In short: La Momia Azteca Contra El Robot Humano (1958)

aka The Robot versus The Aztec Mummy

It's five years after our last visit to the land of the Aztec Mummy. Good old Doctor Almada (Ramon Gay), who is by now married to Flor (Rosa Arenas) and still keeping Pinacate (Crox Alvarado) as his secret lover or assistant, informs two visiting Doctors of what happened in the first two Momia Azteca movies - though in a version peculiarly different from what movie one and movie two in the series showed - through the power of endless flashbacks. But his tale doesn't end with the malevolent Dr Krupp aka The Bat (Luis Aceves Castaneda) being thrown into his own snake pit by an angry mummy. It turns out that Krupp was able to escape the pit through a secret escape hatch (note to other supervillains: always have an escape hatch in your death traps - there's nothing that could go wrong with that), and was in action again just a few nights later.

Krupp used his powers of remote hypnosis to get the living Mummy detector that is Flor to show him where the Mummy strolled off to with her breastplate and her bracelet (the ones that should lead him directly to the treasure of the Aztecs, remember?). Krupp still really, really wants to steal the Mummy's stuff and use it to steal even more stuff, but he's now quite afraid of the dead guy. What to do in a case like this? If you're a professional mad scientist like the Bat, you decide to just disappear for a few years and improve your Tampering in God's Domain skills. Almada is convinced that Krupp has returned now, and does his best (that is, not much and getting himself caught) to obstruct Krupp's plans.

Krupp hasn't returned alone, though. The mad scientist now comes with his new secret weapon against mummy-dom - a half-human/half-bicycle-headlight/all-hand-made radioactive robot. Whatever could go wrong?

In the beginning, Momia Azteca vs. Robot Humano puts up quite a fight, actively hindering even a tolerant viewer like me from enjoying it. There's not much that can stop a film dead in its tracks faster than a twenty minute flashback (including one whole musical Aztec number) to its two predecessors, closely followed by another twenty minutes of Ramon Gay and Crux Alvarado playing detective by talking not very interesting nonsense at each other. Up until that point in the proceedings, it was a bit difficult not to drift off into the land of sweet, sweet dreams for me, with Krupp's Extreme Scenery Chewing™ the only thing that kept me awake.

But then, very suddenly, the films final twenty minutes turned into everything its title promised: a mad science lab full of adorable mad science stuff! Gay and Alvarado getting manhandled (yay!)! Krupp turning into the perfect serial mad scientist! A guy in a robot suit of the most boxy degree! Monster wrestling that looks a lot like hugging, only with a bit of steam coming out of the robot (who might have teakettle parts inside, as far as I know)! It's psychotronic movie perfection.

Of course, it's twenty minutes of psychotronic movie perfection that follow forty minutes of dullest dullness, so I'm not sure how much of a recommendation this actually is.

No, wait, who am I kidding? Of course it's a recommendation! If you're the kind of gal/guy who is going to watch a film called The Aztec Mummy versus The Human Robot, you're not the sort that can be held back from pure bliss by the threat of a mere forty boring minutes. I certainly wasn't.

 

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In short: La Maldicion De La Momia Azteca (1957)

Now that mildly evil mad scientist Dr. Krupp aka The Bat (Luis Aceves Castaneda) has been caught by the police, and the Aztec Mummy (Angel Di Stefani) is merrily sleeping with his beloved magic doodads again, the life of the family of Doctor Almada (Ramon Gay) should go back to normal again.

Alas, some of Dr. Krupp's henchmen are still at large and are freeing their master from the hands of the police faster than most people would think possible. Not even the intervention of the masked wrestler El Angel (not to be confused with El Santo, whose movie adventures would only start in 1961, and who was still "only" an exceedingly popular luchador at the time) can prevent the evil mastermind's escape. The rest of the film will make clear that El Angel's intervention won't prevent anything at all - he's basically a masked punching bag.

The freshly freed Dr. Krupp has a plan. He still wants the Aztec treasure to finance his dastardly experiments, but he knows that only the mummy's magical doodads can take him there and that only Alamada's fiancé Flor (Rosa Arenas) can lead him to them - notwithstanding the fact that it were Almada and his cowardly assistant Pinacate (Crox Alvarado) who returned the objects to their place of origin. We don't call the guy a mastermind because he's clever.

Be that as it may, Krupp decides that it is best to kidnap Flor, hypnotize her, get the girl to tell him where the doodads are hidden, fetch the doodads, then kidnap Alamada, get Alamada to translate the writing on the doodads that leads to the treasure, fetch the treasure, and not get killed by a rampaging mummy.

I don't see how anything could go wrong for him.

