Transformers, No. 2 - Transformers (2007)

Where’d the idea of doing a live action Transformers movie come from? Well, nostalgia, the ongoing sense that every revered 1980s property could (nay, should) be brought back for the old audience with a filter of maturity, while also appealing to younger, newer audiences. Filmically, the same rough 2007/8 period renewed Die Hard by Living Free, gave us a Rambo actually called Rambo, and then there was that Indiana Jones movie we shan’t speak of again.

Plus, movie producers are always looking for the latest untapped lode (uh heh heh) from which to pilfer. Within the larger post-millennial period which Transformers defines, they’ve gone to theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean), comic strips (Garfield), and soon enough we’ll get an influx of board game movies (Battleship, et al). (Comic book movies barely count, as they are genuinely respectable.) Of course, earlier periods produced occasional “odd source” movies, like Clue or Mars Attacks! (both of them awesome), but without the prominent ubiquity of the ‘00s.

And Transformers represents the “toy line” side of that thought process, though to say this ignores the Hasbro’s innumerable TV and comic manifestations – to say nothing of The Transformers: The Movie. Any promising source is worth doing repeatedly – hence Hasbro also created the live action G.I. Joe, initially switched out for Transformers thanks to goddamned Saddam Hussein. In a similar(ish) vein, there would’ve been the now-scrapped Thundercats flick, plus one only assumes “My Little Pony,” “Candyland,” and in ten years we’ll all be even the wiser.


Ah, but Transformers…Doing this property in live action is indeed a good idea – I say, willfully ignoring what’s been done. To begin with, the allure of specifically a live action film (as opposed to more animation, likely for TV or DTV or HDTV) is the sense that it is the official story – Obviously no pragmatic adaptation can be perfect, but more people will know it, give it more credence, and thus the Transformers characters enter the mainstream consciousness as never before. It’s a sort of pinnacle, or tent pole, to increase awareness of lesser “Transformers” entities – as a Hasbro business decision, with no question as to artistry, this is a sound choice.

Plus, live action demands discipline in a way animation doesn’t – even with a budget as permissive as Transformers’. With limited resources, and the need for relative realism, bombast becomes grounded. A strange thing to say, I know, about any Michael Bay movie – for now I point out what everyone knows going in, that Michael Bay directed Transformers. And while Bay’s approach is the furthest from disciplined, the medium does it for him. The Movie, for its hallowed position amongst nostalgists, is just as hyperkinetic and sugar-rushed, in its 1980s way, so Bay is actually a good choice to update and modify what seems to be the franchise’s main mode – for better or worse.


Helping out Transformers the most, conceptually, is its need to go mainstream. I know, hear me out! With an excessive budget, Transformers cannot just appeal to pre-initiates as The Movie does; it must balance that sort of hardcore fan with the absolute ignorantsia. Thus Transformers, under the guidance of executive producer Steven Spielberg (it’s perpetually odd to think he and Bay aligned), focuses upon humans – It’s Blockbuster 101: Devise an outrageous premise (in this case, space-faring giant robots that have evolved naturally to turn into 20th century Earth vehicles), and present it normally. Transformers then eliminates a lot of the zanier “Transformers” baggage, such as a space setting, or the Transformer sub-groups (Insecticons, Dinobots, most anything post-Generation 1). Instead Transformers takes place on Earth. In the present day. Humans are the main characters.

That last part is a major sticking point for many “Transformers” faithful, for whom Optimus Prime is Jesus Christ. But this is the sort of necessary trade off one makes in adapting “Transformers” to live action, since the title characters are expensive: CGI behemoths whose rendering process is known to blow up computers (because Michael Bay needs explosions everywhere).


Though this is…an avoidable problem…The Transformer redesigns are hideous, a fallout of Bay’s insistence (back when he was surprisingly reticent to shepherd a “stupid toy movie,” he being so mature and all) that the Transformers be believable. By “believable” he means technically so, thus an undue amount of effort was put into making robots which could actually transform – and then squelching that effort anyway, by making the transformations superfast and totally incomprehensible. The result is a bunch of visual diarrhea, a baroque spiky nightmare which (honestly) is a lot more coherent on my television than it was in the theater. Anyway, these complex, complex designs are harder to render, so the Transformers are given less screen time as a result – no time to make a dramatic impact (in keeping, frankly, with The Movie).

(Complexity-for-believability is Bay’s chief contribution, and it doesn’t work. It especially jibes poorly with how he shoots the frequent – but not frequent enough – robot fights, as though from a puny human’s point of view. It’s simply difficult to parse out. On the big screen, this technique gave me the single worst headache of my life. Yes, Transformers is literally the most painful movie I’ve ever seen – though my choice to drink a yard of Blue Moon and sit in the front row didn’t help.)

Oh wait, I’m nitpicking fundamentally flawed character design, when perhaps we ought to take a step back and consider the larger concept of Transformers. If we accept the need to stick with humans, a new narrative must be devised. While Transformers still tells of Autobots and Decepticons, we take a human perspective. How would humans perceive two warring robot factions?


There are two approaches. The Spielberg approach does like E.T., and tells of a boy’s first car – a universal (enough) story. Then the car turns out to be alive and, unlike in Christine, it’s good, leading the boy into an ever-expanding universe. It just happens to be “Transformers.” It also just happens to be a narrative which celebrates blind consumerism, which is in Hasbro’s interest.

The Bay approach highlights military hardware, because he has a nine-hour erection for the U.S.’s military industrial complex, and an unquestioning faithfulness to our recent the icky imperialistic politics. So he shows soldiers in Qatar (further subtitled as “the Middle East,” because we have the IQs of lobsters) fighting an alien invasion – of robots.

Neither of these approaches really meshes with the other, so naturally Transformers does both of them…at once. The military angle affords Bay an opening action sequence, but at the expense of further wonder or discovery (though the preview trailers have already sabotaged that emotion to begin with). His tale of warfare, entirely independent of the other plot threads until well over halfway through, also grants Bay the chance to cut away whenever Spielberg’s domestic suburban tale isn’t hypermacho enough (i.e., “not enough military”). Considering Bay’s exclusive marketing agreement with the armed forces (essentially), lotsa pointless military porn was probably inevitable. ‘Merica – FUCK YEAH! Of course it has nothing to do with “Transformers.”


