climax, logic be cursed.

Following this curious Mexican anti-logic, every time the Bat captures El Ángel, he refuses to unmask him. He doesn’t merely refuse it, he orally justifies carrying the idiot ball. Because El Ángel will no longer be a problem; just toss him in that death trap unguarded, then let’s all leave, and assume it’s done. MORONS!

So the Bat has no one to blame but himself once Popoca finally makes his delayed entrance in the movie’s final few minutes. What was that about B-movies just barely delivering upon their titular promises? Surely with the costume already built (for Part One), they could’ve done slightly more with the series-justifying Aztec mummy than this!

As it is, Popoca is exposed to brightly lit sets, highlighting how rubbery his decaying, jerky-fresh flesh actually is. He don’t look too good, he don’t. Oh, and a horror movie? Eh, Popoca is now the hero. With the Bat 1/3rd into his evil, evil, evil treasure-stealing scheme, it’s up to brave Popoca to keep Aztec gold randomly, purposely hidden…by killing a dozen men! It’s staged like a Mexican wrestling match. Popoca lightly taps goons on the shoulders, and they die from the sheer force of it. There are at least two nicely gruesome fates in here: Acid eats one guy’s face away, and another fellow tumbles into the Bat’s snake vat (psst – it was the Bat).


Popoca retrieves his beloved breastplate and bracelet, or something, and wanders off. With no logical justification, Dr. Almeda hypothesizes Popoca shall now wander to someplace new, instead of back to his old beloved pyramid. I think Almeda sees the pre-filmed sequel on the horizon.

Well, that was inept. The Aztec Mummy baseline isn’t great, yet The Curse of the Aztec Mummy is made worse by being a second movie made when they barely had the resources for one. The film’s editing scheme really highlights their financially friendly recycling. It’s like with Ed Wood: You get one shot of a car driving, so it becomes reusable forever. Just add a night tint, or reverse the image. So action bits featured in Part One return in new contexts – I swear the same cop dies two or three times throughout.

Actually, there is one particularly curious example of this phenomenon – where Part One uses footage from Part Two! The Aztec Mummy opens with the Bat escaping prison, just as its sequel does – and it’s the same footage, but only used as an entire sequence in Part Two. So what’s it doing in the original? Creating a plot hole, mostly, for there’s no reason for this stuff to appear when it does otherwise.

Boy, with things folding in on themselves in this way, I’m excited to see what the trilogy’s final entry can offer!

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