Transformers, No. 1 - The Transformers: The Movie (1986)

It is every film blogger’s occasional joy to run across a complete blind spot. Given my age, interests, and the never-ending rants of the ever-expanding nerds I went to college with, I am somehow a deeply lesser human being for having never seen The Transformers: The Movie – to go by the nerds’ wizened jabberings, the single greatest animated film conceivable.

Actually, I had next to nothing to do with the Transformers brand growing up, except for a few toys I think I must’ve burgled from somebody. But do not weep for a childhood that never happened, because every young boy has two possible career options: be a giant truck, or a dinosaur. I was a dinosaur. My hosannas then and now go out to the almighty Turtles – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to the layman. That’s when I wasn’t intentionally wrecking my childhood with R-rated junk instead (e.g. RoboCop), so a single cartoon utterance of “Oh shit!” probably wouldn’t have even phased me.


Time to do my penance for pop cultural ignorance, and probe this Transformers trend…

It all began as a toy! In an eternal tale of inspiration, in 1984 Hasbro proved Orwell right and acquired preexisting molds from Japan (MicroChange, which spun-off from Diaclone, which spun-off from Microman, which spun-off from G.I. Joe). The toys: robots which could transform. Hasbro’s witty contribution was to call said transformers “Transmorphers” – er, no, “Transformers.”

Largish robots that can turn into cars, and vice versa – it’s a truck enthusiast’s automotive wet dream. To fuel and overwrite children’s playtime fantasies, Hasbro commissioned a story for their semi-Japanese-ish car-bot-itrons. These guys were involved: Jim Shooter, Dennis O’Neil, Bob Budiansky. (Through advance research, it seems I am a worthless scrap of meat for not knowing that a priori.) Thus there are two robot factions, the Autobots and the Decepticons, who battle each other…over energy resources. Despite seemingly interchangeable tactics, one side is good and angelic, and the other side as evil as Pazuzu. The Decepticons, because their innate ancestral name sounds like the English Earth word “deceive,” are the “bad” ones. And…let the hyperactive schoolboys choose their allegiances!


The toy line lead swiftly to a TV show, “The Transformers” (“Fight! Super Robot Life Form Transformer” in Japan, which is an infinitely cooler name). Plus, such publicity leads to more toys purchased, which a cynic without a childhood to rape (i.e. me) would point to as the ultimate goal. For this great mid-‘80s renaissance of product promotional programming, we can thank regulators for lifting a previous ban on such glorious capitalism. (Thanks to “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,” because you cannot oppose crass marketing in light of such patriotism!)

The show, by all evidence, explores the war twixt Autobots and Decepticons over the planet Cybertron. It is contemporarily set, with scant Earth humans from the Witwicky family in there not to be further toys (though who really knows), but to entice those weirdos not auto(bot)matically interested in robots. Robo-wise, the cast is massive, to reflect each and every toy available for purchase at your local participating toy emporium: Optimus Prime, Brawn, Bluestreak, Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, Gears, Hound, Huffer, Ironhide, Jazz, Mirage, Prowl, Ratchet, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, Trailbreaker, Wheeljack, Windcharger, Hauler, and those are only the good guys, and only from the pilot.


Imagine now, as we artlessly jump ahead to 1986’s big damn theatrical The Transformers: The Movie, an uninformed viewer suddenly plunged into a universe more overloaded than the one outlined above. This is the effect of attempting to watch The Movie now without proper grounding. As animated by Japan’s Toei (though an English-language American release), the Transformers characters are…difficult to tell apart. The movie makes no appeals to newbies, no effort at introductions or explanations. It is mostly by color that I can pick out at least the most important characters (Optimus, Megatron, Hot Rod, Starscream)…though one could complain similarly about the Turtles, I suppose.

The voice cast is really show-offy – among others, Peter Cullen, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Frank Welker, Eric Idle – in perhaps an effort to create some personality distinction. For whatever reason, the DVD’s vocal synch doesn’t work, so this one is screwed up – with hilarious results! Plus, stiff robot faces aren’t the most expressive, so it’s hard sometimes to know which head is yakking anyway.

I feel rather like Stan in “South Park’s” recent “You’re Getting Old” – exposed to entertainment so clearly not meant for me, as it’s both juvenile and instantly time-stamped. Everything throughout feels like the same bombastic visual and aural noise (no, I’m not yet reviewing the Michael Bay efforts). The Movie is no doubt designed for those consumers already initiated in the “Transformers” world – the “Generation 1” world specifically, though they didn’t know that at the time.


The animation is the perfect representative of “Super Robot Seizure Happy Time Hour” – flashing lights and visual dissonance, done with admittedly some budget for a mid-level Japanese 1986 production, but wholly cluttered to behold.

The soundtrack is inundated with period power ballads, and assorted sub-New Wave synth what-have-you. “The Touch,” Stan Bush’s central tune (originally meant, amusingly, for Stallone’s Cobra), is the sort of inspirational pap Daniel La Russo wouldn’t be caught dead training to. Plus, it’s sorta awesome. The entirety of every scene is pumped to full volume with it and similar noise, forever overpowering the hard efforts of the voice cast. (To say nothing of including “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Dare to be Stupid,” which I like – because it’s “Weird Al” – but is wholly out-of-place near the climax of a self-serious American mecha monstrosity.)

Individually, the story works just like the songs or the visuals – that is, at 11, independently trying to overwhelm the senses with so much spectacle and event and detail that one is never able to get a grasp of what exactly is happening. Or at any rate, my laid back adult mind cannot do this – The whole of The Movie plays like the fever sugar rush babbling of an explosion-happy six-year-old, which no doubt explains its appeal to those who were that age in that year…a limited, niche audience, to be sure.


Here’s what I could figure out: The always-hungry, planet-devouring Unicron (voiced by the similarly omnivorous Orson Welles, who then died) threatens to destroy the peaceful tranquility of the Autobot-Decepticon war. It is also the distant future year of 2005 now, allowing for a heady combination of robots and hoverboards and prophetic Bush satire (okay, only the first two).

Meanwhile…okay, I think it’s all action sequences from here on out. Anyway, assorted cartoon robots launch special effects towards each other, eventually Unicron is turned into something else all explodey, and…a whole shitload of main characters die!


Okay, The Movie is famous for decimating the “Transformers” lineup, in a cruel act of attrition which utterly devastated many ‘80s boys – Imagine if you first learned about death through the passing of Optimus Prime. Seen in isolation, and with recourse to other period anime features with more decidedly mature tones, one (myself) barely grasps the gravity of all this. Part of it is…I sometimes cannot tell if someone is dying. Honestly, I think there’s something wrong with my brain, that the boundless, uncontrolled energy of The Movie is more confusing than the zanier efforts of a Lynch or a Cronenberg.