Rafael Portillo's La Malidicion De La Momia Azteca drops any pretensions the first Aztec Mummy film, La Momia Azteka, had of being a horror film and concentrates on the pulpy serial elements of its plot, completely sidelining the titular mummy until the final fifteen minutes, but adding an early (although not, as some people seem to believe, the first) appearance of that mainstay of Mexican pop cinema, the masked, heroic luchador. It's just too bad that El Angel is so utterly useless, only winning one of his various fights - characteristically the one where he has the assistance of a teenage boy and attacks his enemy from behind - and doing nothing actually heroic whatsoever. At least, the demasking scene explains the "hero"'s crapness, and thereby gives the whole masked man episode a weird streak of realism in a film that is about as divorced from reality as my dreams of becoming the Emperor of America. It is probably best to see El Angel as another baby step on the way to the true lucha hero, that is, a masked guy who is not overshadowed by a middle-aged archaeologist.

Still, El Angel's uselessness aside, La Maldicion is quite a fun film if you are inclined to like straightforwardly directed films with overacting bad guys with silly plans and randomly placed snake pits, enthusiastic (non-choreographed in a serial style) brawls, wild and woolly plots, snazzily dressed gangsters and, um, well, that's about all there is to see here, really. But it's fast and fun enough to provide an entertaining time.

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La Momia Azteca (1957)

aka The Aztec Mummy

Dr. Almada (Ramon Gay), a Mexican Doctor of SCIENCE(!), presents a group of his jaded peers with his theories about the use of hypnosis to help people to remember their previous lifes.

Surprisingly, his public thinks this preposterous, especially when Almada has to admit that he has never tried to actually hypnotize someone to find out if his theory holds. You see, the "remember a former life" part makes the procedure mortally dangerous for the present life, and Alamada, not being a mad scientist, really does not want to let anyone get hurt in any way.

He can't resist when his fiancee Flor (Rosa Arenas) offers herself as a willing test subject, though, and soon listens to a rather interesting story. Flor once was a temple virgin - and therefore born to be sacrificed - named Xochi. Alas, the forbidden love between her and the warrior Popoca (Angel Di Stefani) destroyed her chance for a real nice sacrificial death. Instead, the priesthood kills them both in a (long and boring) punishing sacrificial ceremony.

That'll teach 'em.

Listening in to Almada's experiment through a window is the delightfully dressed masked science villain the Bat, known and feared (or so a voice over explains) for grafting animal parts onto other animals (will that get important later on? Umm, no).

But the Bat isn't going to be a problem in the short run. Much more important for Almada is that he now knows that his theory is true, but he still can't prove it. Unless...he breaks into the secret temple in the ruins of Tenochtitlan whose position he now knows thanks to Flor's memories and grabs something called The Aztec Breastplate. How this is supposed to prove his theory, I don't know, but I'm no doctor of SCIENCE(!) myself.

For some reason, this breastplate is also the key to the lost treasure of the Aztec Empire, which explains the interest of the Bat in the whole thing - at least somewhat.

Of course, poking around in the hidden temple and absconding with an artifact as Alamada does brings the curse of the gods upon him, or rather the mummified remains of Popoca, shambling, shambling ever onward.

La Momia Azteca is one of the classics of the Mexican horror wave, and very typical of it in the way it takes elements of the Universal horror films of the 30s (in this case of the mummy films), mixes them with pulpy serial business like the Bat and transfers them into contemporary Mexico.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't say that the film does this all that well. Even for a film of its time, La Momia Azteca suffers from some terrible pacing problems. Two thirds of the film are already over when the mummy finally appears, and those two thirds aren't exactly filled with thrills. Instead, director Rafael Portillo treats us to many a scene of bad science, odious comic relief in the form of a "cowardly and superstitious" student (Crox Alvarado) and Almada's little brother's tendency to hide and follow the Doctor around.

And don't get me started on the Bat, a criminal scientific mastermind who never does much criminal or scientific and is dispatched in what must be one of the least entertaining ways in film history - he just gets arrested without much of a fuzz. I don't have the slightest clue why he's in the film at all.

It's not all bad, though. The actors are playing their cliché roles with a certain gusto, especially Rosa Arenas nails the all important hysterical tone needed for the reincarnated lover of a mummy perfectly. But, most importantly, every scene where the mummy itself appears is golden, from the perfect 50s monster movie score to the pleasantly desiccated monster design. It's just too bad that there's so little mummy in this mummy film.

Mostly, La Momia Azteca feels like a dry-run for the beauties of lucha cinema, already merrily mixing classic horror with the pulpy and the gothic, but still missing the all-important ingredient of the masked, crime-fightin, monster-catching wrestler.

Well, that or a script that makes better use of the elements it already contains.

 

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