The Aztec Mummy trilogy was so popular, producer Guillermo Calderón didn’t even bother making sequels. Oh, Aztec mummies would continue in Mexican pop culture – La Cabeza Viviente and…really, that’s all. At least from that era. And it’s not even an official sequel of any sort, as Aztec mummies are a generic, non-trademarkable notion. Besides, Calderón wasn’t involved in that one – though it got the same K. Gordon Murray translation/distribution deal in the U.S.
Nope, a true sequel at this stage could only come about through a crossover – the fourth and final Aztec Mummy. But that’d require another Calderón product worthy of sequelizing, and all this in a renewed Mexican cinematic marketplace that has ceased producing entire trilogies in one month. Instead, Calderón could simply hope to produce a sufficiently good movie – a significant task, given the general air of cheapness.
Broadening our scope for a bit, recall how profoundly backwards-thinking Mexican horror cinema was in the 1950s, looking to decades-old U.S. films, then just ripping them off wholesale. Enter the 1960s, and while Mexican film remains pulpy programmable schlock, endlessly caught in the tonal idiom of old crackerjack escapist serials, it starts developing its own personality. Enter now without reservations the luchadores! Though briefly toyed with in The Curse of the Aztec Mummy, Mexican lucha libre wrestling truly became a subgenre unto itself shortly thereafter. The first El Santo movie came about in 1958, and from there a veritable avalanche of masked wrestling superheroes took over Mexican screens. And while these B-pictures remain an irredeemable porridge of action, horror, sci-fi and other exploitable filmic elements all mashed together into a lumpy, tasty gruel, the luchadores were the glue that held these messes together. Add to that a healthy taste of ‘60s mod, rock ‘n’ roll culture, and you’ve got a curious thing indeed – movies still somehow stuck in the ‘30s stylistically, but reflecting all the nonsensical biker gangs and counter culture Roger Corman was embracing so lovingly at that time.
Many a luchadore franchise sprung up in Santo’s wake: The Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, and lesser stars (all sharing the same fictional identity as in their wrestling careers) like Tinieblas, Rayo de Jalisco (both Sr. and Jr.), El Fantasma Blanco, and Superzan!
…Oh, and the Wrestling Women, Calderón’s major stake in the genre – noting a gender-wide genre gap, he thus makes something that is functionally no different, really, only it has breasts. And is, reportedly, more insane!
These Wrestling Women (Las Luchadoras) – Gloria Venus (Lorena Velásquez) and Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell) – are not, like their male counterparts, genuine artifacts of the Mexican pro-wrestling circuit. They’re true creations of film – evidenced by how clearly non-wrestlers they are when placed alongside stocky, squat, genuine female wrestling opponents. Thus, the Wrestling Women weren’t even conceived of as franchise characters. While I prefer to call their first film Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape, for how wonderfully loopy that is, it is more commonly known by the generic Dr. of Doom, a title which reveals nothing of the Wrestling Woman wonder to burst forth from it.
That more generic title indicates the general attitude of this first Wrestling Women – the shorthand I’ll refer to this flick from now on. In essence, it’s just your bog standard mad scientist flick, the sort the ‘60s saw so much of before Night of the Living Dead totally redefined what horror was. It reminds me a lot of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, or something Bela Lugosi would’ve done for Monogram. In this aspect, Wrestling Women is at times tremendously boring, and at times ridiculously hilarious – it works like nearly all “MST3K”-ready B-pictures in that way.
For basically, a duo of masked mad scientists have been terrorizing…some city. Presumably, it’s Mexico City, only a Mexico City Podunk enough to warrant only two inept, bungling comic relief police detectives to its name. Which is why this unnamed doctor’s reign of terror – kidnapping, then killing, assorted alley-dwelling women – continues unabated.