Besides, going in I already understood the true motive behind animated mass murder: TOYS! The Transformers: The Movie was put out in the summer between the second and third seasons of the TV show, which is a familiar pattern for – yes – the era’s anime films. (See, e.g., “InuYasha.”) The Movie is subservient to the show, which is subservient to the toy line – and toy lines must renew themselves with time, lest the eternal capitalist impulse dry up without new products. So while artistically the show might’ve wished to continue developing its established cast, each new toy means a new character, and it demands the removal of an old character.


So The Movie is really a filmed product announcement, one you have to pay to see. Only no child heading into theaters knew this – they simply knew they’d be seeing their favorite soulless robot heroes in a glorified adventure. Who’da thunk the freedoms of cinema (over kid-vid Saturday morning TV) meant mecha mortality.

And here are the new toys (er, characters) The Movie establishes: Hot Rod, Kup, Bluur, Arcee, Springer, Ultra Magnus, Wreck-Gar, Wheely, Steeljaw, Ramhorn, Eject, Rewind, the Sharkticons. (God, these names!) I get all this info from outside research, because there’s nothing in the film which makes it remotely that clear. Plus, certain former characters aren’t quite killed, but rather “promoted” into “new” consumer-dictated figurines: Megatron becomes Galvatron, and some other misspellings change as well.

And there’s something called the Matrix of Leadership, and I’m sure it makes sense if I could parse out its exposition over the cock rock. As it is, that just sounds like some phraseology from a business retreat.


“More than meets the eye.” “Robots in disguise.” The central concept of “Transformers” isn’t anathema to something a little less batshit nutsazoid. Robots hidden among us…this opens up a rich fantasy reverie, and is obviously the engine behind the ongoing franchise. Too bad the facts of toy production dictate continuous elaboration, which turns – in no time flat! – into lunacy. To capture a new market share, Hasbro invented new sub-lines of Transformers such as the Insecticons or the…er, the Dinosauriconobotics. (Sorry, “Dinobots.”) Also the Constructicons, and probably something called the Comiconitrons.

So…giant robots morphing into giant dinosaurs. It’s cool, in that reductive, maniac sort of way, but these ideas do rather undercut believability. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this overstuffed world was/is the appeal. Maybe it’s more fun to see gigantic robots on alien planets, where their scale is equivalent to the local architecture, as opposed to on Earth where they look massive. All these things which alienate me, which make me hear farting noises, could be what’s fun about the brand.

And moving on briefly beyond The Movie…“The Transformers” continued on TV for two more seasons. Assorted spinoffs then emerged in Japan, but we expect the Japanese to do silly things to begin with. The line bifurcated within the U.S. as well, creating numerous new animated shows and toy lines and comic book continuities, all distinct from each other, except when they’re not. To wit, there’s “Beast Wars,” “Robots in Disguise,” “Armada,” “Energon,” “Cyberton,” and something simply called “Transformers: Animated,” even though all of those are animated. And those are just – I think – the shows. All hail Hasbro, which develops ideas like tumors! Each new line is a chance for new customers – renewing a fan base is one approach, unlike most series which try to maintain a single audience long term.

And then there’s the live action franchise, which is a separate bag of bolts…

Mr. Wong, No. 1 - Mr. Wong, Detective (1938)

The mystery genre was once surprisingly fertile, throughout the 1930s. Without even addressing one-offs, these are simply some of the franchises which adhered to this formula: Sherlock Holmes, The Thin Man, Bulldog Drummond, Hildegarde Withers, Torchy Blaine, Philo Vance…There is even a remarkably peculiar further subgenre…the “white guy plays an Asian detective” movie.

That particular niche is best exemplified by the Charlie Chan films, which had their start with a series of novels by Earl Derr Biggers – serialized novels being the origin of so many of these mystery franchises, which goes a way towards explaining their sudden existence. (So does the mere fact of filmic serialization, as movie series were just being explored as an idea in the ‘30s – largely by the B-studios.) Produced under Fox, the Chan films were reasonably successful and hugely prolific – with thirty entries, and that’s before Monogram Studios got their grubby little hands on the franchise in 1944. But before they could do that, Monogram was already hungry to snatch up some of Chan’s nascent racist luster for themselves, and thus they created a copyChan – Mr. Wong.


This wasn’t the only Chan channeler, for there was also the Mr. Moto series, also produced by Fox – which begs the question. While I remain for now entirely unfamiliar with the Peter Lorre-starring Mr. Moto, we turn our attentions wholly to Mr. James Wong, the sole Asian detective without any evident literary origin. Rather, we can look to Chan as Wong’s major inspiration, and play comparison. Each is a Chinese private citizen, residing in San Francisco, forever called upon by the police to solve regularly occurring formula murder mysteries – though the cinematic Chan would only do some of this later, so in 1938 this wouldn’t seem entirely unoriginal. (Indeed, the Mono-Chans took on some of Wong’s characteristics, for want of even the remotest creativity in Monogram’s monotonous movie machine.)

There is very little effort made to distinguish Mr. Wong from his betters – forsooth, Monogram was the Asylum of Classical Hollywood. The lone unique factor is the casting: Wong is essayed by Boris Karloff! Karloff “the Uncanny,” monstrous star of Frankenstein and subsequently more Universal horror films than a sane man can ever hope to comprehend. A brilliant character actor, Karloff had already appeared in Charlie Chan at the Opera, for my money the absolute tiptop of the Chan clan – which is largely Karloff’s doing! (Karloff’s friend/rival Béla Lugosi has some connection to the “rinky-dink Chink dick” genre as well, even beyond Chan’s The Black Camel.)


So…Mr. Wong is an astoundingly dull character – as evidenced by his “most generic Chinese name possible.” Perhaps this is because he’s a legally distinct semi-Chan with the edges hewn off. Here are his non-Chan-tastic characteristics: He has a mustache, glasses, black greasy hair; basically, he’s a white guy’s misinterpretation of “Darkest Orient.” He is deductively calm, always one step ahead of the police in a way which seems more derivative of Sherlock Holmes, only without the faintest justification. He has, at least by Part One, neither family nor friends, excepting a “buck-toothed Chinaman” manservant (Lee Tung Foo). Wong’s intended catch phrase is “Just a cup of tea.” Scintillating! [Snore!]

To Karloff’s kredit, though he kannot make Wong interesting, at least his performance isn’t the remotest bit racist – something that cannot be said of Chan’s charges, saddled with their falsely slanted eyes and stereotypical “Ah-so, me rikee the flied lice” dialogue. (Honestly, these Chan movies are a real affront to modern sensibilities!) Apart from his bland name and butler, the only indication that Mr. Wong is of any ethnicity is the silk robe he’s seen wearing in one scene. Oh, and that inane tea fascination. Karloff’s Wong is bracingly neutral, which is perhaps all we could ask for in these conditions.


