Like masterpieces, truly bad films are hard to make and rare to see. The world is full of mediocre movies, but a film that is truly awful can be paradoxically memorable and, even, perhaps raise questions about the nature of the medium itself. In a fundamental way, film is a spectacle that people are willing to pay to behold. Spectacle can mean many things -- after all, people pay good money to attend professional wrestling matches; indeed, the current President of the United States was once closely affiliated with the World Wrestling Federation and Miss Universe. At its essence, a movie is a light show with words and music, son et lumiere and a transcendentally terrible move like Mil Mascaras v. The Aztec Mummy (2010 Andrew Quint aka Jeff Burr & Chip Gubera) reveals some uncomfortable truths about films and film-making. As Pauline Kael pointed out, the greatest films are often the silliest -- that is, the closest to plummeting into cult badness. Most films are trash and sometimes a consumer and critic needs to be reminded of this fact from time to time.
A bad movie on the heroic scale has several characteristics: first the filmmaker's paltry means are so pathetically incommensurate with his ambition (with very few exceptions the makers of really bad movies are all men, usually hustlers of some kind -- this gender distinction deserves further thought as well.). Thus, such films are often wildly ambitious, but lack the budget, technical means, and skill to achieve the desired ends. Movies of this kind often arise in cultic subcultures -- for instance, Mil Mascaras is Mexican masked wrestler film (a so-called Luchadora), a genre without honor, cross-bred with a horror film, another Mexican genre, the Aztec mummy movie. In films of these kinds -- and Exhibit A is oeuvre of Ed Wood -- the actors are given flamboyantly florid and overwritten lines to speak: this kind of dialogue would tax the skills of Lawrence Olivier, but must be delivered by an actor who seems scarcely capable of speaking English and may be half illiterate. Commensurate with the film's overweening ambition is its grandiose plot -- generally something about saving the world that would require fifty million dollars in special effects. But the budget is tragically low so that the filmmaker is required to desperately improvise to merely hint at the majestic images that he would supply if only he had more than the credit limit on his mother's MasterCard for financing. As I have noted above, the truly scary thing about these films is that they are monstrously exploitative, garishly designed to push the buttons in the "deplorable" who rages within all of us -- in this respect, these films are only a hair's breadth from pictures like Avengers: Endgame in which thirty seconds of film probably cost twenty times what was spent to make Mil Mascaras v. The Aztec Mummy -- and, yet, Mils Mascaras is about ten times as interesting and fun as the 200 million dollar spectacle that is the most recent Avengers movie.
In an Aztec tomb hidden beneath a pyramid that is incongruously within walking distance of central Mexico City, a strange ritual is taking place. In a torchlit crypt, a beautiful half-naked woman does a sensuous snake dance around a sarcophagus containing a hideous Aztec mummy. A fat priest intones some words and, then, another fat, bare-chested campesino performs an auto-sacrifice, using a flint blade to wrench his still beating heart from his chest, smearing blood all over the jaws of the Aztec Mummy. The Mummy, needless to say, comes to life and vows, for some reason, to take over the world. Meanwhile in a posh restaurant, the great masked wrestler Mil Mascaras ("Thousand Masks") is dining with his blonde girlfriend. She says that she is leaving him. Mil asks her mournfully if it is because his face "must always be covered with a mask." She denies this motive but it's pretty clear that she is a bigot of the worst kind -- prejudiced against Mexican masked wrestlers. Poor Mil goes out by a stream where he broods on his sad fate: "Why must I wear this mask?" he cries. The Aztec Mummy and his cadaver henchmen (or hypnotized minions) are robbing blood banks in the city. The Mummy uses a scepter with a hypnagogic gem to mesmerize a sulky young man who helps with the robberies. Mil is very good friends with a handsome scientist, the Professor. The scientist has built a robot warrior in his lab and has a beautiful young daughter who "has feelings for" Mil. Mil thwarts a blood bank robbery resulting in the sulky young zombie being dragged back to the Aztec tomb where he is tortured to death -- "the Aztecs," the scientist