Meanwhile, in Los Angeles of course, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf , a stuttering young Jewish actor who reminds Spielberg of a falsely “manly” version of his younger self, and does nothing for anyone else) wants a car. He gets a car. Fascinating! Specifically, he gets Bumblebee, now a Camaro because of an unavoidable GM tie-in – this is consumerist hagiography, and “better” than The Movie simply by being a more sophisticated commercial, for more products. In the long run, Sam does learn that his car lives, and seeks a mystical space MacGuffin (the All Spark, available now at Pep Boys). Meanwhile, Sam romances Mikaela (Megan Fox – no comment), which doesn’t feel like the usual tacked-on blockbuster romance because A) Sam is clearly just filmmaker wish fulfillment, and B) Mikaela gets us as close to pornography as the PG-13 rating will allow.


There is the promise of…some sort of movie in Sam’s antics. One can see the Spielbergian heart buried deep under all the chrome, and wonders how J.J. Abrams might’ve handled this same basic movie. Bay, who is clearly embarrassed by the need to dwell upon a normal teenager, rather dudes up even Transformers’ baseline reality with all sorts of strangeness.

Every time some past event is referenced (an Arctic expedition, football tryouts, the Mars rover), it is shown, for upwards to 10 seconds each – which seems like a very frivolous use of budget. Some of Sam’s tale is told with an attempt at humor, a sort of American Beauty for mouth-breathers. That’s when the movie isn’t randomly attempting, for all of several seconds, to ape Kill Bill – mostly by “borrowing” musical cues.

And the whole movie boasts the same sort of whiggerism I’d identified in Scary Movie 3, the clear product of a white man accidentally misreading “urban” culture. Sam’s comic relief parents (who intermittently shatter whatever “reality” Bay goes for) refer to “bling” and whatnot with utter ignorance; the movie as a whole does similarly, slopping on the surface details of hipness everyplace – e.g. Sam’s love of faded faux-retro T-shirts, which is totally not in keeping with his ostensible “nerdy” persona. Also, his spray-on douche tan. Plus, Bay casts Anthony Anderson, which is automatically evil – especially since he gets a completely isolated “super kewl exxxtreme ballz” hacker subplot.


Actually, to limit myself to the human details, there are a lot of individually indefensible decisions in Transformers:

Bernie Mac (rest his soul) appears as a used car dealer, and forces laffs in, in a way which reflects Bays’ prison shower gang rape conception of komedy. He calls his mother a bitch, berates a Puerto Rican for being a Puerto Rican (or some sort of non-black ethnic). It’s all very ugly.

Anthony Anderson gets largely the same routine with his grandmother, minus the racism. This is the modern equivalent of sambo dancing, a tone-deaf parody of hood rats that somehow is meant to appeal directly to said hood rats.

A U.S. soldier is ridiculed for speaking Spanish, because that’s not a language that is spoken by American citizens. Another soldier is lambasted for having slightly irregular culinary tastes. This is in the film’s first Earth-bound scene, setting the stage for our species as a whole!

Sam has an extended-wannabe-Jeff-Goldblum-stutter-off with a drug-obsessed cop, who likewise exists in some skewed comic reality unrelated to any other scene.

White people, for the most part, are frat boys, a lifestyle which is celebrated. Sam is weaker because he hasn’t fully embraced douchiness yet. His conquest of Mikaela is just one crucial step in his arc towards embracing assholism, Bay-style.

Also, Bumblebee “upgrades’’ from a 1976 Camaro to a 2007 (probably) Camaro, which seems equally distasteful – but maybe that’s just me.


It’s a complete tonal mess! This is what Transformers does. Nothing which happens has any emotional relevance to anything else. Nor plot relevance. For instance, it appears Bay wanted to film a scene of a gremlin-sized Decepticon (that’s Gremlins gremlins, not car Gremlins) – it transforms into a boom box, because that’s “gangsta.” This beast, whose name I dunno, raids Air Force One, simple because. Because Bay wanted to film an Air Force One scene, why not, and toss in an utterly spineless “caricature” of George W. Bush too – The man wants ding-dongs, oh the political commentary!

Then the Transformer robots get sorta halfway almost kinda involved in their own story, and come across badly. Bay doesn’t seem to “get” robots (at least when they’re not military hardware). Despite their transformation camouflage, the Autobots physically hide behind puny hedges. A Transformer is mistaken for the tooth fairy, something which makes zero sense. A Transformer urinates on John Turturro’s head – you don’t fuck with the Jesus! A dog (a Chihuahua, which affords a Taco Bell reference and $) urinates on a Transformer. Assorted childhoods are raped.


This isn’t necessarily what a live action Transformers should’ve been like. Surely, there’s a lot of stupid, stupid stuff in the older series, but that isn’t what’s perpetuated the brand. Nostalgia-wise, memory upgrades the Transformers into something more effective than they really were, and it’s that notion which Transformers should’ve aimed for. For all the “detail as realism” misdirection, Transformers needn’t be this reductive. Raiders of the Lost Ark still stands as what should be done with properties like this – realize the potential of silly old genres, elevate them.

That all being said, revisiting Transformers has been far less painful than I’d anticipated. In light of The Transformers: The Movie, Bay’s magnum Optimus really does feel a little calmer. For newbies it’s approachable, which is surely something can’t be said for other “Transformers” products. As for a lot of the genuine miscalculation, well, that is “Transformers,” only here in its 2007 guise – hip hop and Bush worship and bad comedy, in place of cock rock and Reagan worship and bad comedy.

Mr. Wong, No. 2 - The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939)

First up, some corrections:

To fix yesterday’s strange, baseless musing about Béla Lugosi, it turns out he was never in a “white ‘Asian’ detective” series. Rather, director William Nigh’s earlier filmography includes a 1935 film called The Mysterious Mr. Wong. It is entirely distinct from Nigh’s later “Mr. Wong” series, with Lugosi’s titular Mr. Wong a Faux Manchu rather than a Sham Chan. The more you know…)

More damningly, I yesterday claimed that Mr. Wong, Detective was, unlike Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto or so many others, not based on a preexisting print series. I was dead wrong on Wong. Monogram’s Wongs (the Wong-ograms) are based on the “James Lee Wong” series in Colliers Magazine, by Hugh Wiley, of which I can find no more information. That doesn’t change the fact that this is mostly a low budget 1930s Asylum variation on Fox’s Charlie Chan movies.


That being said, having serialized magazine stories to adapt takes a lot of pressure off of Monogram’s jabbering, quasi-literate screenwriters to devise new stories. These are adaptations, and the sequel – The Mystery of Mr. Wong – followed under a year after Part One. I wish I knew more specifically what the timeline was, since two more sequels follow in that same year (1939) – obviously, Monogram was a very efficient filmmaking factory, even if they sacrifice little things like thrills or sets or budget or characterization or drama or general quality.