The Mr. Wong series as a whole amounted to a mere six pictures (hardly anything at all by the standards of ‘30s franchises) all made within a three-year window – this highlights Monogram’s quick-and-dirty turnaround assembly line. Their wholly serviceable approach is evident in every stage of Mr. Wong, Detective, the intro entry. At 68 minutes, there is absolutely no time for dilly-dallying, and hence none of the characters – not even Wong – can make the remotest impression except as a cog in a formulaic B-movie. The story itself is paint by numbers, either to best facilitate Wong’s introduction, or because that’s what Chan channeling looks like. It is very difficult to tell the assorted mustachioed, suited businessman suspects apart, a common genre pitfall – it’s only by knowing the genre’s archetypes that one can keep suspects straight, and even then it’s difficult.

The tale starts out at an unnamed chemical factory, where the three principals – Simon Dayton (John Hamilton), Theodore Meisel (William Gould) and Christian Wilk (Hooper Atchley) – fashion an agreement whereby upon the death of one, the survivors inherit his shares. Ladies and gentlemen, we have our potential motive! In fact, it’s rather obvious, and I picture mystery movie audiences of the ‘30s would be superhumanly fluent with the assorted ins and outs of the genre. Thus they can spot an obvious red herring when they see it, and immediately start looking for the least obvious possible killer.


Mr. Wong, Detective follows a very bizarre path towards the climactic revelation – accomplished, as in all such mysteries, through ten minutes of exposition on the top dick’s (Wong’s) part. For even now we’re aware of a cabal of saboteurs – it being 1938, wartime tension was already rife, and every contemporary B-movie concerned itself with sabotage or weapon invention or similar such MacGuffins (all without nationality ever getting dropped – except the Bavarians, which rather ties this all back to Germany after all). There is no question that these schemers – Baron Von Krantz (!) (Lucien Prival) and the Countess Olga Dubois (!) (Evelyn Brent), plus a third goon whose name I could not catch – are behind the inevitable murder(s). No – question!

Usually, a mystery series only reverts to an obvious villain later on, as an anti-formula trick to throw off the audience – these stories then become about how the detective solves the case, with the outcome predestined. That’s not Wong’s tact. Instead, on top of these gimmes, there shall be the “surprise” culprit fingered at the end – and you can bet your shekels it’ll be the “least obvious” character…every time!

Actually – to jump to the conclusion way ahead of schedule, and spoil a third-rate film from 1938 none of you shall ever watch – that’s not it yet! There’s a fifth guilty party, making Mr. Wong, Detective practically the single most stuffed such mystery I’ve seen – nice it has at least one claim to non-Karloffian fame. On top of the saboteurs, and the non-obvious obvious suspect, the obvious obvious suspect is guilty too! Yup, look back up to those three business partners the story started with. One of them is to blame for the murder of the other two, in an amazingly rare instance where a mystery film plays 100% straight. (Though I’ve indeed seen movies where the butler does do it, which is even more subversive by not being subversive at all.)

Oh yes, a murder mystery needs murder, and Dayton is more than happy to oblige narrative formula by dying. Mr. Wong, despite being a private citizen, assists the SFPD in the case, and no reason is given for this except it’s his right as the headliner. The case follows perfectly perfunctory notes, as Wong examines the assorted suspects (many of whom I haven’t laid out, but they include the standard Woman, Lover, Shyster, Hateful Foreigner, and so forth). By around midpoint a second murder is committed (of Wilk, meaning logically Meisel is the meanie) – This second murder happens only because it does in all mystery movies, and is thus treated with ceremonial disregard. (There’s a third murder too – of Meisel, though it turns out he’s just a fantastically shitty murderer instead – which is only slightly less common.) You know, none of these fictional shamuses is any good, since over 50% of fatalities occur mid-investigation.


And I haven’t even gotten to the (obvious, obvious, obvious) clues yet. Perhaps it’s too many years raised by “CSI” (which I’ve never watched, for all the archaic potboilers I ravenously consume), or the ubiquity of mysteries in general, but when a story concerns a chemical manufacturer killed without any wounds, it should take seconds to figure out that poisonous chemicals were the murder weapon. I mean, come on! Mr. Wong plays that like a surprise revelation late in the game.

So naturally all viewers have correctly placed the means of death ahead of even Wong. Keep in mind all the guns present haven’t been fired (in that they have no empty chambers, and the victims have no bullet wounds), yet still the movie plays the “gun as weapon” angle endlessly. When Mr. Wong discovers broken glass on a corpse’s former person, here is my immediate reaction: “Oh, so the chemical was in a glass container, which was broken in some means.” Nailed it! That’s another “revelation” Monogram’s typewriter monkeys won’t make public until the denouement.

Plus, when we see Mr. Wong (having silently deduced stuff ahead of time) playing musical instruments before glass baubles, it doesn’t take a Holmes to deduce the glass was shattered by noise frequency. Honestly, this is the least effective mystery qua mystery I know of – ignoring at least the parody mysteries, and sometime even they fashion cleverer whodunits.


Granted all that, but the superior (though more offensive) Charlie Chans didn’t always have the world’s most airtight plots. That wasn’t to their detriment, because the joy was in seeing Chan solve the crime – or rather, seeing him flummox the latest suspects. In this task, Mr. Wong falls short, as a total cipher. As I’ve said, he functions solely as a plot device, nothing more.

“Aiding” Wong are the police – Captain Sam Spade, er, Sam Street (Grant Withers) and the even doofier Detective Devlin (George Lloyd). Any ostensible entertainment value comes from them. They are not competent. Because Wong is stoically boring, and fated to solve the case at the 66th minute, he can only be amusing in contrast to the cops. Thus they are painted as the mightiest batch of nincompoops possible – men so pre-inclined to leap wholeheartedly at the world’s most obvious red herrings (which, to their credit, sometimes turn out to be true – see Meisel), they’re barely credible as law officers. As straw men and foils to Wong (mystery cops can never catch a break), they’re too obvious. It’s as though Monogram’s filmmakers didn’t trust audiences to pick up on subtlety, so they created the brashest grotesques they could. I have a sneaky suspicion Street will become a recurring character. I am not pleased.


Because Mr. Wong, Detective is a Monogram product, it never had very much chance for greatness. There are too many handicaps in Monogram’s approach. Director William Nigh, nigh prepared to helm the majority of the series, is limited to a few sets – a house, a different house, an office, a different office, and Monogram’s patented Crime Lab™ (which shall be burned into my retinas in five days’ time). Add a roster of actors without the ability to stand out…except for Karloff, who simply doesn’t try, and the police performers, who stand out too much (they’re assholes!). Plus, time and limited resources conspire to limit Nigh’s blocking, so the film is nothing but assorted static shots of people standing around.

At least, to the benefit of the entire ‘30s mystery genre, what we have here are the nascent components of film noir. Almost without Nigh’s knowing, there is the faintest suggestion of urban ennui. At the very least, the black and white cinematography cannot help but be moody, in a smoky, shadowy way. That’s good enough, and future Wongs have the opportunity (thanks be to Karloff) to be at least slightly better than this. As a derivative bit of Poverty Row formula, nope, not brilliant, but…well, something.

