Aka Wolf-Babes of the Ring (liberal translation)!
The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy did what it did for the Wrestling Women franchise (screw that dusty, shambling Aztec Mummy!), opening it up to sequels. That’s all well and good except for one thing: They had no idea for a sequel…
Well, that didn’t stop ‘em (“‘em” being producer Guillermo Calderón and director René Cardona) from simply making Las lobas del ring anyway, accurse it all! As if working under a sense of deadline, Las lobas del ring is a Wrestling Women movie in that the Wrestling Women appear in it and…yeah, that’s kind of all that happens. In the storied luchadore Mexican subgenre, so often rife with vampires, mummies, secret societies, aliens, witches, ghosts, superheroes, mad scientists, robots and sombreros, Las lobas is just a luchadore film…in that it only shows wrestling scenes, and adds nothing else of value.
It is my hypothesis that lucha libre cinema developed when it did as a substitute or supplement for televised wrestling matches. Given Mexico’s technological limitations in the 1960s, broadcasting these fights live wasn’t an option. But so many of the star luchadores – Santo, Blue Demon, Hurácan Ramírez, Mil Máscaras, Rey Mysterio, La Parka, Eddie Guerrero, Hijo de Santo, Nacho Libre – were national superstars anyway, beloved as living iconic folk heroes in a way I can’t even find a parallel for. Audiences wanted to see these storied gods-among-men, and so movies floated that bill, creating fictional escapist fantasies surrounding masked personas in the wrestling arena.
This feels akin to the fictionality which has come to encompass popular U.S. wrestling, where it’s commonly accepted the “sport” is essentially live theater, telling outsized tales of outsized men. By the framework of professional wrestling entities, the WCW, the WWE, the WWF, the WWEF, the WWC, the WWJD, WWWWAFCHFS, the QVC and the WTF, the sport and a larger bizarre interest in narratives unite into a single spectacle – only don’t tell my preteen cousin it’s fake, lest he piledrive his bed in defiance for some reason. (God, it seems I’ve said far more on wrestling over this blog’s existence than I, a total ringside apathetic, have any right to!)
Eh, so it is with lucha libre, that utterly ridiculous fiction becomes intertwined with the films. But owing to the nature of cinema, of lucha flicks, these fictions remain accepted as fictions – that is, unless some young Mexican fanboys genuinely thought Santo went off to defeat supernatural psychotics on a yearly basis in between wrestling professionally, and I wouldn’t put it past them. Still we get wrestling matches in these lucha películas, filmed with all the cinematic verve and energy one would expect from live single-camera recordings in the 1960s third world. These in-film matches, as far as I can tell, are genuine (for wrestling is a sport there); you then add a story about lizard people or some damn thing around the edges, tie it in vaguely with the matches presented (where the hero always wins, which raises some eyebrows), and you got mucha lucha!
Now belatedly I return to Las lobas del ring – and when I say all it concerns is wrestling, I mean there are no otherworldly beasties nor any other such B-movie nonsense for our heroines to contend with. Nope, there’s just a mighty million peso pot (aka $85,506.60) at the end of the year’s wrestling season, awaiting the champ. Some criminals seek the prize; so do our stars, Loreta Venus and Golden Rubi (Lorena Velásquez and Elizabeth Campbell). Intersperse wrestling scenes with static, unenergetic talking scenes, leading up to Loreta’s oh-so-inevitable final victory, incorporate some scant gangsterism and kidnapping and mamacitas into the mix, and that is the entirety of Las lobas del ring.
Therefore, all in all, it isn’t a very interesting movie, certainly not when (having seen but two lucha libre movies to my name at this stage) wrestling is but the baseline for juvenile insanity. I want insanity! Thus this movie is a sequel made without even a plot to support it – pretty much the notion of an automatic sequel dragged to its logical extreme.
Too bad this lucha-chica lunacy doesn’t work on its own. Hence all that dwelling upon the genre above. Unique among luchadore flicks, The Wrestling Women does not showcase actual wrestlers. There’s no way (and I’ve explored this before) that Velásquez and Campbell, with their Amazonian sex bomb bodies and hazardously accentuated breasts and ginormous Texas-style ‘60s beehive hairdos, there’s no way these chicas could function in the professional fighting circuit – let alone escape from every match with their hair unmussed, while the troll-like real “female” wrestlers they defeat so handily emerge looking like Stallone at the end of Rocky. Thus the fights are thoroughly faked, improvised, performed by attractive non-wrestlers with a “do not harm” clause hanging invisibly around their necks. The verisimilitude which actually underwrites fictionalized wrestling, in either its Mexican or U.S. form, is lacking here, which is entirely too fake to be taken as sport, and too lacking in any other qualities too.
It’s telling just how uniform the screen caps are. Hell, I wasn’t even trying to make the movie look monotonous! Well over ten minutes separate each image, at least, to show the sort of visual blandness that is Las lobas del ring.
It goes without saying, with all these handicaps, that Las lobas del ring wasn’t nearly as popular as the greater Wrestling Women efforts, such as Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape (that title alone makes it the better film!). At least, Las lobas had no sway in the U.S. – hence my insistence upon its Spanish title. Therefore – and this is me grasping at straws in order to keep on jabbering pointlessly – it isn’t dubbed. I watched it in Spanish. This couldn’t have helped matters much, as much of the dialogue (and there is a lot of it, when wrestling isn’t happening) totally went over my monolingual head. Though not from complexity of vocabulary – they say most movies employ a roughly 3rd grade use of language, and we’re talking Mexican schooling here. It just got tiring trying to translate chatty chatter for so long, when it became quickly obvious how fruitless it was. As an example of my efforts, here’s how my note-taking went at the outset:
Talk on lucha libre, an important deporte. Es mas dramatic que los otros deportes. Necesitamos propaganda. Los luchas mujeres son atractivas. Van a ver…uno cosa yo no sey con las luchas de mujeres.
Then it just became a drinking game. At every utterance of “lucha” or “mujer,” I imbibed. I write about this now the day afterwards, damaged enough from the effort that I lack discussion points more intriguing than my own alcoholism.
At least there’s one other notable fact about Las lobas del ring – it marks Lorena Velásquez’s final entry in the series. It’s not a total farewell, as she’d go on to do some Santo flicks, so whatever ostensible attempt at respectability in Las lobas (by dropping the superstitious hocus pocus we come for – I mean, they couldn’t even deliver on she-werewolves, as the title indicates) didn’t stick. It’d be the nice thing to do at this stage to retrospect upon Velásquez’s Wrestling Women career, except…except I feel none of these casts have ever risen above adequate. The acting itself leaves little impression, so all one can say for Velásquez is that, yup, she sure was an attractive enough lady. Which, you know, is such a rarity in film and all.
Meaning the series will have to continue now without its star. If they can toss in some dinosaurs or zombies or whatever, it’ll be a trade up, frankly.
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