Boris Karloff returns as Mr. James Wong, with no noticeable variation in his Wong interpretation – i.e. he’s still surprisingly bland (a very unusual thing for Karloff). William Nigh returns as director, likewise not varying his approach one significant bit. If anything, The Mystery of Mr. Wong (and mind you, Mr. Wong himself is all but mysterious) is less cinematic than Mr. Wong, Detective. It takes the classic Monogram approach of simply arranging its cast by their marks, filmed at mid-range, and that is that [dusting off hands]. These sorts of films would work just as well as radio dramas, but considering it probably took Nigh only slightly longer to film it than it’ll take me to write this blog entry, one’s expectations diminish accordingly.

The Mr. Wong series was already highly prescribed, formulaic, long before Part Two. So it goes, when conforming to a highly regimented genre (the 1930s murder mystery), plus ripping off Charlie Chan. If the potential for variation did exist, Nigh would shoot it down in an instant, for that is not in the Mono-Wongs’ interest. Thus now, as both before and since, it’s the same Sisyphean struggle, with people reduced to stock types: A big house in San Francisco, intrigue abounds, one person is murdered, Mr. Wong investigates along with the SFPD, a couple more people die in due course, and the murderer is discovered. Case closed, let’s go get some delicious, steaming hot tea.


Within these limitations, a viewer learns to appreciate the tiniest details. Character names change, but their central roles remain the same…

The respected businessman who fears for his life, and is destined to jumpstart the plot by dying: Brandon Edwards (Morgan Wallace)

His shady business partner of dubious ethnicity: Michael Strogonoff (Ivan Lebedeff – a Russian)

His wife: Valerie Edwards (Dorothy Tree – not a Russian, yet somehow SHE’s the communist)

Her extramarital lover, because these mystery films often assume a lover couple to provide the emotional underpinning (something the titular master detective cannot bring). Also, affairs (though patently immoral, says Hays) are an easy way to increase motives: Peter Harrison (Craig Reynolds)

The manservant and maid, each to arouse suspicions in the most genre-naïve viewers, then possibly die at midway to deflect same suspicions: Sing (Chester Gan, for all your outdated stereotypical Asian needs) and Drina (Lotus Long)

An extra guy, who seems to have no reason for being here (read: is probably the murderer): Prof. Ed Janney (Holmes Herbert)

This isn’t exactly the interpersonal situation found in Part One, but it’s close enough – I couldn’t’ give you a mathematical formula for 1930s mystery suspects, but I’m certain it could be done.


Similarly, there must be a MacGuffin, to either drive the motive, or be a red herring. Switching out Detective’s chemical weapons, Mystery goes for a gem, jewel or sapphire, to go by its various designations: the “Eye of the Daughter of the Moon,” the world’s largest MacGuffin, and one recently stolen from China by Edwards – hence he’s crooked enough for us to not be terribly bothered when he’s shot dead in full view of everybody. Keep in mind this big rock isn’t the only motive, for it’s a mystery’s duty early on to pile on as many arguments as possible, to cultivate potential plot threads – the rest of the film is then an act of Mr. Wong discovering which possible narrative is real, and which isn’t. Until the end, and the actual clues and motives are highlighted – and no, I shan’t be revealing what they are.

As with many a mystery, there’s a lot of exposition to get out of the way, and a lot of that to cover even before the inciting murder. This requires Mr. Wong be present in advance, so even if the “Eye” is a functionally useless MacGuffin (in other words, a proper MacGuffin), its Chinese origin is enough to draw in our protagonist. Because Mr. Wong is among the world’s foremost experts on ancient gemstones, which embroils him in eventual mystery successfully enough that we hardly question why he (a nonprofessional civilian) has jurisdiction over the police throughout this series.


The police are back, and as ignorant as ever! I was correct in predicting that Captain Sam Street (Grant Withers) would become a series regular, the perennial foil for the all-wise Wong. Though Street remains by necessity a straw man, forever following the wrong clues to make Wong look better. Still, he (Street) is far better served by this entry. The Mystery of Mr. Wong drops the cops’ more annoying jerkass tendencies. Street is kinda boring now, which is the tradeoff for not being irritating. And that trade characterizes what this series means to me…boredom.

Recall that conceptually, Mr. Wong is an Asian detective – that’s an entire subgenre! As exemplified by Charlie Chan, the form is helplessly racist, fueled by the vestiges of Yellow Peril, even if it seeks to correct the greater problems of Fu Manchu stories. This means Chan’s Asianness was always played as his defining personality trait; Mr. Wong, as exemplified by Karloff’s inescapable whiteness, isn’t even remotely Asian. He’s even less “Chinese” in Mystery, dropping even his former tea mania.

(The supporting characters, when required to be Asian, are still played by Asian actors, who mostly eschew “Hong Chong Chew” caricatures – I say “mostly” because that precise phrase gets uttered in Mystery, as the name of a Chinese emperor. Sounds like baseball tobacco to me.)


So anyway, these Mr. Wong movies are (against all 1939 odds) not very racist, and so instead they are, yes, a little boring. Mr. Wong is an amazingly flat persona, and mystery films (where the actual plots are mostly interchangeable) live or die by their detective’s personae. What a shame that Boris Karloff’s skills were then wasted in multiple 1939 movies, when he could’ve played a few more brooding mad scientist types, to everyone’s benefit. For a franchise starring Karloff the Uncanny, I expected more!

However, for all that Mr. Wong’s race is a complete non-issue, tying the MacGuffin back in to China makes it an issue again – but in a completely agreeable way. To jump to the chase, The Mystery of Mr. Wong takes a surprisingly progressive stance about China’s sovereignty, at a time when other films basically portrayed the country as full of capuchin monkeys. Mr. Wong knows, while barely saying so, that the gem should be returned to its rightful ancestral owners, removed from grabby Americans. To quote Indy: “This belongs in a museum!”


When Mystery is over, there has been your bog-standard parlor assembly, missing only an extra “darkened lights murder” to reach full-on cliché. Mr. Wong even collects the remaining suspects with that most cliché of detective statements: “I submit we are all here for one purpose: to identify the murderer of the late Mr. Edwards.” (Eh, the “Mr. Edwards” part is a little more specific.) And he proceeds to frighten the murderer enough for him to reveal himself, in the absence of genuine clues – a very common movie detective ploy, known as the Charlie Chan Special™.

That’s not what I mean to highlight. Rather, more impressively, throughout all this Mr. Wong has secretly rediscovered and stolen the gemerald away from the baddies. The film ends – its final lines – with Wong tasking Sing the Chinese butler with returning the rock to China. More than just fooling a killer, Wong has fooled everyone (that includes Street’s somewhat imperialistic policemen)! So The Mystery of Mr. Wong is ultimately respectful towards China, which makes me rather like this movie, even if it is otherwise tedium in extract form.


