This movie and I have a disagreeable history. I'll explain exactly why later, but it includes elements of Keith's previous complaint about the movie Matango and the vicissitudes of the pre-DVD weird cinema (black) market. And it still pisses me off to think about, despite that now, thanks to the fact that for some reason the University of Florida library has a great collection of Spanish-language horror and B films, I have finally seen the entire movie that I'm about to review.

Anyway, following in the footsteps of some more ambitious horror ventures in Mexico, as well as some more successful B ventures in the 'States, Guillermo Calderon wrote and produced a series of three movies in quick succession which attempted to Mexicanize a popular Hollywood monster: the mummy. Egyptian mummies had become the province of Hollywood and Western cinema, so Calderon apparently looked to his national backyard in coming up with the Aztec mummy for whom the films are named: The Aztec Mummy (1957), Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957), and Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (1958).

For the record, the Aztecs didn't really have mummies. The only Mexican mummies I know of are those of Guanajuato, and as far as I know, that city and its mummies date from the colonial period at the earliest. The Inca had mummies, but Calderon probably wasn't from the Andes, and judging from the caliber of these films, he didn't have the cash to get there to do any filming either.

You might also notice that the dates of the films are pretty close together. It seems that Calderon filmed these more or less one right after another, though even if each of them were feature-length and consisted of nothing but original footage, he'd still have nothing on Cuneyt Arkin, who could sometimes star in two Kara Murat films in one year on top of starring in like six others.

But then, no man, mortal or otherwise, has much of anything on Cuneyt Arkin.

I don't think I've ever seen the first Aztec mummy film, and I only vaguely remember the second. However, when I first saw Curse of the Aztec Mummy and Robot vs..., it was back when bootleg vhs was more or less the only way I knew of to see anything even remotely like these films, and Video Screams packed both Curse and Robot onto one vhs for me for the price of a single movie. It was good to save vhs space and money (especially money). But it was bad because it turned out that Calderon was one cheap sumbitch.

Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy is but 65 minutes long. That's short enough as it is; what that number fails to tell you is that at least 45 minutes out of those are of footage from the previous two films, rationalized under the aegis of the "narrated flashback to bring other, and largely superfluous, characters up to speed on the backstory" device. It's a device rarely used, and I think that for the most part, that's because it sucks. It sucks even more if you happen to have watched one of those two films immediately previous to watching Robot, because now it's like you're watching it all over again, except this time it's more boring.

The plot basically revolves around the struggles of the good Dr. Almada and his wife Flor, as well as his assistant/friend Pinacate, whose secret identity is as the crimefighting Angel, which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't come into play as having any value to the plot. They are up against the evil Dr. Krupp, who's some kind of underworld kingpin and mad scientist trying to take over... I dunno, probably the world. Right now he's after the "Aztec treasure," whatever the hell that is, and to get it he needs a special Aztec breastplate and bracelet combination which have the map somehow encrypted onto them in hieroglyphs.

I might also mention that although the Aztecs had a form of writing of sorts, it was nowhere near as sophisticated as the hieroglyphs Calderon seems to have had in mind, but maybe that's beside the point.

The complication for Krupp? Through hypnosis, it is discovered that Flor Almada was the Aztec maiden Xochitl in a past life whose sworn duty it was to remain a virgin until time came for her to be sacrificed. (The Aztecs usually didn't sacrifice their own people, and they usually didn't seem to care about the virginity of their sacrificial victims, but then, by the end of the 15th century they were doing a hell of a lot of different sacrifices, so I dunno, maybe that does fall in line with something they were doing in some small temple at one time.) Xochitl fell in love with the warrior Popoca and attempted to escape the city, and so the priests sacrificed her anyway and buried Popoca alive so that he would become the undead guardian of the breastplate for all time.

For what it's worth, Xochitl is pronounced, as far as I know, "Zo-chee." (The "-tl" could make that more complicated, but unless you're a native speaker of archaic Nahuatl, maybe it's best to let it go silent after all.) Xochitl means "flower" in the Aztec language Nahuatl, which is a mildly amusing parallel to the name "Flor," which is "flower" in Spanish. Popoca, on the other hand, is the verb "to smoke"... either Calderón was thinking of the god of magic and darkness and I forget what else Tezcatlipoca (smoking mirror), or maybe the volcano Popocatepetl (smoking mountain), or... I dunno what.

