DOCTOR OF DOOM (1963), WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY (1964)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical*

Probably for budgetary reasons, Mexican filmmakers showed an indebtedness to the tropes of American chapterplays long after American movies had ceased using them (though some tropes, particularly cliffhangers, remained popular in TV serials). 

I've usually heard it said that though films starring heroic male wrestlers had been made since the 1950s, DOCTOR OF DOOM is the first to exclusively star "luchadoras," grapplers of the feminine persuasion. Like most of their male predecessors, both of the heroines, Gloria Venus (Lorena Velasquez) and Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell) drop whatever they're doing as soon as a dastardly criminal manifests, volunteering to help the police trap the maniac. In this case, because the villain leaves behind corpses of women whose brains have been removed, the newspapers dub the fiend "the Mad Doctor." To be sure, Gloria has a personal motive to find the evildoer, since one of the victims is her sister. Golden Rubi, though, joins in the team effort even though the two lady wrestlers haven't worked together very long.

The ladies also get a side-benefit in that each of them gets a cop-boyfriend out of the deal, though Gloria gets the traditionally handsome senior detective and Rubi winds up with his shrimpy comic relief subordinate (who's actually moderately funny, unlike most such characters). However, none of the good guys suspect that the Mad Doctor is actually the pacific-seeming Doctor Ruiz, who tells the girls that wrestling is too bloody for him. In reality Ruiz's experiments are oriented on creating superwomen. He's already created a super-strong brute, name of Gomar, by transplanting a gorilla's brain into a man's head, and now he wants to repeat the experiment with a female. But all the women he has Gomar abduct die on the operating table. At first Ruiz thinks he needs a more intellectual breed of female, causing him to prey upon Gloria's sister. When that operation doesn't work, the mad medic sets his sights on women of tougher fiber, like lady wrestlers.

Director Rene Cardona captures much of the exciting pace of a vintage Republic serial, with lively, attractive heroes opposed to a vicious madman-- and even though a practiced eye can see the two actresses being doubled sometimes, Cardona gives Velasquez and Campbell generous exposure in the fight-scenes, so that they never come off as less than exceptional in that department. As the result of one of the Mad Doctor's battles with Gloria, the luchadora tosses acid in his face-- so that the villain's new priority is to send his newest experiment, a powerful ape-woman, after Gloria in the wrestling-ring. I rate the film's mythicity as fair due to the skillful way Cardona and his team build up the credibility of the women warriors.

Cardona's sequel WRESTLING WOMEN VS THE AZTEC MUMMY follows the same serial-emulation as the previous film in the series, but it's a much choppier affair. The first time I encountered the title, I assumed that the luchadoras were going to cross over with the same cerement-wrapped creature who'd appeared in THE AZTEC MUMMY, one of three mummy-films directed by Rafael Portillo in 1957. However, this mummy has a different name and origin, though oddly, a minor character is called "Popoca," which is the proper name of the original monster.

Though there's no crossover as such between the world of the original Aztec revenant and that of the wrasslin' heroines, the plot of this MUMMY is very similar to the plots of Portillo's film-trilogy. Those flicks focused a group of good archaeologists (and their allies) competing with an insidious criminal, The Bat, who wanted access to the lost tomb of the Mummy. In the Cardona film, an Oriental criminal, The Black Dragon, is the one who wants the information in a certain codex that will lead him to the lost tomb of Tezomoc, who like Original Popoca guards his tomb from outsiders. 

Though this time I didn't find MUMMY as incoherent as I claimed in my review of THE PANTHER WOMEN, the sequel suffers from dividing the lady wrestlers' action between two separate menaces. The film spends roughly two-thirds of its time as the girls, their boyfriends and their allies strive against the Dragon, whose arsenal includes enslaving people with his hypnotism and using his judo-trained henchwomen to challenge Gloria and Rubi in the ring. Then the last third is devoted to the heroes entering the lost tomb, where they learn that this resuscitated mummy is also a nagual who has supernatural powers and can change into shapes like a bat or a spider. Despite the film's title, the lady wrestlers actually can't fight such a monster and all they can do is run for the hills. Oh, and the revived mummy slaughters the Black Dragon's gang, but I'm not sure if the Dragon himself gets killed or escapes.

Velazquez and Campbell made one more luchadora-film together, SHE WOLVES OF THE RING, which is said to hold no metaphenomenal content. Then Campbell essentially finished up the series with Ariadna Welter filling Gloria's boots in PANTHER WOMEN. I may as well note that Gloria is called "Loreta" once or twice in MUMMY as well, testifying that her professional first name is as made-up as her professional surname. To my knowledge, poor Golden Rubi never gets a real name to her, uh, name.