Roundtable time again already!? Yup, and this time around the B-Masters are paying tribute to the company that never met a social trend it couldn’t exploit; that set new and still standing records for the gap between the content of the advertising art and the content of the completed film; and (perhaps above all) that unleashed Roger Corman upon an unsuspecting public.
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It’s ON TIME & UNDER BUDGET: A Salute To American International Pictures. All throughout the month of February at the B-Masters’ Blog!
DELUGE (1933)
Mil Mascaras: Resurrection comes to us some thirty years after Mil Mascaras last appeared onscreen in a narrative feature. For those of you who missed out the first time around, Mil, along with Santo and Blue Demon, is one of the “Big Three” stars of lucha libre cinema, as well as one of the biggest stars in the history of lucha libre itself. While Mil’s cinematic efforts never had the same stateside impact as some of Santo’s, thanks to them never being dubbed in English, they are nonetheless every bit as entertaining — and, in some cases, much more so — than many of El Enmascarado de Plata’s contributions to the genre. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection — which was initially titled Mil Mascaras vs. The Aztec Mummy — doesn’t come to us by way of the normal channels one might expect a Mil Mascaras movie to come through. In fact, it may very well be the only Mexican wrestling film whose writer-producer holds a Ph.D. in robotic engineering from Oxford. Jeffrey Uhlmann brought the idea for the film with him when he took an associate professorship in the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Computer Science Department, and proposed it as an ideal project for exploring the potential for an entertainment technology-related IT program within the University’s Engineering School. Being that Uhlmann is obviously a serious fan of lucha cinema, I imagine that he also decided it would just be really cool to make a Mil Mascaras movie using some of Mizzou’s resources — but in the long run, it’s really all about the kids, isn’t it?
I had pretty high expectations going into this film — not that it would be good, but that it would hilariously, confoundingly weird. And I was not disappointed. But I discovered that it was also actually pretty good. Sure, it’s crude. Yes, the special effects are more surreal than they are real. Certainly it’s schizophrenic. But realism seems to be the least of this film’s concerns. What it is, instead, is an incredibly energetic, offbeat, thriller that has one foot in The Evil Dead, the second foot in Hong Kong horror/action films, and a third foot in films like Alejandro Jodorowski’s Holy Mountain. Although it’s fun to watch it alongside previously mentioned piece of crap horror films, it’s nowhere near that level of incompetence. It makes sense, in it’s own batty way. But that’s the same way that vampires, demons, animated little skull bats, and demon tree rape make sense. Without a doubt, the best Indian horror/supernatural film I’ve seen so far. You may not go into this movie thinking marmosets are scary, but you’ll sure as hell be creeped out by them afterward. Just imagine. You’re lying in bed, minding your own business, then you casually glance across the room, and there one is, just sitting there…staring at you…staring at you…staring at you…
Lloyd Kaufman of Troma is going to be in Salt Lake City next week for Tromadance (one of the Sundance hanger-on mini-festivals), and thanks to connections at the comic shop where he’s doing a news conference, I’ll be able to swing a short interview with him (five minutes, maybe).