Change Your Image
lucha_diaries
Reviews
Las lobas del ring (1965)
Women without monsters
For their third outing, the Wrestling Women apparently decided they needed a break from grappling with mummies, brain-thieving mad scientists and armor-plated beast men and instead chose to take on a comparably more quotidian adversary. This would be Lorena Vazquez's last film in the series before she moved on to bigger and brighter things (well, she would next co-star in a couple of Santo's Vergara pictures, so maybe I should just say _other_ things) and perhaps doing a Luchadoras film in which she abstained from punching any zombies in the face was the closest she could come to bowing out gracefully. In any case, the plot of Las Lobas del Ring revolves around a wrestling tournament that pits Loreta Venus (Vazquez), Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell) and their fellow luchadoras against a team of unscrupulous woman wrestlers who will stop at nothing - nothing, I tell you! - to win. This focus on wrestlers wrestling makes Las Lobas del Ring a lucha film that's very heavy on the lucha - and its an interesting choice, given that the Luchadoras series is one of the few lucha film series built around stars who are not actual professional wrestlers. As a result, we get a film where Vazquez and Campbell's chunky, unconvincing doubles get a real workout. For unprepared viewers who come to the film expecting the usual smack-down between big-haired women in leotards and cheesy monsters - finding instead just more big-haired women in leotards in place of those cheesy monsters - Las Lobas del Ring will undoubtedly come as something of a wet slap in the face. It's really impossible to over-stress just how much this isn't a monster movie. Still, it's not like everything in the Luchadoras universe has changed; Elizabeth Campbell, for instance, is still inexplicably saddled with a grating comic relief boyfriend (He has to stand on a box to kiss her! Oh my sides!) - though it's not Chucho Salinas this time, so perhaps we should at least be thankful for that. Much comedy is also mined from the rich vein of mere women - both in and out of the ring - repeatedly beating the hell out of men. One member of Venus and Rubi's team in particular is shown happy-slapping her tubby boyfriend into a cowering stupor in scene after scene until he finally breaks a flower pot over her head... The End. (Seriously, that's how the movie ends, though I don't think that quite counts as a spoiler.) Come to think of it, even if you are prepared for it (as I was), Las Lobas del Ring is kind of tough going. In its favor is the fact that it features Velazquez and Campbell, who are always engaging company. (It might also be of interest to Campbell fans for a brief moment where the gringa actress slips into English for a couple of lines.) There is also a somewhat rousing climax in which a group of the Luchadoras' wrestler friends storm the hideout where the villains are holding not just Rubi but also Loreta's mom (Nothing, I tell you!) hostage. Still, its a good thing that the series got back on track with the next film - the cheesy monster-fest and wannabe Santo movie Las Mujeres Panteras - because seeing the Wrestling Women amidst all this ordinariness is mildly traumatizing.
El asesino invisible (1965)
A Santo clone wrestles with the invisible
Of all the lucha films in which classic movie monsters have made an appearance, El Asesino Invisible is the only one that I can think of that features the Invisible Man as its villain. There are a number of reasons why pitting a luchadore against an invisible foe is a bad idea, one of the most obvious being that Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, for all their athletic ability, were not, as far as I know, accomplished mimes, and would have had difficulty selling the idea that they were grappling with a transparent corporeal being - much less that they were walking against the wind or trapped in a small invisible box. Fortunately for us, the lead here is taken by professional actor Jorge Rivero, essaying the one-off role of El Enmascarado de Oro, aka The Golden Mask. (Unable to beat Santo at his own game, Rivero would go on to join him a couple years later as his co-star in Operacion 67 and El Tesoro de Moctezuma.) El Asesino Invisible is the type of film that I imagine people are talking about when they refer to a movie as "an entertainment"; There's a sprinkling of plot, a bunch of musical numbers, a little romance, eye candy of both the male and female varieties, and, of course, a couple of wrestling matches shown in their entirety. The adorable Ana Bertha Lepe is the female lead here, and how much you like El Asesino Invisible will depend on how much you like Lepe (I do; she's adorable, remember), because she appears in several full-length song and dance numbers that are distributed liberally throughout the length of the film. Interestingly, Lepe is playing herself here - or at least a version of famous star of stage and screen Ana Bertha Lepe who exists in a world where she might be stalked by a mad scientist with the power of invisibility - which I can't help thinking was a move to compensate for the lack of verisimilitude that resulted from having an actor, rather than the "real" wrestler you'd typically see, in the masked hero role. (It would appear that having this kind of bridge between fantasy and reality was important to the audience for these type of movies at the time - or at least the producers certainly thought it was.) In a further concession to genre tradition, Rivero forfeits the romantic lead to Miguel Arenas' police detective character, and doesn't even appear unmasked until a very brief moment in the final scene - an especially odd choice given Rovero's classic movie star looks. On the villainous front, the presence of the ever waxen Carlos Agosti in the cast once again makes a mockery of a film's attempts to create any mystery around the identity of its killer, invisible though he may be in this case.
On that point, I've got to say that the movie's invisibility effects, while not groundbreaking, are always competent and, in a couple of instances, quite striking - in particular the creepy "empty mask" effect when the killer tries to masquerade as El Enmascarado de Oro, and a bizarre, supernaturally-tinged moment when the hero sees the killer made visible as the reflection in a cat's eyes. I like to point out such technical accomplishments, because I've been troubled by some online reviews I've read of later luchadore films which seem to mistakenly interpret those films' shoddiness as being typical of the product of a backward, "Third World" film industry. The fact is that, at the time El Asesino Invisible was made, the Mexican film industry was the major provider of film entertainment for all of Latin America, was making its films for a worldwide audience, and had an established studio system that was a magnet for first rate technical and artistic talent from throughout the Spanish speaking world and beyond. The real reason that those later lucha movies are shoddy is that, by the time they were made, the genre had fallen out of favor with audiences to the point where they were no longer an acceptable risk for the larger studios, and so became the provenance of smaller studios and independent producers looking to make a quick profit on as small an investment as possible. Still, I can understand how, if the only Mexican film someone has seen is, for instance, the first Superzan movie, they might not have the most charitable view of the country's film industry as a whole - because that movie looks like it was made by some kind of cargo cult after some camera equipment washed up on the beach. (Hey, I'm not saying you shouldn't make fun of those movies; I'm just saying to be careful about the generalizations you make from them.) Still, even a glossy piece of fluff like El Asesino Invisible, which is entertaining but far from the best the industry had to offer, should serve to handily refute such notions.