Getting into details, the doc is trying to insert a gorilla’s brain into a woman’s brainpan. Yes! What the hell for?! I mean, for one thing he’s already done so successfully with a dude – the resulting ape-like “ape-man” is lovingly christened Gomar. Based on the incontestable lies of SCIENCE, Gomar’s human body is reacting to the gorilla brain the only way possible – by slowly transforming into a gorilla! (A side note: this mania with eeee-vil murderous gorillas is a remnant of older U.S. films, and evidence the Mexicans were indirectly racist for much longer.) It is this physical reversion back into lesser hominid which most disturbs our doctor, which is why he needs a woman – because women, according to SCIENCE, do not transform into gorillas when implanted with gorilla brains. The only problem – they die instead. D’oh! There is some confusion here as to just which brain they’re putting in whose body, so I’ll just let the doctors handle this one:
“All the brains we have transplanted so far have come from totally uneducated women. And their IQs were extremely low!”
Mind you there is a general, unconcerned patina of misogyny to these old Mexican flicks, the automatic assumption (title aside) that women are totally worthless dimwits, who’d barely remember to breathe if a noble man wasn’t there to remind them. It’s kind of remarkable. And so the doc laments the sheer impossibility of finding what he needs – a functionally intelligent woman. What a rarity!
It just so happens that there is one woman who’s been allowed access to Mexico’s educational system, one Alicia (Sonia Infante) – we know she’s smart (despite the same voluptuous Miami model appearance all Mexican actresses evidently cultivate) because she wears glasses and a ponytail. (See also: Alone in the Dark) Too bad that for all Alicia’s hard work, all it earns her is a kidnapping via ape-man, followed by a swift death upon an illegal, underground Mexican operating table.
A pause. I’ve been addressing the mad scientist doctor in generic, lower case terms. This is because his identity is not yet revealed. In fact, he wears the surgical equivalent of a luchadore mask. Now just becoming cognizant of the rules governing luchadore movies, I understand mask-wearing is a widespread custom in Mexican film. And it’s usually a shorthand for our benefit. Characters wear masks to conceal their identities, either for a late-movie twist (as in the doctor’s case), or simply to be unknown in public. In other words, people wear masks for arbitrary in-film reasons, and no one else calls ‘em out on this! With a little logic the cops could figure out the dude wandering around in plain daylight with a mask is the serial killer scientist, but of course you need a warrant to unmask a dude, etc. This is kind of a fascinating development, and likely a major ingredient for lucha cinema.
I bring it up now because the question of the doctor’s identity becomes central. Also incredibly easy to deduce ahead of schedule. I mean, a drooling, isolated cretin never before exposed to film could figure it out! For Alicia, while she still lives, has a certain colleague, a mild mannered, violence-hating fellow – Professor Ruiz (Roberto Cañedo). Here’s our first genuine hint Ruiz might be the Mad Doctor…
Deliveryman: “Here’s your suspiciously large delivery of venison, Professor.”
Yes, that is actual dialogue. No, this is not a comedy (intentionally).
Further hints retain that degree of inelegance (credit to regular Calderón scribe Alfredo Salazar, and director René Cardona). As if to counter this obviousness, there are many scenes of Ruiz held at gunpoint by the Mad Doctor’s assorted henchmen (who apparently have some sort of vested interest in human-gorilla brain transference). Usually, this is a ploy to lure people in, the mastermind acting the victim. It becomes problematic when we even see Ruiz making phone calls at feigned gunpoint, for no reason except so that we mightn’t suspect him. Like the mask thing, the rules about villains, heroes, and other such niceties follow their own illogical paths in this genre.
….Now wait, I’ve been calling this a luchadore film. Where’s the luchadores?! Well, patience, for artlessly intercut with all this mad science hooey, Cardona has generously served up endless scenes of wrestling, with the franchise-making Wrestling Women referred to so far above. They’re sultry, they wear body-tight leotards (and occasionally capes), they’re prone to stilted line readings with just a hint of lesbianism to them: “My new apartment is large, and you are lonely.” Cue the sexy saxophone music – I am dead serious!
All in all, though, Gloria and Golden (those being our two Wrestling Women – I honestly expected something more like a dozen) are presented as competent, heroic…against all odds, this woman-hating 1964 Mexican flick passes the Bechdel Test. We know this is a remarkably difficult thing for the filmmakers to accede to, when they’d prefer to show women as shrieking, eternally-terrified lingerie-clad…entities. But that’s the requirement of Wrestling Women’s premise, to show female protagonists, and the movie men are able to have it both ways by making this an eye candy factory for the entire time as well.