The Flor/Xochitl parallel is probably better planned than anything else in this movie. After forty minutes of narration, with occasional invigorating insertions of new footage featuring some older men sitting around in a living room and reflecting on the flashbacks, we finally get to the only part that we acquired the film to see: the robot who will eventually grapple with the eponymous mummy.

It seems that Krupp assembled a bunch of metal and wiring together with a human brain (probably not the first time this was done in film, though it does predate Astro-Zombies) to create "the human robot" which, once mass-produced, will somehow be implemented in some kind of world domination scheme. Krupp heralds this robot as pure genius and "beautiful," and frankly, I don't think I can disagree. Slightly less ridiculous than the Turkish version of E.T. (for those who've seen Badi), and slightly less streamlined than your average cardboard box, this robot comes equipped with blinking lights and a human head behind glass for your viewing pleasure. And frankly, if the human robot doesn't satisfy you, then I can conceive of nothing that would.

The robot lies supine on a table until Krupp slowly moves it to a more vertical position... slowly, slowly... The robot gradually becomes aware of its verticality and begins to stand upon its own two feet... slowly... Suddenly, the Aztec mummy shambles out onto the floor and lurches with reckless abandon toward the robot!... The robot languidly raises its claw hands, the mummy stretches out its own arms in that "I'm dead and going to get you!" pose... any paint that you may have applied to anything has probably dried by now, but the excitement is nevertheless building because this is why I watch movies to begin with, just to see moments like this--

...and that was when the vhs cut off because apparently the film was five minutes too long to fit both Aztec mummy films on there. Forty minutes of watching the other movie again, then the agonizing anticipation of seeing the combatants finally enter the ring and race to meet each other like two warring slime molds... and then nothing but darkness.

Five or six years later with little bitterness lost, I got to see the rest of the film... which basically ends exactly the way the title suggests, and then more or less lays to rest the whole Aztec Mummy theme. Of course, Calderon resurrected that theme again in 1964 for the Aztec Mummy's encore in Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, but that's another story, and one which I haven't really explored.

Strangely, co-director Manuel San Fernando went on to direct two Santo films, followed immediately by three Santa films, which is too odd a bit of random trivia for me not to pass on.

Word has it that the butchered U.S. import print of the first film in the series is the only surviving copy, and the original has been lost. I hope that's just an internet rumor, despite that I'm not a tremendous fan of this series.

Or am I? In final assessment, I guess there are some positive things which I can conclude with about this film.

First of all, Calderon had a stroke of brilliance which he then adulterated and completely lost when he conceded to marketing demands--take out the flashback footage, and some of the other boring stuff where anyone who isn't robotic or undead is walking around, and you've got one hell of a film. Some films only need to be about ten minutes long--hell, two minutes, really--and Calderon said, "I'm going to shoot that film, damnit!" But then, no doubt, friends and associates talked him out of it, convincing him that he needed to pad the film out so that audiences would feel like it was a feature-length movie. Or at least, that's how I like to envision it, with Guillermo Calderon at the vanguard of B movie innovation--genius, even--before lesser minds pulled him back into inferior conventions.

Second, there's another parallelism between the Aztec mummy--an automaton created by Aztec priests, using human sacrifice, to guard a sacred relic--and the Human Robot--an automaton created by Dr. Krupp, using human sacrifice, to uncover that relic. Is this some statement on the part of Calderon, using Mary Shelley as a guide in a Mesoamerican context to not only decry soulless scientific progress but compare its brutalities to those of past civilizations? Is modern technical "magic" no less dark than the religious/spiritual magic of bygone eras?

Probably not, but I'm sure anyone who cares to can probably go to town on that and get it published in some kind of film journal. Have at it, folks, if for some reason you care to. Save for occasional references here and there, I think I'm done with these films... except for that magic minute-long sequence that I waited for years to see.

Labels: Country: Mexico, Horror: Mummies, Science Fiction