It only remains to point out those rare moments when Mystery isn’t simply boring us silly. The most entertaining scene is actually Edwards’ murder. It happens during a rather glorified game of charades, with a gathering of what the Marx Bros. would call “snobs.” Edwards acts out these little pastiches with some of his potential murderers – and he knows someone is out to kill him. Given that, why would you agree to be the “victim” in a fictionalized stage shooting?! Especially considering it’s precisely this pretend death which ends up being Edwards’ real death – It’s really quite funny how conversation continues for minutes more before anyone (even Wong) realizes Edwards is a rotting corpse in a tuxedo.

The other random note involves what is, I swear for the life of me, an actually swear word! In 1939, the year that Gone with the Wind popularized the word “damn,” this Poverty Row production actually managed to sneak in the word “fuck” – with no contextual justification! At least, I think that’s what’s going on; see so for yourself (damn thing is unembeddable – sounds like a description of the girls I date), around 57:35 (that’s the whole movie there, by the way). Did Janney not just ask “Wong, what the fuck is this?” Am I hearing things?!

...

And…that’s about all I have to say. The Mystery of Mr. Wong respects the Chinese, and includes the f-word. In these subtle ways, it is a very unexpected movie.

The Tramp, No. 2 - The Kid (1921)

The Kid is Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film. After nearly a decade of assorted twenty and thirty minute frivolities, it clocks in at a mighty sixty-eight minutes! That double what A Dog’s Life boasted, and it allows Chaplin to hunker down with essentially the same concept – the Tramp and his small charge living in poverty (here Chaplin trades up, from dog to child) – only developed with greater detail than ever. A Dog’s Life was rather the perfect length for a Tramp comedy, really, yet The Kid effectively doubles its time by doing twice the genres: comedy and drama. This is perhaps Chaplin’s hugest contribution to the world of filmed comedy – the dramedy. That’s most appropriate for the man synonymous with pathos, and it’s perhaps only by my own compulsion to read these things primarily as comedies that I don’t often think of Chaplin as a dramatist.


It is inarguably The Kid’s aim to accomplish this unlikely union of the serious and the silly, as that is its admission right there at the top. Silent film titles allow the storyteller to directly address the audience far more effectively than talkies. This is a little too on the nose, but for the first time out it’s necessary to alert audiences what sort of tonal experience they’re in for.

The predicament: A Woman (Edna Purviance) has an unwanted newborn baby boy, and tries to abandon it with a wealthy family, and hope for the best. Through a series of semi-comic blunders, the baby instead winds up in the charge of the Tramp, who at least lives indoors now. Five years pass, the child grows into young Jackie Coogan (also TV’s Uncle Fester!), happily conning window-owners with the Tramp. Then outside forces, from crooks to well-meaning bureaucrats, conspire to separate this unofficial father-son ragtag team.

The move to relative dramatics is essential; at feature length, the style of comedy of even Chaplin’s more dour shorts would seem flippant. Other silent comedians graduating to features would sometimes add on other genres – the 1920s are host to a surprisingly large number of comic action-thrillers, from Safety Last! to The General. Or they would use drama to up the stakes in what would otherwise be featherweight comic shenanigans. Chaplin, rather, seems to embrace drama more wholeheartedly than the others.

The thing is, this is silent era drama, a most melodramatic beast indeed. Drama is tricky, as it’s sort of a-generic – comedy seeks laughs, action thrills, horror frights. Drama simply seeks emotion of some sort, in a more broad sense. Comedy works in silence, because there is a regularized output (jokes) which aren’t hurt by the necessarily stylized acting silence demands. The other genre genres work similarly – witness Nosferatu’s eeriness, or the thrills of an old Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler. Silent dramas work when trading in spectacle – Intolerance – but they’re the hardest antiquated film form to take seriously today.


The Kid, lacking in spectacle by its domestic setting, opts for the melodramatic histrionics of silent drama, for want of a different tact. This form of drama traffics in being overwrought – Assuming an immediate connection with the characters on screen, the story will start indiscriminately ladling out tragedies and diseases and oh so many other unpleasantries, resulting in tear showers the likes of which A Dog’s Life so effectively mocked. It’s sort of that way with the introductory sequence with the baby-abandoning Woman. An early title asserts “Her only sin was motherhood.” (Funny, spell check wants me to change “sin” to “son.”) Sorry to differ, but her undiscussed sin is abandoning a newborn child in the ghetto. And yet, we’re supposed to immediately feel pity for the Woman. There’s not enough context to really understand her motivation, besides poverty, so one only assumes child abandonment was a regular enough part of the 1921 audience’s existence (Great Depression and all) for them to relate.

Once the youth winds up with the Tramp, the natural emissary of comedy, things improve mightily. The Tramp is a figure of fun – this fact is so ingrained in viewers’ knowledge by now that he needs even no introduction prior to discovering the tot amidst the ash and soot. His first non-cannibalistic impulse is the same as ours would be upon finding an alley baby – he tries to get rid of it. Ye gods, the instinct is spreading!

Actually, this yields a most amusing routine, with the baby acting as an unwanted prop the Tramp fails to squander off on assorted Depression Era urban archetypes. The kick comes from how serious the situation is. Adding a baby gives the Tramp’s antics weight, edging things ever so slightly into dark comedy. Hey, that’s a pretty good example of how the drama improves the comedy, at the least! And there’s always that reassurance that nothing dire will happen to the child, that indeed the Tramp shall concede and unofficially adopt it – now christened John. (That the Tramp never seems to consider an orphanage seems curious – not knowing the social realities of the time – but the fact is we must saddle him with a child for this movie to play out, so on with the show.)


Once John has aged into his five-year-old self, The Kid’s meat is upon us. “Father” and “son” roam the city in a variation on the usual Tramp antics, a sort of unofficial comedy duo – it helps immensely that Coogan was already quite familiar with vaudeville by this stage. Many scenes feel, on the face of it, not unlike what a Tramp short would offer up: taking unfair advantage of homeowners to make a buck, or antagonizing the local derby-clad tough (a disproportioned period type I can only associate with cartoon bulldogs). The comedy is winning enough, I suppose, in that gentle Chaplinesque sort of way – never aggressive, more eager for a smile than a guffaw. Dramatic seriousness has waned notably, doing a disservice to the comedy…for now.


(It somewhat bothers me that the Tramp is so unashamedly crooked or dishonest in his own dealings. Perhaps it’s a condition of his impoverished existence, or a way for audiences to feel that he’s getting one better on the supposed suppressor forces in their lives, but it makes the Tramp – for me – a little less likable. Contrast him to the perfectly middleclass Harold Lloyd, also hugely popular in his day, though Lloyd’s Everymen have the advantage of financial comfort.)