The Tramp, No. 1 - A Dog's Life (1918)

In 1918, Charlie Chaplin was contracted by First National, a newly amalgamated film studio banking on their monopoly of theater chains throughout the U.S. Yeah, the movie industry was this way until antitrust actions decades down the road. Chaplin’s contract was in excess of one million dollars, the first actor (along with fellow new First National star Mary Pickford) with such clout. And these are 1918 dollars here! That sort of money no longer even exists, or my conversion is slightly off. (First National was eventually engorged by Warner Brothers, for what it’s worth.)

Chaplin already enjoyed great heaping scads of freedom to create his own films as he wished – as producer, director, writer, star, composer (in the silent era, dictating what accompanists played live). Upon reaching First National, add to that release from the tyranny of a schedule. Unlike with Mutual or Essanay, Chaplin no longer had to contractually deliver a certain amount of reels per year. Rather, he could take things slowly, focus upon pure quality in a way few filmmakers have ever enjoyed. So, from a pace of a dozen two-reel comedies a year, Chaplin went to producing only two or three reels total per year. It’s worth noting that this is where his iconic Tramp character became a long-lasting cinematic legend, and not simply a passé superstar.


New among Chaplin’s freedoms was the chance to do films at whatever length he preferred – no more duration limitations, should he wish to move on. And while Chaplin had no doubt perfected the two reeler, there’s only so much it allows. Assuming the Tramp features in every film, the story must concern him homelessly ambling into a new situation, falling for a girl, possibly getting her (the elusive Chaplin happy ending)…plus all the time needed to run through whatever gags the setting suggests. So the Tramp must forever languish in a surface-level depiction of poverty, because this movie needs to make boat jokes, then this one cops jokes, this one department stores, a church, and so forth. But extend the Tramp’s time in any of those same settings, and the facts of his plight itself can be explored.

So it is that Chaplin’s first First National national release, A Dog’s Life, is not a two reeler. Neither is it feature length (in 1918 terms, six reels – one hour, give or take). Chaplin is working his way up to that point, settling in the mean time for three reels – just over half an hour. Certainly not a proper movie, but neither a short – and more common in the silent era, before distribution formats necessitated the standard bladder-dictated running time we love today. Buster Keaton’s arguable masterpiece, Sherlock Jr., is only slightly longer. Some would argue that Chaplin’s next Tramp role, The Kid, is the first in the “series” (as in “feature length Tramp movies”), but I feel A Dog’s Life deserves some recognition.


The scenario of A Dog’s Life is nothing special. In fact, it’s the Tramp template stripped to its bare essence: The Tramp living in the gutter, scrounging for food, falling for the Girl (Edna Purviance, same as usual). Most Tramp shorts, even The Tramp, elaborate upon this. There is the slightest elaboration in A Dog’s Life, as Chaplin shares protagonist duties with Scraps, “a thoroughbred mongrel,” the Little Tramp in dog form.

First off, the Tramp awakes in his familiar filth, stands in the bread line, battles old-timey shopkeeps – you know, just your average American day. Ho hum.

Then, in parallel, Scraps awakes in its scraps, and runs through a dog-centric variation on the same – basically, contending with a bunch of larger asshole dogs.

To ascribe some sort of deeper meaning to Chaplin’s work – which he no doubt intended, though it’s not worth dwelling upon self-seriousness – he portrays the bum’s existence in almost literal “dog eat dog” terms. Audiences of 1918 lapped this stuff up, as it depicts the regular immigrant experience – this is a historical predicament we’ve somewhat moved beyond.


The Tramp ends up rescuing Scraps from a dog pile, perhaps recognizing the artful parallel between them. They’re kindred spirits, at any rate. And all this before the Girl even shows up! It paints the Tramp in a different light, less selfish than before, a benefactor and not simply a scrounge. For the less high-fallutin’ comedic value of it all, Scraps is anthropomorphized up the wazoo! Editing gives him much of the Tramp’s cadence and instant emotability. It’s not unusual for silent comedians to enjoy a dog costar – Keaton had Luke, and while your reaction to Scraps might be “Ahh, I want to pet it,” your reaction to Luke would be “Holy crap, did that dog just climb up a ladder backwards?!”

Such demonstrates their comedic differences, not a necessary exploration when discussing Chaplin films alone, but it helps me define what is unique about Chaplin against other luminaries of silent comedy. It’s more tender, and the laughter isn’t as loud. This is humor, not comedy, to be precise, which uses an amusing approach to enlighten or amuse. I guffaw mightily at many of Chaplin’s contemporaries; with Chaplin, I might just grin softly. This isn’t a fault in Chaplin’s work, but an example of his uniqueness.


Not that there aren’t moments of more extreme comedy to behold. Scraps and the Tramp (!) attend the local vaudevillian music hall – a chance to explore the art form which created Chaplin. The Girl sings a melodramatic song, whose musical quality is retained by Chaplin’s score despite the silent format. It is a ridiculously sad song, at that, with the Tramp and other audience members weeping by the literal bucketfuls. (With three whole reels to play with, this joke has time to creep up on you as well.) It somewhat resembles the projectile puking scene in Stand By Me, only with tears replacing great heaping torrents of human bile. (Wagging the censors, Scraps is covered in moisture, and it’s unclear it this is the dog’s tears, others’, or some different liquid entirely.) It’s patently unrealistic, with no (evident) greater relevance to the pathos of poverty – except as maybe a parody of Chaplin himself.

Following the song, the Tramp pursues the Girl. If you wanted, you could try paralleling this to his relationship with Scraps. Or you could simply enjoy a slapstick dance sequence involving the three of them. Usually, dancing alone would be a signal for supposed “hilarity” in silent comedies – totally performer-dependent, and usually somewhat outdated. Chaplin adds in a dog on a leash. Because that’s not enough, there’s also gum on the floor, to exacerbate things further. Such a scene cannot be written, nor preplanned. It’s all on the strength of Chaplin’s pantomime.


But wait, there’s still another reel left! With the relaxed pace already affecting the tone, Chaplin uses his extra ten minutes to do something no Tramp film has really had – he creates a plot. That is, not simply a romantic predicament, but a series of connected events. It’s all in service of an eventual happy ending, in a rather Horatio Alger sort of way. A local criminal, pursued by the police, buries a wad of cash near the Tramp’s favored filth. From the setup, it’s obvious Scraps will dig it up – a little too obvious, by modern standards, perhaps. So find it Scraps does.

That the Tramp’s eventual salvation comes of coincidence and outside events is no mistake. We might prefer a more active protagonist, but this better perpetuates beliefs Chaplin’s impoverished audience might prefer. Chaplin paints the gutter as mostly inescapable, and again someone with more time and concern might care to tie this back to his political beliefs. In the years following, Chaplin’s left-leaning attitudes have become an elephant in the room, something he possessed even this early on, yet always tried to keep out of his films.