tells us, "have mastered all of the arts of torture." Mil Mascaras, who is also a pilot, flies to Washington D.C. where he meets with the President and tells him that the nation is under attack by zombies and the Aztec Mummy. (It's a little unclear why he flies to Washington when the Mummy and his army of undead are in Mexico City, but this detail is never exactly explained.)The joint chiefs of staff are skeptical about the presentation made by the wrestler in his elaborate be-gemmed mask and tight leotards, but they give him 48 hours to destroy the Aztec Mummy. Why? And what will happen after the 48 hours? These are imponderables. Mil Mascaras has other tasks on his mind -- for instance, he has to fight several championship bouts, including a tag-team match. In his last bout, the Mummy sends a zombie to inhabit the body of Mil's opponent and he almost loses the match. Then, at a restaurant where Mil is celebrating his difficult victory, a waiter serves him psilocybin mushrooms as an appetizer. Mil experiences a colorful psychedelic trip in the restaurant's toilet. But he recovers and with the scientist and the Chief of Police of Mexico City, a comical African-American, Mil attacks the Aztec Mummy's stronghold. The Mummy has kidnapped the Professor's daughter and there is a desperate battle between the Mummy with his undead army and Mils. Just when things look the darkest, the Professor's Robot intervenes going mano et mano with the Mummy. This provides only temporary respite. The tide is finally turned when about eight other masked Mexican wrestles including Santo, the Blue Demon, "Hurricane" Ramirez and el Hijo de Santo (the son of Santo) join the attack.
What makes this movie astonishing is that it was filmed entirely in Jefferson City, Missouri. In some sequences, Mil and the grinning, half-witted Chief of Police stride through a spectacular palace -- it's apparently the Missouri State Capitol building, something that is obvious from the maps of Missouri hanging on the walls. (Someone has draped a Mexican flag over a marble balustrade to show that this film is set in Mexico City.) The two showpiece wrestling matches take place in small theaters with maybe forty spectators. The Ozarks stand in for the Yucatan, although, of course, the Aztecs didn't live in the Yucatan which is, also, nowhere near Mexico City -- the Aztec Mummy's tomb is one of the pyramids at Tikal. The film ignores major plot points but luxuriates in morose reveries about Mil's ancestors "being forced to wear the mask thousands of years ago." Indeed, there are detailed scientific explanations provided for how Mil manages to change masks about every three minutes in the movie -- the Professor determines that the masks simply alter "genetically" clinging to Mil's face. The film oozes machismo -- but it has weird interludes: in one the Destructor, one of Mils opponents is lured into sexual encounter with a demon inhabiting the body of a beautiful woman: when the wrestler realizes that he's just had sex with a male demon, he contorts his face as if he eating something very foul, indeed, these expressions concealed partially by his knobby insectoid mask. Both the Aztec Mummy and Mil speak in bombastic, but extremely beautiful, mellifluous baritones. Mils is unfailingly polite, generous and kind. Somehow, he seems very courtly and gentlemanly even when he is bashing together the heads of his adversaries, including two lethal seductresses -- they are evil twins. The movie is so down-and-out that it advertises as special guest stars Harley Race (who does the blow-by-blow on one of Mil matches) and P. J. Soles. At one point, the Professor tells Mil: "You have the mind of a scientist, the soul of an artist, the body of a great athlete, but I can't figure out what goes on behind that mask of yours." Threatening the villainous mummy who has kidnapped the Professor's daughter to make her his bride, Mil says: "My fist is the only bride fate has in store for you. And the consummation shall be painful!" The movie is garishly shot. The backgrounds of every scene are tarted up with blue and red lights. The Professor's daughter wears high gloss lipstick that glints lasciviously in the light. The film's credits include not one but three "Nahuatl Advisors" and features "artifacts from the UMC Museum of Anthropology" -- presumably referring to the University of Missouri at Jeff City. Mil Mascaras was 66 years old when the movie was made -- he still sometimes wrestles: he is now 77. The film was screened at Burning Man and has won just about every horror film award that exists.
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