There is some drama left, drama now pertaining to the Tramp himself. Playing his standard comic bits with John builds their relationship subtly, creating much more specific, rich bonds than a full-fledged period drama could. It’s the “honey on the wormwood” to draw audiences in for the inevitable heartstring tugging. Many of the best works of humor – I’m thinking partly of “Don Quixote” – sneak deeper emotions up on you, by investing the lead characters with purely humorous traits at first, until the reader (viewer, whomever) cares for them anyway. I don’t begrudge this approach, it can be remarkably effective. (One reason television comedies, with the advantage of time, can be so effecting.) The Tramp, as a recurring character, accomplishes largely the same response.


There is no doubt that John and the Tramp love each other very much. With enough setup, that allows for some genuine threats to enter their existence, right around the time something like A Dog’s Life would be wrapping up. Interesting, how every time increase inspires in Chaplin an entirely new style of comedy. Mind you, that’s with over half an hour devoted entirely to the Tramp and John. Despite the presence of Purviance, there is no attempt at a romantic subplot, or anything that would distract from the central fatherly relationship.

So a few plot complications later, and the authorities catch wind of the tenuousness of John’s existence. It’s not the poverty that’s an issue (pointed commentary…unintentionally?), but the mere fact that the Tramp seems to simply have the boy, for no justifiably good reason. Their dire threat: To shanghai John off to the orphanage, and find a well-to-do family for him. All well and good, except it undermines the emotional bond John has formed.


John is taken away…and the Tramp gives chase. What follows is another example of comedy working best when there’s some seriousness underlying it: The Tramp, desperate to get his child back, outpaces the orphanage’s paddy wagon across the rooftops, police chasing, until he leaps into the speeding vehicle, fights off the interlopers, and escapes. In a different film it would read as an action sequence, but in context it is tragicomic. And the duo’s reunion, after even so short a separation, is all the more rewarding for the emotions involved.

It’s inevitable that John cannot remain the Tramp’s forever, as their subsequent itinerant existence between flophouses isn’t sustainable. Thanks be again to the gods of coincidental melodramatic plotting, John is destined to be reunited with his original mother – the one so abandonment-happy at the outset. She has, in the meantime, endured a largely unseen drama of her own (one imagines a more generic picture of the era chronicling this), having in five years risen from the gutter and somehow become a singing sensation superstar. It’s oh so convenient, that John is destined to go live in a shiny gilded mansion, that promise of ostentatious riches this era’s films always tempt viewers with. It seems…willfully perverse to excuse initial abandonment with subsequent wealth. Odd too that John won’t be happy without the Tramp unless he’s obscenely rich. This matter of money seems really disingenuous, in the context of things.


The Tramp, meanwhile, doesn’t know what’s happened to John for various ostensibly comic reasons. Then Chaplin allows himself one truly unexpected detour, as the Tramp dreams on a stoop in his loneliness…and pictures his slum as Heaven, everyone in the most by-the-books angel outfits possible – even the Tramp, derby and baggy pants still forever there along with his wings and harp. The image alone must be what sustains comedy in this section – presumably – or otherwise it’s a parody of some long-dead form of entertainment, or something. As a dramatization of the Tramp’s emotional state, it reveals little. I’m not sure what to make of it, except Chaplin needed a definitive climax for his low key, bittersweet dramedy, and happened upon a sub-hallucinatory passion play for whatever reason.

Then, like the ending of Monsters Inc., our hero, denied a lifetime with his child, at least gets one final heartwarming reunion. All is well. It’s a strong way to end the movie, reinforcing the Chaplin/Coogan team up.

Thematically, this was no doubt a hugely personal film for Chaplin, in the wake of his own impoverished London childhood. Such experiences, and Chaplin’s rise to international stardom, perhaps excuse some of the Algerian (that is, Horatio Alger, not Algeria) money-gazing which often resolves his stories. More immediately, Chaplin’s firstborn infant had died just before The Kid was made, and his inner turmoil is certainly present on film. This accounts for the unusually vulnerable state of the Tramp, the matter of a master clown infusing greater humanity into his central creation without ever sacrificing what makes him funny.

The Kid was the result of a two-year downtime for Chaplin, who hadn’t put out a film since 1919. This shows incredible faith on the part of First National Pictures, confident that Chaplin’s cachet would persist into the twenties. They were right – in spades! The Kid was the second highest grosser of 1921 (one can only guess what a high gross looked like in those days), behind only The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Chaplin produced a few more short films for First National – The Idle Class, Pay Day, The Pilgrim – over the next two years. He was growing less prolific, certainly in contrast to the heady ‘10s. But Chaplin’s artistic heyday was just beginning, as even more freedom would soon be his.

X-Men, No. 2 - X2: X-Men United (2003)

One truism about many superhero films – of which X-Men is the primordial progenitor in the modern movement – is that the sequel is often surprisingly superior. This comes of the subgenre’s unique properties, where Part One must needs be 70% exposition, leaving little room leftover for superheroics. But this was not known upon the release of X2: X-Men United, which predates even Spider-Man 2 (but not Spider-Man). That this sequel wound up being incontestably better than the original was a mighty shock at the time.

The fact is that the mutant world is now well known, effectively established. About the fundamental issue with human mutation, only the briefest introductory scene setting suffices for X2. As for the X-Men, their existence and motives and personalities and powers, all this is mostly assumed as well. When the time comes to reestablish that, say, Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is telepathic/telekinetic/photogenic, it’s simply shown, and viewers are left to deduce the meaning. Could be partially that director Bryan Singer has become more comfortable in the ways of Marvel storytelling. It helps that matters are grounded come X2, and audiences will accept teleportation or super healing or shapeshifting far more readily than before.


Actually, there is no question Singer has grown accustomed to this setting – as have the moneymen at Fox, X-Men having proved incontrovertibly that money spent on superheroes is money well spent. There is a healthy dosage of action in X2 – I wager at least 5x more X-action. It is quantitatively better as well, now that Spider-Man has shown how much CGI assistance the genre can successfully employ. X-Men mutants now freely exploit their powers, feeling far closer to the actual superheroes of the comics…a good sight removed from X-Men’s occasional “stand around and debate endlessly the viability of using your powers” approach, necessitated by what budget and effects technicians then allowed.

The special effects are noticeably better, much more uniformly integrated. They lack the shiny, plastic sheen of Part One – with the exception of Magneto’s (Ian McKellen) plastic prison, which ought to look plasticky. At some point in the early ‘00s – not reducible to a single set of movies, in my mind – CGI effects became more reliable as movie-wide tools, and not simply occasional grace notes. This distinction is there between the first two X-Men movies, with X2 unquestionably a part of the cinematic superhero revolution, and not merely a glimmer of promise.