To create the impression that the Tramp has actually earned salvation, he runs through a brief conflict with money-hungry crooks. This is partly the chance for a fun isolated comic routine – the Tramp knocks out one goon, then hides behind a curtain as he animates the crook’s body to fool the rest. Then the Tramp is found out, leading to the Chase – a silent comedy standby. Normally, this would have accompanied all the other plot points in a fraction of A Dog’s Life’s running time – and then, we wouldn’t even have the dog subplot, or the extended view of the Tramp’s vagrant existence. Calmly isolating outward climactic conflict like so keeps the rest of the movie on its own enjoyable level. A good thing, because this section might be the film’s weakest.

Then our heroes achieve their bucolic happy ending, as happily wed farmers. We see this at length, to impress upon us just what happiness looks like – no material comfort, but the assurance of a home, hearth and crops. And Scraps has puppies, possibly as a stand-in for the babies most romances would conclude with. There’s a little grist for the “dog and Girl parallel” interpretation, plus a fun joke on the censors and their fear of biology. (The ending of Sherlock Jr. does something similar, but altogether cleverer.)

Interestingly, this happy ending is a guaranteed secure future for the Tramp. And yet he’ll return time and again, always reverted to his initial level of poverty. This doesn’t undermine the joy certain iterations of the Tramp find in the mean time. As a series, the Tramp’s films as discontinuous, wholly separate tales that just happen to feature the same persona. The Tramp is the same character, but with many stories he can tell. In this way he evolves into something of an icon or an archetype for audiences at the time. The Tramp will always be there, struggling against crooked authorities and the whims of fate just as his viewers are. This, paradoxically, allows fans to appreciate the Tramp’s financial windfall at the end of A Dog’s Life, without alienating the Tramp himself.

(As a postscript, 1918 also saw Chaplin create a much shorter Tramp film, The Bond. This is a curiosity, a one-reel effort to sell bonds for World War One, showing the war bond’s interaction with day-to-day life, and oh so many other outdated period details. So much for Chaplin’s films being apolitical, eh?)

X-Men, No. 1 - X-Men (2000)

The superhero movie is the lone substantially new (sub)genre of our generation, something which has gone from nonexistence to proliferation with great efficiency. Credit special effects, finally able to effectively convey the outsized heroics of comics-derived heroes. Credit a sudden seriousness with which filmmakers regard the genre. Credit mere copycattism on producers’ part. And also credit X-Men, which earns praise as the real trendsetter in this form.

Oh, trust me, there were plentiful superhero films before X-Men and the new millennium. To simply look at their larger history (hopefully with some swiftness)…

Superhero cinema started almost as soon as superhero comics themselves. During the heady heyday of WWII, comics stories were regarded – rightly or not – as children’s stories. Hence superhero films were themselves childish, Saturday matinee serials: The Phantom, Batman, Captain America, all these from ‘43 and ‘44.

Then the movie serial died out, and with it super-cinema. The dogoodnik dogoodery of the Comics Code sapped the comic medium of its essence, as meanwhile Hollywood lost all respect for the genre – too good for comics, they were, with their atomic bug movies and whatnot. For a great long while, the only noteworthy filmed comic adaptation was TV’s “Batman” and its spinoff The Movie – that campy gag-factory shows what opinion most people still held on the matter.


Meanwhile, Marvel Comics started making a name for themselves in the ‘60s, Stan Lee’s assorted creations addressing notions the more classical Golden Age comics wouldn’t – like the possibility of social metaphor, such as with the X-Men and civil rights.

Meanwhile, Star Wars broke one barrier for comic films – special effects. Along came Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman, a serious hagiography of the DC hero, well ahead of its time…because most subsequent comic movies remained the purview of lesser studios, like Cannon and New World Pictures, with Superman IV and The Punisher, respectively.

Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman reignited major studio interest. Actual output of superhero films was still a trickle – DC was content with the Batman sequels, mostly, and once Batman & Robin sharted itself out, we were back at a dismissive, tongue-in-cheek ”better than the comics” mentality. Meanwhile, most comics movies (Steel, Barb Wire, Tank Girl, Judge Dread, god the ‘90s were a cesspool!) derived from more minor comics companies, suggesting little promise.

What of Marvel? For purely legal reasons, whatever of their properties were filmed (a 1993 Captain America, Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four) remain unreleased, largely to this day! But Marvel bade its time, and when they did inspire a film – 1998’s Blade – it was in a less overtly “superhero” form. If any film has the edge over X-Men in inaugurating the present superhero trend, it’s Blade, which is so serious about its subject, it’s actually R-rated! But X-Men wins out by featuring recognizable superheroes – not only are the X-Men better known, what with their ‘90s TV cartoon and video games and all – but they better fit the public’s impression of superheroes. It was just a matter of doing this notion justice on screen, and not spending millions of dollars to undermine the subject matter, all Joel Schumacher-like.


X-Men’s development is nearly as convoluted as superhero films themselves. James Cameron initially had a hand, until he decided to go fail to make a Spider-Man movie instead. This was around 1990. Marvel retained their film rights, and went straight to the big studios. Ultimately it was Fox which bit, the unlikeliest of places for a property to be lovingly shepherded to artistic and financial success. This is 1994 by now, and that six year delay prior to the film’s actual release suggests Fox had a hard time of it. X-Men went through at least half a dozen scripts, it would seem, each with a slightly different approach – some no doubt frivolous and cavalier, much as Cannon once considered making Spider-Man into an honest-to-Lee horror movie (which still sounds less ill-advised than “Turn Off the Dark”).

Let us ignore all these complexities, and jump ahead to the point where Bryan Singer directed X-Men, with a screenplay credited solely to David Hayter. It’s 2000 now, and suffice it to say X-Men was a…perverse choice to kick start the superhero fad. For what it has over most other Marvel entities is the necessity to showcase many, many, many different heroes, each with a separate back story and powers and personality, and all these elements united together in a way that makes sense to “X-Men” neophytes while telling a captivating narrative. Hmm, it sorta starts to make sense why development took so long. And introductions are pretty much all X-Men has the time for, for even as streamlined as it is.

Nothing says “things would otherwise be altogether too confusing” than opening narration, so we get one courtesy of Professor Xavier, as embodied by Patrick Stewart. Mutations happen, it is posited, in a characteristically Stan Lee-style willful misinterpretation of evolution, resulting in a new class of humans – the mutants. All at once, people start appearing with hugely varied superpowers and – now this is the kicker – are victims of prejudice.

It is to the inestimable credit of X-Men that it takes this premise seriously, for as potentially silly as mutations could be (see Troma). This is old hat nowadays, with The Dark Knight among the cleverest metaphors for modern politics put out by a major studio – and X-Men’s thematics aren’t nearly as developed as those that’d come, but things have to start someplace. For instance, X-Men loads itself up with unmistakable references to historical events, of a most varied sort.


