Sex Monsters

I don't know if it is still the case, but the Mexicans loved their wrestling in the '60s: there are countless 'luchador' movies out there, the grappling often combined with horror. Personally, I find the lucha libre movie genre rather boring, and no amount of cheesy monsters or ridiculous robots is going to change my mind.

This one sees Dr. Orlak (Carlos Agostí) deciding that building obedient mechanical robots is too costly and time consuming, so he sends his one and only metal slave out to abduct prominent scientists to help him create an army of radio-controlled people. One of the kidnapped boffins is the uncle of luchadora Gaby (Regina Torné), who teams up with fellow wrestler Gemma (Malú Reyes) and two secret agents, Arturo (Joaquín Cordero) and Chava (Héctor Lechuga), to try and find out what has happened to the missing men.

The appeal of wrestling is fairly subjective, but what I think we can all agree on is just how crap the robot in this film is: a man in a silly metallic mask with a crap perspex chest full of lights and widgets, and a slot into which details of its victims are fed. It's so cheap!!! As if to compensate for the rubbish robot, director René Cardona also includes a monster (one of Orlak's earlier unsuccessful experiments), which goes on the rampage in the final act. It is also rubbish. In fact, the whole film is rubbish. Why do I subject myself to this kind of garbage?

I saw an undubbed/non-subtitled version of this René Cardona wrestling flick, so naturally my judgment is kind of clouded. It's very similiar to the director's former Night Of The Bloody Apes, although there is very little gore and nudity. The sets, story, style have the same feel and the rapist man/monkey monster has a small part. A mad doctor is using a super-strong robot to kidnap various people (probably politcians or rich industrialists, as usual). Somehow a female wrestler and her cop boyfriend finds out about the doctors diabolic plans and runs to the rescue. The robot itself is just a big Mexican with silver color sprayed on his face. His whole act concists of walking through cardboard walls and sink people with one fatal blow. I lost track of how many cardboard doors and walls he must have walked through during the film's brief 90 minutes, but it must have exceeded 20+. Although I loved the robot and the wrestling, amongst other things, the movie has far too much dialouge for its own good, making it pretty dull for non-Spanish talking people like me. Thus, I cannot really recommend this film to others than Hispanic viewers or fans of Mexican wrestling.