The (mostly returning) cast is well served too, with a few lesser X-Men now promoted to semi-lead. There is not a weak member in this bunch (and bear with me): Wolverine (breakout star Hugh Jackman) – power: healing. Cyclops (James Marsden) – power: laser eyes. Jean Gray (Famke Janssen) – power: telekinesis. Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) – power: shapeshifting. Rogue (Anna Paquin) – power: absorption. Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) – power: ice, man. Pyro (Aaron Stanford) – power: FIRE!


And of course there’s always Storm (Halle Berry) (power – the weather, except interesting), who gets the mightiest screen time promotion, for a fairly one-note character, owing to Berry’s interim superstar success with Monster’s Ball. I don’t want to dwell upon this for too long, but it seems Berry got a little full of herself in the light of that and Die Another Day, arguably the worst of the James Bond movies. She wouldn’t even appear in X2 unless Storm was promoted to Berry-level prominence, and made to represent all the light and the goodness in the world. Lucky for Berry she humbled herself enough to reprise Storm, for it left her intended Gigli role open for J. Lo’s self-sabotage instead. …And then Berry later did Catwoman!


Meanwhile, there is but one central new mutant among the cast (I’m ignoring the somewhat tertiary Lady Deathstrike and Mutant 143). That would be Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming, another Bond veteran alongside Berry and Janssen), teleporter. One newbie is enough, as the roster is rather overstuffed as it is – it’s a marvel (heh?) Singer balances things as he does. The “X-Men” premise has always threatened filmmakers with its scope.

So X2 takes the promise of X-Men, and runs with it. For all these masses of characters, they’re mostly preset, so a movie-long story becomes the focus instead – where X2, like most superhero sequels, really succeeds. Running with the notion of strained mutant-human relations, especially as a metaphor for otherness and prejudice, X2 flips the villainy coin around and posits a new threat – not Magneto, but rather human Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox). Stryker is this series’ metaphorical equivalent of a white supremacist, militarily opposed to an entire group on principle, and without reason. Unintentionally backed by the U.S. President into suspending mutant liberties (and kudos to the film for not making some lazy, undercooked War on Terror parallel out of this), Stryker has one aim, and one aim only: KILL ALL MUTANTS

Achieving this worldwide, omnicidal scheme, Stryker needs a few things – a replica of Professor X’s Cerebro machine…oh, and Professor X himself! Thus begins, elegantly enough, his involvement with our heroes. It then becomes a matter of the X-Men piecing together Stryker’s plan (as each member knows only a part of it), then discovering Stryker’s base of operations.


This central premise comes of the comics – reportedly, the “X-Men” series “God Loves, Man Kills.” It seems the prerogative of superhero movie commentators to either claim encyclopedic nerd-like omniscience on all things comic book, or to play incredulous elitist who scorns the genre. I am neither, for while I respect many comics, I don’t have enough intimacy with “X-Men” to know really any of its plots – to my detriment. However, as adaptations, comic book films have the advantage of decades’ of writing to borrow from freely, and it becomes a dire temptation to steal freely from all over at once. Singer and his writers are wise to limit their adaptation to a contained, logical thread. In the interest of perpetuating cinematic X-Men, in doing something akin to serial comic development, pragmatic adaptations seem wiser than willy-nilly appropriation.

Delaying the climax, X2 separates the X-Men group early on, only to reunite them after sufficient individual adventures. This guarantees moments for every character (and every character’s powers) to shine, without Storm’s storming negating Pyro’s pyromania, or some such. That’s a simple enough solution to the challenge of a superhero team story – where, as in X-Men, writers often struggle to create the perfect scenario demanding one use of each player’s powers.

(This separation also gets beyond the plot-ending ultra-superpowers of Professor X, who takes on brainwashed damsel duties for much of X2, leaving his charges without their greatest asset. The films on either side of X2 do something similar as well.)


Singer describes this division as an intentional echoing of The Empire Strikes Back, which is telling. In retrospect, X2 is the middle chapter of a trilogy, though this wasn’t wholly intended at the time. Unlike Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men is resolutely not a macro-movie, filmed at once with artificial divisions. Each entry is reasonably standalone, even while the series-wide arc escalates the mutant/human conflict for all its worth. Aping Empire isn’t some high-fallutin’ attempt at mythmaking, but simply Singer’s acknowledgment that the second Star Wars is among the greatest of sequels – and a great template for the X-Men mold, for how it deepens established characters, widens its universe, and ups the stakes.

The situation with Stryker is a unique one – odd that the central villain of a superhero story is not a supervillain, but a reasonably pudgy guy with no powers. Stryker does have a few select brainwashed mutants, but his antagonism is almost wholly “us vs. them.” In light of this, the X-men unite, as the title promises, with the normally villainous Magneto and Mystique joining forces with Wolverine, Jean Gray, Storm, Rogue, Iceman, Pyro, Nightcrawler… All this following a remarkably cool – and cruel – Magneto escape from plastic prison, involving the ingenious smuggling of metal. Needed because Magneto is not wholly heroic, is still the series’ central villain, despite this one-film truce. That he can ally with his enemies on occasion is a testament to the flexibility of the core X-concept, and the strength of Magneto as character.


Summarizing events as such passes over notable moments. Naturally, Wolverine gets the opportunity to go all badass against Stryker’s men, shrugging off their bullets while using his adamantium claws as God best sees fit – within the realms of a PG-13 movie. Even in this bloodless form, it took Singer some doing to get X2 negotiated down from an R, because stabbing deaths are apparently that much more taboo than gunshots. Would that a more proper vehicle for Wolverine existed (be careful what you wish for).

Another worthwhile scene involves Iceman’s mutant “coming out” with his parents – one of X2’s lone moments of obvious metaphorics (in this case, phrasing mutation as homosexuality, in no uncertain terms). Overreliance upon this approach was one of X-Men’s crutches, and to do it but once in a film (and to simplify the metaphor into a single form of otherness) increases this moment’s potency. Besides, the scene ends with a raging sequence of explosions, which is always nice, and there is also an alarmingly hilarious adamantium-licking kitty cat.