Central is the underlying concept of civil rights, particularly the distinction between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (an over-explored notion already, without my help). That name, “X-Men,” it’s no accident! Mutants are “an other,” a means to explore racism without actually exploring racism – look to “Star Trek’s” alien races, or Night of the Living Dead’s zombie class, for other ‘60s media with this notion. In “X-Men” (and X-Men), Lee, Singer, Jack Kirby and whomever else posit two elder states-mutants, Professor X and Magneto (in film, Ian McKellen). While each craves equal mutant rights, one prefers peaceful means (that’d be X, counter-intuitively re: Malcolm Little), and the other is militant (Magneto, of the Brotherhood of [Evil] Mutants). They are our hero and villain, respectively, and because their differences lie mostly in tactics, this is a far more rich relationship than many foes share. Indeed, Magneto and Professor X are old friends, which as of 2011 is again an inescapable fact. And for all that X-Men is an action movie, its heart belongs to a wheelchair-bound headmaster and an elderly Holocaust survivor.

Oh yes, the Holocaust – CGI-assisted narration aside, that’s what opens this popcorn blockbuster, ensuring no one misses the point about prejudice. And the metaphor doesn’t simply stick with segregation or anti-Semitism. The very next scene rephrases anti-mutant fervor in McCarthian terms – “I hold in my hands a list of mutants” (paraphrased), says an asshole senator (in other words, a senator). At other times, it’s an immigration debate metaphor . Or sometimes homosexual rights – no mistaking on this one, given Singer and McKellan (X2 furthers this particular thread). Oh, and when the movie climaxes, it’s at the Statue of Liberty, alongside an international conference on Ellis Island, gateway to America. Subtlety isn’t X-Men’s forte.


Neither is story, really. Because before we can get to story, first the world of the X-Men must be further elaborated, for the sake of newbies. To be established: The X-Men exist, a team of superheroic freedom fighters based out of Professor X’s Westchester institute. Merely plopping us in there, then moving on with matters of superheroism, would be sort of disorienting even for one schooled in all matters mutant – because mainstream film demands certain things, and one of those is emotional grounding. It’s best, in a sci-fi/fantasy world as developed as this, for a character to enter it gradually, just as we do. Enter Rogue (Anna Paquin).

As a teenage girl, Rogue (aka Marie, because there are mutant monikers, and then there are human handles, in the way all superheroes have alter egos) has just become aware of her mutancy – oh right, there’s also a metaphor for sexual maturity in here. Specifically, Rogue learns her touch can steal another’s essence, and mutant powers (provided said someone is a mutant). Her physical separation from the rest of humanity, that’s another of Singer’s eleventeen dozen metaphors. It’s effective enough, however.

In short order, Rogue joins with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman’s breakthrough role), not an original X-Man, but a fan favorite you just can’t do an X-Men without. Wolverine is our other access character, and while mutation is nothing new for him (making him an effective action hero, for our vicarious thrills), his recent amnesia leaves him just as confused. And while amnesiac heroes are usually a lazy writer’s trick, Wolverine’s history (a mysterious experimental adamantium skeleton, on top of preexisting super-healing) sort of necessitates it. It’s all there in the comics, after all, and speaks of greater Alkali Lake developments this Part One hasn’t the time to explore.


That’s became what we do now know of Wolverine takes long enough to establish, without further complications. Seeing as he knows so little himself, it’s up to the X-Men to examine him, and vice versa. For Rogue and Wolverine are soon the guests of Professor X, where the rest of the film is mostly devoted to putting forth more X-details.

Professor X we know, though the extent of his psionics, and his Cerebro machine, still need to be explored.

Then there’s the X-Men, and even with a reduced roster, this’ll take some time…

Team leader Cyclops (James Marsden) shoots lasers from his eyes. Personality wise, he is a boy scout, a straight man to counter Wolverine’s animalistic temper (right, I forgot, Wolverine has a bad boy thing going for him, hence his popularity).

Cyclops’ gal, Dr. Jean Gray (Famke Janssen), a more pathetic telepath than Xavier. Wolverine feels perfectly understandable lust for her, and…well, with powers and relationships and everything else, that mostly suffices for persona.

But your greatest cipher is Storm (Halle Berry)…who makes storms. This power is mostly assumed by the preexisting naming convention, because Storm doesn’t kick up a namesake until action demands it.

Keep in mind, initially screenwriters intended for Beast, Gambit, Angel, Colossus and Nightcrawler to also show (which they do not). Meanwhile, characters like Pyro and Iceman appear without fanfare, and it’s wholly up to fan speculation to assume that anonymous background extras might be Kitty Pride, etc.

To say nothing of Magneto’s crew. Of Magneto himself, well, if that name doesn’t say to you “magnetic powers,” this isn’t the franchise for you. Aiding him are shapeshifter Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in a painted-on skin-tight blue non-outfit ahhhhhh – excuse me), toad-like toady Toad (Ray “Darth Maul” Park), and lesser Wolverine clone Sabretooth (pro-wrestler Tyler Mane).

[Deep breath.] Whew!


Where were we? Oh right, once we know all this stuff, there’s barely any time left for a climax, for in the Third Act the X-Men (now counting Wolverine among their ranks) first don their heroes’ outfits to go battle Magneto – in an eleventh hour scheme to turn humans into mutants via special effects. It’s curious, X-Men follows the “first superhero movie” sort of template (minimal action, plot, for all the world-building) even though it’s not an origin story, and thus lacks the usual excuse. The “X-Men” universe is just that complex, though!


Most of what I’ve related would’ve been a list of screenwriter’s challenges, and an outline says little of what actually works in X-Men. Much of what it does right isn’t even noteworthy after a decades’ worth of formula improvements, how it translates a comic book world to film mostly intact. That doesn’t mean unchanged, for among X-Men’s huger liberties are a change in outfits from yellow spandex to trendy black leather – something Cyclops even points out. This is no idle switch, done by an executive’s confused notion of toy sales or quadrants or not understanding the source material; Singer et al tested out more traditional “X-Men” duds before realizing, film being what it is, what seems normal is different. It’s hard now to fault this decision, or even approach it critically, since the black-clad X-Men have become so commonplace themselves since 2000.

Much of X-Men is hard to approach over a decade later. Future superhero epics have embraced CGI far better, making the dated 2000 effects curiously underwhelming. The action in total feels stagebound and unkinetic, like even earlier superhero efforts. Moments such as Wolverine floating via Storm’s and Jean Gray’s combined storming and braining, these feel just slightly silly now, like a guy on strings indoors. I don’t remember things looking this cheap a decade ago. Seriously, while the basic contour of this movie is familiar, my brain had somehow updated the visuals. And I don’t mean this as a slam, by no means, because I think X-Men is phenomenally instructive of how superhero movies have evolved, even since then.


There is far too much in “X-Men” for a single movie (or a single franchise, even), so sequels are pretty much a necessity. X-Men seems to be written with sequels in mind – partly by ending with a cliffhanger of Magneto imprisoned in plastic, partly just to cash in on the endless introductory exposition. Plus the truth about Wolverine’s past, Iceman and Pyro awaiting larger roles, and the vast swaths of popular “X-Men” characters not even alluded to thus far.