In fact, the Wrestling Women’s competence is no mere trait. It’s a plot point! For the Mad Doctor now, by process of pure SCIENTIFIC logical deduction, concludes that he needs not a smart woman, but an athletic woman. Cue the same hand wringing about how unlikely such a specimen exists. But then the Mad Doc recalls filmic convenience, that Gloria isn’t simply the exact brain recipient he needs (being the national wrestling champ and all), she’s also Alicia’s sister. How likely! This gives Gloria a motive too, the simplest of all: Revenge!
Most of the rest of the story is pretty basic, once Gloria wants to kill the Doctor and the Doctor wants her skull cavity. Toss in a romance between the Wrestling Women and Mexico City’s two guileless detectives – Armando and Chema (Armando Silvestre and Chucho Salinas) I deduce they’re so called, since the damned English dub instead calls ‘em Mike and Tommy. Right. Anyway, the sudden pairing of Wrestling Women and Dopey Detectives demands further analysis.
It undermines the Wrestling Women! Consider that all important gender inequality must be maintained! For while the cops are utterly worthless human beings (in that sort of doofy “Mexican comedy” way, a nation which still finds nasally-voiced men clad as niños bonking each other with mallets the height of humor – to say nothing of Carlos Mencia), they still did get themselves the girls. Two Amazons, the sole two able females in existence – and their equals are a pair of jokers that make Abbott and Costello look like Martin and Lewis. It’s subtly tasteless on one hand, and it simultaneously is such a contrived situation, it keeps Wrestling Women in a bizarre, abstract realm. I swear, for all their similarities to more familiar Ed Wood-style U.S. films, these Mexican efforts are a bit arbitrary, like passion plays with symbolic, archaic types to be filled.
Anyway, the Wrestling Women eventually corner the Mad Doctor…and kill him! This is with a good half hour of movie to go.
Which means the Doctor didn’t die, but just had his face melted away with acid (something which happened to the villain in The Aztec Mummy vs. the Human Robot as well). Now we officially learn that Ruiz is the villain – not like there were many other options anyway. And vowing vengeance against Gloria for initially vowing vengeance against him, Ruiz (now lacking his lair, lab, ape-man and network of goons, mind you) does the unexpected…
He successfully creates his long-awaited gorilla-woman!
Just like that, eh? For all the apparent difficulties, there was evidently another fit wrestling woman nearby. Well, okay then. It’s not every mad science movie which sees its villain actually achieve his climactic goal. And while the initial idea was that this gorilla-woman, this unstoppable (except by bullets, and all other forms of death) paragon of beastliness, this creature would somehow aid Ruiz in conquering the world (I’m sensing a pattern in these movies), well…Well now all Ruiz cares about is slipping a mask over both himself and the Gorilla Gal (now named Vendetta), and entering her in a wrestling match against Gloria. Because Mexico’s commissioned wrestling league is totally OK with a manager and fighter arriving out of the blue with masks on and demanding to fight the national champ.
The fallout of all this is Vendetta tackles Gloria in the ring, Vendetta controlled by Ruiz’s ESP mind control capabilities we never knew of before – this sequence reminds me of that “Futurama” episode where Bender joins Ultimate Robot Fighting. That’s the one where the kung fu alien controls the gigantic mecha in the ring, until the one-eyed space pilot defeats him. Well, Mexico’s serious variation on the same is no less insane, and to simply state that Wrestling Women ends in all out insanity rivaled only by the 1966 version of Casino Royale, well, that’s a much simpler way of wrapping this up than attempting to actually explicate all the nonsense.
Except to say that Vendetta (once Gloria’s good boon friend) is shot dead as a gorilla woman, and that’s after much distress over re-transferring brains to save her…Well fuck it!
And that’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape – with very little actual rock ‘n’ roll to its name, and the ape in question being decidedly not Aztec, and perishing at the end of Act Two. Ah, but who cares? The Wrestling Women themselves are the big takeaway from this enterprise, two gals to (somehow) inspire the women and titillate the men. More so the latter. That cheesecake factor pretty much explains how a franchise could’ve been born of this, especially when B-movies were still people’s main source of remotely pornographic notions.
Next stop: Crossing over with the Aztec mummy!
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