Then eventually X-Men team up, character dynamics are tested, and everyone reaches Stryker’s evil lair…Alkali Lake. Waitaminute! This place has meaning! Indeed, pragmatically adding new elements to the “God Loves, Man Kills” framework, here X2 fulfills that niggling promise of X-Men, to examine Wolverine’s amnesiac origins with greater care. Now we can unequivocally state it: Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton is the result of a secret military experiment, in film continuity headed by one Colonel Stryker. And not only that, but there are other super-healers under Stryker’s present employ, to add a little action sequencing to all this backward-looking soul searching. What a nifty way to incorporate necessary character revelations into the greater plot! For those knowing the answer, Wolverine’s past could’ve been steeped in tedium and hand-wringing, but Singer anticipates and sidesteps that issue. Though, let it be known, the term “Weapon X” has yet to enter the cinematic X-Men lexicography.


X2 is a good movie, most enjoyable, but it doesn’t lend me many more avenues of discussion. Maybe just taking a few more plot points as they come about… (Potential spoilers)

Stryker himself proves easy enough to foil…but there remains the issue of Professor X and Cerebro. As Magneto sees it, this is an opportunity for genocide, one way or another, and it’s simple enough to switch X’s polarity to KILL ALL HUMANS. Thus Magneto returns to his baseline villainy at the tail end. And don’t fret your pretty little head about humanity – hardly a summer blockbuster would actually eradicate the human race in such a way. Though there’s still the unremitting pain which every person on Earth endures at the finale of X2, which is kind of surprisingly cruel (mostly unaddressed), and potentially even fatal – I can’t imagine anyone driving at the time, or operating heavy machinery, endured Professor X’s unwitting psionic attack with flying colors.

Though perhaps that’s the point – X2 concludes with the promise of greater antagonism to come, in that classic middle chapter sort of way. Similarly, anything following the Empire Strikes Back guidebook must identify a Han Solo stand-in, a character to (presumably) perish, only to return shortly in the sequel. I won’t say just who that is, though it’s perhaps oblique enough to reference the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” Yeahhhhh…that was something I knew nothing about in 2003 when first watching X2, and only know of now largely thanks to X2. My cinema-going buddies had to fill in those blanks, but the intimation is the same nonetheless – some badass stuff is about to go down! And…credits!

Yeah, it’s a cliffhanger, but not in a way which makes X2 feel truncated, ala The Matrix Reloaded or some such. For the self-contained Stryker story is nicely resolved, and it’s only the greater, series-spanning arc which is still in the air. Which is right and good for this sort of a franchise. It ups the stakes with each entry to maintain interest, without becoming too enamored of its own continuity.

The Aztec Mummy and The Wrestling Women, Nos. 4 and 2 - Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964)

It’s crossover time!, betwixt the Wrestling Women (a franchise so strong, it hasn’t even had a sequel yet) and The Aztec Mummy (which has had sequels, but only because they were made before Part One was released). Meaning this is the first naturally occurring sequel in either enterprise.

Given producer Guillermo Calderón’s track record, one doesn’t exactly expect elegance from this effort. So as crossovers go, this one follows the Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man format – namely, that it’s not so much a combination of film series as it is a mere sequel to one, with a little bit of the other tossed in at the end. Only much worse, naturally, than the old Universal example, because that’s Mexico’s cinematic prerogative. And since Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy is, for 80% of its existence, a mere Wrestling Women movie, let’s just treat it at that, and dive right in.


The first order of business is determining just how the Wrestling Women can have more adventures. How Gloria Venus and Golden Rubi (Lorena Velásquez and Elizabeth Campbell), two mere professional wrestlers, continue to have adventures dropped right in their lap. By having an adventure dropped right into their lap! A tormented archeologist, fleeing the mob (as archeologists do), directly seeks out Gloria and Golden for help. (Wrestlers: Mexico’s superheroes!)

(Sorry, I forgot…Gloria Venus, though the same character, is now officially renamed Loreta Venus, for absolutely no reason whatsoever!)

Why not just go to the police?! Well, A) in this universe they are as useless as the boar’s proverbial teats and B) the police are right there next to the Wrestling Women anyway! That’s right, it really is a sequel, with the Women’s purposeless police paramours (Armando Silvestre and Chucho Salinas) returning. They exist solely to support a 1960s Mexican’s idea of comic relief, in a movie which is damnably hilarious without help. All they do is fall down and say stupid things. Since it’s remarkably difficult to say amusing things about bad comedy, I now take my leave of the cops.

Back to the archeologist. He dies. Turns out those Wrestling Women weren’t much help after all.

Ah, but here comes a second archeologist, himself bearing plot. Dr. Tracy, he is, and he’s played by Victor Velásquez, presumably the lead actress’ father, or relation of another sort, or Velásquez is simply a common last name. Whatever it is, Dr. Tracy tells of a recently discovered codex, leading directly to that most Mexican of McGuffins, Aztec treasure™. The codex has now been split into several pieces, simply because that’s what is done in these sorts of stories. And now villains, specifically in the form of the Black Dragon Gang, seek it.

Now…everyone’s motives are the same – to obtain the treasure for their own material gain (and that goes for the Wrestling Women as well, who have now teamed up with Tracy) – so you can’t fault one party over another. That is to say, the villain is arbitrary. Except the Black Dragon Gang is doing it evilly. They’re killing archeologists, while the Wrestling Women are killing…Black Dragons. How is this okay?! Well, the Black Dragons are Japanese, see, therefore…Oh, I don’t like where this is going.


Let’s look into this. The Red Dragon himself (actor unknown, thanks to the vagaries of the English dubbing process) is your standard Fu Manchu affair, a white guy (in this case, Hispanic) made to look like an outdated Asian stereotype thanks to squinted eyes and other yellowface. I’ve seen this sort of thing before – yeah, in movies from the ‘30s. But this is Mexico circa 1964, which really oughtn’t to be trafficking in such pointless racism. This is just more proof that Mexican movies were helplessly indebted to aping archaic Hollywood schlock, and not their famous schlock like Gone with the Wind or Citizen Kane, but Monogram-style Z-grade exploitation. Only now, many decades removed, the initial “Yellow Peril” offense Fu Manchu intended is lost, leaving only a blind, unquestioning copycat mentality, repeating old movies for no reason.

Dr. Tracy, to keep the Red Dragons from getting their hands on the various codex pieces, determines to portion out the pieces over time to a different member of the Wrestling Women gang. This doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense, frankly, so let’s just sum up the next 30 minutes as simply as possible:

Fights!

The Wrestling Women and Red Dragons repeatedly come to blows, each sequence, regardless of context, playing out the same way. The same way I imagine all luchadore epics play out, with fighting phrased in the specific idiom of Mexican wrestling. Mostly, people hurl themselves bodily at each other, and occasionally employ holds. It gets a little repetitive, and that’s not counting the separate moments where Gloria and Golden wrestle in the ring.