Given all that, there’s no evidence a sequel was guaranteed. Given X-Men’s position at the very start of the superhero upswing, two years before even Spider-Man, there’s no way success was guaranteed. Recall, Batman & Robin was still a vomitous taste in audience’s collective mouths, a climate where X-Men would seem a revelation. A “surprise hit,” it must be called, and a good thing too. With the exception of Batman and Superman, their franchises already defunct by then (oh, and Blade, who hardly seems to count), no superhero was yet engendering sequels. X-Men did, and then some, so that in ten years we’ve gone from “a sequel is a remote, outside rarity” to “we’re making prequels four years in advance” (The Avengers). Mutation indeed!

The Wrestling Women, No. 1 - Rock 'n' Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape (1964)

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!

The Aztec Mummy, No. 1 - The Aztec Mummy (1957)

Are you ready to spend a week discussing Aztec mummies and other ridiculous Mexican exploitation nonsense? I sure as hell am!

Mexican cinema…I don’t know a whole lot about its intimate history. Though I do seem to know that the late 1950s saw certain Mexican filmmakers embracing horror, and that’s “horror” as in 1930s Universal style. Vampires, werewolves, Frankensteins, gill-men…mummies. All this in an era where U.S. horror has “evolved” to concern gigantic irradiated insects and whatnot: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Them!, The Giant Claw, The Blob, roughly 200 other movies.

The Mexicans, however, like Ed Wood, had little evident use for this trend. Who knows if they were unaware of what was going on up north (unlikely), or if their younger film industry was content to mimic more outdated filmic forms. With their musicals, detective fiction, and pulpy, serial-style matinees, Mexican movies of the 1950s were like Hollywood movies from two decades prior. Horror-wise, certainly no film called El Vampiro comes about unless you’re just starting to dabble in blood-sucking.

And so Mexico’s premier horror franchise of that era – and that’d be The Aztec Mummy, if you hadn’t gathered – borrows quite liberally from an old Universal stalwart, namely The Mummy (1932). But with a difference! Producer Guillermo Calderón knew Mexican audiences weren’t wholly enamored of this trend of imperialist horror inheritance – Hollywood desired gothic tales, themselves taken from largely Anglo-European myths. (Never mind The Mummy is Egyptian, it’s filtered through the distinct phobias of Britain.) Given a certain strand of Mexican culture, a sort of raza/Chicano interest in pre-conquest Americas, there’re plenty of indigenous bogeymen to choose from…even mixing in Mexico’s unique Catholic influence, ya got Dia de los Muertos, El Cucuy, la Llorona. Forget the chupacabra, for Mexico’s goats remained unsucked at that stage.

Surely certain productions contemporary with The Aztec Mummy built on this unique tradition, such as The Curse of the Llorona [link not found]. So it is with Calderón’s franchise, adding on a veneer of Aztec culture to create the impression, at least, of distinction from the Karloff model. The Aztec Mummy isn’t completely divorced from its obvious inspiration, for the story and structure are still hugely indebted to the old Egyptologist tale of reincarnation, mummification and past lives. Still, the mere addition of New World Aztec cacao flavoring sets a Mexican precedent.


The resulting films are remarkably cheap by most standards; indeed, they are genuine “MST3K” fodder. In this sense, even a high end studio-based Mexican effort feels not like even the minor U.S. studio efforts of that time; rather, The Aztec Mummy’s soul mates are Ed Wood, Coleman Francis, Phil Tucker. Herein lies much of the films’ charm nowadays, divorced from concern over Chicano heritage and whatever.

Surely cheapness was a driving principle for Calderón, who saw the potential in exploiting the Aztecs, and went about ensuring a franchise immediately. One Aztec Mummy would be easy enough to make, but under the assumption it would be popular, wouldn’t it be simpler to manufacture the sequels ahead of time as well? Therefore The Aztec Mummy was conceived as a trilogy, for purely business concerns, in imitation of certain cost-cutting measures already in place – measures the Mexicans borrowed from Hollywood’s old, defunct studio system, retaining cast and crew for multiple features to streamline the process. Roger Corman would be proud. And while the three initial Aztec Mummies were filmed like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga – three movies created as one single super-ultra-mega-movie – their one-month production turnaround, and shared 1957 release date, betrays their bargain basement qualities.


Enough setup. What of the first Aztec Mummy? – And mind you I watched this in the original Spanish, with no more translation than my own dormant, casual knowledge of the language. Well, let’s say the language barrier wasn’t a huge problem. Not that the movie is terribly visual – far from it, it’s static and stage bound and full of awkward, awkward blocking (much like Lugosi’s Dracula, actually) – but that’s the glory of B-movie dialogue written in the 1950s, from whatever country. Recall The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, with lines like “Not something I can see or touch or feel, but something I can’t quite see or touch or feel or put my finger on.” This movie is filled full with redundant redundancies of redundant dialogue, aided by characters absolutely enamored with explaining and re-explaining the plot twice per scene. Frankly, it’d make for a great Spanish learner aid, far better than those damned “Destinos” videos they had us watch in high school!

Setting the stage, The Aztec Mummy opens (following an expository voiceover narration, which is standard for all ‘50s sci-fi/horror/garbage) at a lecture, a meeting of Mexico’s mightiest intelligentsia. Dr. Eduardo Almada (Ramón Gay) exposits on end about – and this is partly guess work on my part (thank God for cognates) – past life regression and reincarnation and other such stuff that indicates we’re in a mummy movie. This scene, like every one in The Aztec Mummy, wears out its welcome well before it’s over, likely because director Rafael Portillo desperately wanted to stretch the final peso out of his sets – hence repeated dialogue ad nauseum, in favor of that dread screenwriter challenge of additional dialogue. Well, one way or another it’s a 90 minute long movie.


The university types disbelieving Almeda’s claims, he promises a demonstration – and each stage, from their request to his response to every further inching towards the actual demonstration, is an opportunity to reiterate the story as it stands, which isn’t very far yet. We’re nearly a good twenty minutes into The Aztec Mummy once Almeda has finally put his fiancée Flor (Rosa Arenas) into a trance – complete with a spinning hypnosis disc, natch, because this is one of those sorts of movies. Realism, or even convincing technobabble, is never even considered – just as well, for the film was evidently intended for sugar-crazed Mexican children rampaging throughout the theaters on their way to a cincianera, or something.

Meanwhile – oh right, I nearly forgot! The Bat has escaped (or rather, El Murcielago)!...Say what?! The Bat (Luis Aceves Castañeda) is the villainous mad scientist we just couldn’t go a B-movie without – not that mummy movies need mad science, but when you’re ladling on the clichés heedlessly, well… The Bat, for what it’s worth (we learn this from the come-and-go omniscient narrator, because no actual character was interested in a multi-minute exposition session re: The Bat), likes to experiment. Specifically, he likes to graft random animal and human parts onto other random animals and humans – SCIENCE! I dunno what his mini-Mengele purpose is, though it’s likely I just couldn’t parse that info out.

