Dilation of time is an experience that everyone who has smoked weed understands. The way it works is that the cannabis-affected mind spawns ideas prolifically and at lightning speed. Since the speed of thought so dramatically exceeds the speed of events in the real world, the dope-smoker, periodically checking in to see what condition his condition is in, will find that nothing much has changed in the exterior world. Notwithstanding a staggering volume of thoughts, cogitation that would usually require several minutes or an hour, the dope-smoker reverting from reverie to the real space and time around him finds that no physical progress has been made -- he has advanced only a few dozen paces along the sidewalk or driven less than a block. Thus, there is a dislocation between interior cognitive time and time as measured in the progress of events. This effect can be produced by certain works of art -- the 1958 Mexican film, The Aztec Mummy v. the Humanoid Robot is so bad in such a peculiar way that it generates this sort of disconnect between reverie and the ostensibly real space in which reverie occurs. All sorts of things are crammed into the film, but individual sequences seem to linger as if in a haze of marijuana smoke -- the plot advances somehow lurching forward like the titular mummy, but individual sequences stall out, entrapped in a labyrinth of repetitive shadowy imagery.
Mummy v. Robot ranks close to Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, the greatest and most mind-boggling of all bad movies. (Plan 9 represents the absolute maximum ambition applied to an absolute minimum of film technique and an absolute minimum of budget.) In Mummy v. Robot, Almada, a mad scientist, is fooling around with "past life regression". He hypnotizes his voluptuous assistant Flora into dreaming a past life in which she was a Aztec princess in love with an Aztec warrior. The two are consecrated to the god Tetzlipoca. But they run off to consummate their love with the obligatory consequence that she is sacrificed and the warrior gets buried alive. (These plot elements are familiar from the various versions of The Mummy produced in Hollywood.) Flora hallucinates a map to a secret chamber in "the old pyramid at Teotihuacan" in which the warrior's priceless breastplate and helmet are hidden. When Almada goes to get the breastplate and helmet, traipsing around in dark tunnels with his whole entourage (including the comely Flor), the mummy warrior is aroused and he menaces everyone. I forgot to report that Almada had earlier presented a paper about past life regression to a scientific society where he was disdained by his arch-enemy Professor Krupp aka the master criminal "The Bat". (The Bat is like a masked luchadora.) The Bat lurks around and gets into a fight with the mummy -- the mummy flings one of the Bat's henchmen ("Tender") into acid disfiguring him; he then pitches the Bat into his own "chamber of death", a euphemism for a snake pit. The Bat is repeatedly savaged by his own vipers but escapes into a conveniently located tunnel opening right next to the rather torpid-looking serpents. The Bat returns and uses mind-control to lure Flor out of bed and into an "old cemetery" guarded a hapless peasant who gets popped on the skull and knocked unconscious. The Aztec mummy is taking his repose in a mausoleum built by "the last Aztec prince of Oaxaca". The Bat goes into the mausoleum, finds the sleeping mummy, and, in a very weird scene among other weird scene, does nothing but denounce the mummy -- he doesn't want to rouse the corpse by trying to wrest the breast-plate away from him so instead he just rants at the sleeping zombie. Instead, the Bat invents a humanoid robot -- made from a corpse, a human brain, and radium. The Bat sends the Humanoid Robot to steal the mummy's precious breastplate and a spectacular fight ensues. Almada appears, shoots the joy-stick robot controller out of the Bat's hand, and the mummy destroys the robot, takes his breastplate back and, after killing the Bat and Tender, returns to his crypt bed.
This is a lot of action crammed into a 65 minute movie but the film gives the odd impression of being slow-moving and languorous. Near the beginning of the movie, someone knocks on a door. The camera is located at the far end of a big set that seems to be about 45 feet deep -- the set represents a lavish sitting room in Almada's mansion. A maid enters and walks the entire length of the room to open the door. Then, when Almada enters the shot, the same fixed image also shows him walk all the way across the set to greet his visitors. (The people who edited the film seem to have no idea that this inconsequential shot could have been broken into one or two short images to convey the same information.) The story is told as a series of flashbacks and the eponymous "Humanoid Robot" doesn't appear until the last fifteen minutes. This mise-en-scene is bizarre and, even, mildly delirous -- in fact, I'm disappointed to observe that the movie's bizarre structure is due to the fact that it is the culminating picture in a trilogy and that the director has simply reprised the first two films by cutting them into the third picture as flashbacks -- at least, two-thirds of the movie, accordingly, is made from re-edited imagery already seen by viewers of the earlier pictures. This also explains the peculiar lacunae in the film -- in one scene, the beautiful Flor is sprawled in the clutches of the mummy; we have no idea how she got there although the narrator who is recounting the flashback says the mummy kidnaped her from her bed. Long sequences are devoted to images of people slowly stumbling forward in dark tunnels. Again, the editors of the film simply show the people crossing the image, then, cutting to a different angle to let them cross that image again and so on. When four or five people climb over a dark threshold, the camera simply waits for every one of them to complete the action. Characters often stumble and fall over obstacles and things are always dropping off the sides of the flimsy-looking sets -- these appear to be mishaps that have not been edited out of the picture. When the mummy first appears, we hear an ominous scraping. The principal characters are each afforded a four or five second shot but from behind -- do they or do they not hear the scraping? We, then, see a dark alcove and a shadow moving -- it's the source of the scraping. The Rueckenfigure shots of the characters nearby, hearing, but not reacting are repeated -- this is a sequence of five shots, showing each character poised, listening, but not turning to the camera. This pattern of shots is repeated a third time before the Mummy makes his appearance. (The principle seems to be that if you have a good idea repeat it over and over again until it ceases to be a good idea.) When the Humanoid Robot is activated, we are provided a bargain basement montage derived from the old Universal Frankenstein films: weird equipment sparking sparks, levers, bubbling flasks, etc. The Bat gives a spectacular harangue that is oddly impressive if you don't know Spanish. The effects would embarrass a High School drama club: the Humanoid robot is made of cardboard tubes and boxes and the disfigured Tender looks as if he had a bad encounter with a waffle-iron. The Mummy is pretty ugly, but obviously just a man wearing a loose-fitting fright mask. All pre-Columbian cultures are described as Aztec although the film involves a Oaxacan nobleman's tomb, the pyramid at Teotihuacan, and opens with a montage of Monte Alban -- none of which could be called Aztec. I suppose that one could interpret the final battle as a fight to the death between the forces of modern Capitalist industry ("the Humanoid Robot") and Mexico's ancient past ("the Mummy") but that would be gratuitous. It's best to ignore the details and just luxuriate in the film's torrent of unrelenting weirdness.
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