The one point of interest is Red Dragon’s (that’s the Red Dragons’ leader’s name, so hello there needless confusion) favorite tactics. It’s all a bunch of arbitrary pseudo-scientific hooey, which is totally in keeping from the team that brought us Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape. For one thing, Red Dragon has a television – a magical television – with total omniscience. Wherever the Wrestling Women go, his TV sees ‘em (with perfect audio and everything!). Forget the loony notion he’s got little cameras everywhere, for most likely Red Dragon has somehow realized he’s a fictional character, and tapped into the actual movie footage, ala Spaceballs. This is some Funny Games shit!

Red Dragon’s other technique involves that old exploitation sawhorse: damsels in distress. Welcome, back, cinematic Mexican misogyny, we knew you wouldn’t be gone long! But that’s the challenge of a Wrestling Women flick, that the Wrestling Women cannot be treated like vapid, inane damsels, yet we still want vapid, inane damsels, because that’s the only story type René Cardona et al know. Therefore we’ve a new female character, Chela (María Eugenia San Martin), a new buddy of the Wrestling Women, a living and breathing plot complication. She becomes Red Dragon’s prisoner, then later his slave, via a combination of screwy misconceptions of chemistry and radio waves and psychiatry and about five other branches of science.

So, as I said, the movie just devolves into fight after fight. It’s going nowhere, which Red Dragon at least is wholly aware of (more evidence he’s aware of his own fictionality). Thus he proposes a compromise, that all bad blood between the Red Dragons and Wrestling Women be solved in the ring. Wrestling Women vs. Red Dragon’s two judo chopping twin daughters. Mostly, this is an excuse to wedge in a proper wrestling scene. Whomever wins gets all the codices. And amazingly, this isn’t a sneaky double-cross on Red Dragon’s part, not because the Mexicans doubt the slimy underhanded deviousness of the Japanese (you’d think WWII was still going on!), but because they’re so dismissive of the race they doubt even this degree of competence. Lovely!

Friday night. The National Wrestling Arena. Gloria Venus and Golden Rubi, our vivacious and comely heroines –


- versus these two dour, unnamed Japanese “women.”


Note the subtle cinematic trick by which we’re made to cheer on one group over another.

The following fight is a legitimate unexpurgated ten minutes of pure wrestling. This is no doubt the central highlight of a luchadore movie, possibly in an earlier era where wrestling on television wasn’t yet a thing (excepting Red Dragon’s television). A single, listless master shot from overhead covers all the ringside action, with occasional completely necessary cuts to the other characters watching from the sidelines. Considering the lead actresses were cast for their buxom hourglass forms and not their wrestling skills (as evidenced by the stocky real female wrestlers they regularly slap around), this deathless match isn’t even proper, though it is improvised, and therefore an awkward, stilted, crazy, hilarious thing. But remember, down there it’s a real sport!

The match ends with the Wrestling Women victorious, because this is one of those franchises where the protagonists are always successful, at all times, like a peplum. (Suspense? What’s that?) True to his word, Red Dragon gives them the pieces of codex he’d stolen from all those pre-murdered archeologists, and his notorious gang of ethnic caricatures retires for good.

And…switch!


It’s a new movie now, essentially, as we enter the Aztec Mummy phrase of things, an Aztec Mummy plot told over the course of a mere half hour and change – which proves to be a much more sustainable running time for this exact same story than any of the proper Aztec Mummies.

By that series, we start with human protagonists (here the Wrestling Women) learning of Aztec treasure™, and the whole history around it. Thoroughly eschewing the former forgotten memories, the translated codex reveals this. The tale, same as ever, about forbidden love in Aztec times between a princess and a warrior. We know this one, she’s Xochitl and he’s Popoca – Hold up! Nope, he ain’t Popoca! The mummy-to-be male lover is called Tezomoc. He’s a new character!

So…how is this a sequel to those Popoca mummy movies, when other generic Aztec and Mayan mummy movies (sadly, never an Olmec mummy) aren’t? Well, it’s all about producer Guillermo Calderón. If he’s delivering mummies, it’s technically an Aztec Mummy. Sure, whatever.


Name changes like this, to titular undead, are part and parcel with movies of this quality; it’s possible Calderón simply forgot what Popoca was called. Except Tezomoc is functionally different than Popoca – who was, recall, a mere shambler and a shoulder-slapper. Tezomoc is oh so much more dangerous, a nagual (Aztec sorcerer), able to shapeshift himself into a bat, a spider, whatever rubbery “scary” prop they already had lying around the studio. In other words, vampirism and mummification are intentionally confused for the hell of it. (In all this, it’s heartening to know Popoca’s story really did conclude in The Aztec Mummy vs. the Human Robot, and he’s still chilling out in that mausoleum to this day.)

Now we’re an official Aztec Mummy movie that just happens to involve the Wrestling Women, things fall out as predictably as the Red Dragon section, but according to different rules. The Wrestling Women find Tezomoc’s tomb, steal away the breastplate which reveals the location of the thing which reveals the location of the thing which reveals the location of the Aztec treasure™. Tezomoc stalks them back home, kills whomever, the Wrestling Women return the breastplate, the end.

As always, there are lapses of illogic which warrant at least some examination. Tezomoc kills people, something all these Aztec mummies seem very fond of. Specifically, he kills all the Red Dragons, never mind they’re now genuinely disinterested in the whole story, now that it’s moved them by. Still, they were the “bad guys,” so I guess for no reason they deserved it. It wasn’t gruesome, anyway. They merely see Tezomoc, shot their prop guns to no effect, and he nears them. The end. We don’t even get shoulder-slapping, the usual ceremonial indicator that a death has occurred.


Oh, and Chela, now freed of the Red Dragons’ grasp (that is, in the stages well before their deaths-by-mummy), becomes a new damsel. Tezomoc’s damsel. Not because he, the mummy, has any specific need to sacrifice her, but it’s just what Aztec mummies do, and it gives the Wrestling Women someone to save at the end, even if we’re still a decade away from movies allowing all three women smooch as an ending.

And there’s some randomly humorous dialogue wedged in the proceedings as well. Most of it is in response to Tezomoc’s shapeshifting:

“Look, it’s a vampire now!”

“He’s a mummy again.”

Well, Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy served its purpose…I guess. It solidified The Wrestling Women as a franchise unto itself, with several more sequels to follow. The Aztec Mummy, meanwhile, ends at this stage, not that it was ever really moving to begin with. And interesting that they needed to do a crossover (even if we never really get the glorious “wrestlers fighting mummies” nonsense promised) to justify further movies about spandex-clad vixens. You’d think that sort of franchise could perpetuate itself.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


Holy shit, was that a luchadore?!

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait…what is this movie about?!


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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