The Bat is my favorite character. He wears a black luchadore-style mask, for no one’s benefit except ours, so that his identity can be a “surprise” at the end. Given no mightier motive, the Bat merely skulks around the edges of Almeda’s story, a random villain to account for the mightily delayed commencement of mummy mayhem. All in all, he seems like the baddie from 1930’s The Bat Whispers – that being one of the movies to inspire Batman himself – as if taken in a totally different direction, in a weird amalgam of 1930s pulp and Mexican wrestling. Also, the Bat occasionally contacts goons for no reason.


Frankly, the Bat serves no evident function in this movie. By film’s end, the police arrest him for doing “bad” things (apparently simply going around in a black mask and a cape is a crime). Then they unmask him – gasp!, it’s Dr. Krupp, someone who was never previously identified by name. But keep in mind, this is a trilogy, and all this is likely to play out later on. …Oh, and a further example of the film’s odd, plot hole-ignorant mentality: The movie opens with the Bat escaping police custody – wearing his mask. In fact, they never bothered unmasking him until The Aztec Mummy’s most dramatically “appropriate” moment. Goes to show how strangely theatrical and arbitrary this thing is!

Meanwhile, Flor enters a trance – the only emotion Rosa Arenas is capable of portraying. She tells of her past life in Tenochtitlan, as the Aztec princess Ankh-es-en-amon – no, wait, excuse me, Xochitl! She enjoys forbidden (for whatever reason) love with mummy-to-be Imhot- no, Popoca. We don’t even see Popoca, mind you (all the better to preserve the “surprise,” I guess, when his mummy is finally revealed in the final 15 minutes), so it’s up to various expository sources to tell us of Xochitl’s love affair – all while we simply veg out to stock footage of ancient Mexican pyramids.

Then the duo, Xoxo and Popo, are sacrificed to the Aztecs’ heathen gods – here I’m not sure what attitude the filmmakers hold in regards to their supposed ancestors, especially in regards to their heart-ripping, head-removing sacrificial ways. I just don’t. It makes sense for an ostensible horror show to play the mummification process for maximum squirm points, but…there’s some evidence that the Aztecs are to be respected, perhaps one reason for the Bat’s more Euro-tinged villainy.


Okay, so, sacrifice…As with all scenes, this is many minutes longer than it ought to be, somehow reverting into a full-on King Kong dance routine. I suppose someone hired traditional folk dance extras, and had to get their peso’s worth.

Anyway, Flor awakes from her flashback and…exposits. She tells Almeda (who then grows the urge to tell the same info to others, then et cetera) about a lost Aztec ruin, and a fabulous breastplate and bracelet therein. And wouldn’t you know it, this undiscovered ruin is within easy driving distance! How great. Actually, cars instantly drive out to the site (in a shot perfectly mirrored by similar ones in Plan 9 From Outer Space), as the massive complex of skyscraper-sized pyramids proves less isolated than most of Mexico’s touristy Aztec/Mayan sites. Pretty hard to accept this all. A shame too that it’s so readily accessible, as it eliminates the possibility for a good, Indiana Jones-style cliffhanger trek.


But we gotta get to the next major set piece – entering one pyramid’s obvious opening, then wandering from catacomb to catacomb. Each new tomb necessitates another exposition session, almost as if – hey, the set guys made several tomb rooms, let’s use each one at length! It’s a chance to dwell upon the notion of a mummy’s curse and – You know how these mummy movies go, I suppose, an assumption The Aztec Mummy does not share. It really is the Cliff Notes version of Karloff’s Mummy, it is.

Summarizing the rest of the picture (something I could’ve done at this stage totally as a guess): The travelers shall steal certain relics – the aforementioned breastplate and bracelet, not that the props department makes them look like such – and head back home, at which point the titular Aztec mummy shall rise, retrieve said amulets, kill a dude or two, the end. There’s an outside possibility they’ll play up the reincarnated love storyline of Flor/Xochitl, only…they just ignore that one. After spending those 12 minutes in an Aztec flashback setting up precisely this story…though Popoca (the mummy) still collects Flor up in his arms at some stage, because it’s not a classical monster movie without an unconscious chick in the beast’s arms.


The plotting becomes pretty awkward at this stage, as they have to make do with action, not just explanation. Having squandered so much of the film on the premise, Portillo’s posse pusses out on what we all came to see – though it’s a truism about B-grade cinema that the poster’s promise usually occupies, at best, but a few minutes of screen time. Just enough to satisfy an undemanding, stoned viewer, because why deliver anything beyond the bare minimum? Otherwise, what’s left for the sequel?


As it is, Popoca the Aztec mummy is reasonably effective. He looks nothing like the old toilet paper-clad Egyptian model; Popoca looks like anthropomorphized bacon, crossed with certain hippies I’ve known in New Mexico. Kept appropriately in the dark, he remains creepy, and the makeup’s shortcomings aren’t terribly obvious. I wholly expect the sequels to mess this one up.

Naturally, Mexican mummies are a potent source of terror. Not that there are specifically Aztec mummies – this is a stretched effort to Egyptify a local culture, to accommodate an old Hollywood pastiche. Surely I hope the Mexicans, of all people, are aware that the Peruvian Incan mummies are not their mummies. Still…there are Mexican mummies…dating from most ancient antiquity: 1833! The Guanajuato mummies are the fucking creepiest thing I’ve ever seen in person, certain Beverly Hills examples of plastic surgery aside, and they seem to be the visual inspiration for Popoca.

As an example of these mummies’ genuine, soul-sapping terror, witness their effective use in Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu remake – I swear, this scene may just well be the most unsettling single moment in any film!


Meanwhile, The Aztec Mummy is a fun-loving bit of monsterism, and has no evident desire to disturb. So its mummy simply does the old Frankenstein routine – Woman asleep, monster creeps in, takes her away. That’s mostly it, really! Toss in but one death – the mummy lightly slaps some old guy’s shoulders, he falls over, is pronounced dead. This is so derivative of the old Universal idiom, without an understanding of its effectiveness, and without (I gather) the same Hays limitations dictating death-by-slapping. Pretty doofy stuff.

So The Aztec Mummy isn’t very good, in the grand scheme of world cinema. No surprise there, and frankly it was never aiming for the Criterion Collection to begin with. This is a cheapo programmer, devised (with its sequels) just as a business ploy. That being what it is, the imitation of Universal makes sense – it’s what sold. The addition of Aztec trappings, those genuine elements which distinguish The Aztec Mummy – they’re what sold too. It’s that minimal promise of the new with the old which serves sequels so well, and it’s a mentality which encompasses The Aztec Mummy to its very core. Whatever else is of note– the stilted, barely adequate form of scrapped-together Z-cinema this is – well, that is all purely unintentional. Like so much of 1950s filmdom – when independent, non-studio entities were just getting into the biz – our enjoyment now is ironic…a weird legacy to be sure.