A dark night, an empty cemetery, a raven perched on an open grave, a sinister cloaked figure, a deformed assistant carrying away the body…
The police are hard at work, seeking a murderer who can disguise himself as almost anyone, who targets the strongest and most powerful of men — and has performed delicate and unheard of surgeries on the brains of his victims.
Which is when we get to the luchador wrestlers. After all, this is a Mexican horror film.
We don’t spend much time with the mad scientist’s efforts to revive the dead and only a little bit more with the police. Instead, we spend a lot more time behind the scenes with the wrestlers.
Of course we have to throw in a bit of tragedy and kill off a sympathetic character. The experiment goes wrong in the usual way these things do (you’d think he’d know better than to use that ape brain! Hasn’t he ever seen a mad scientist film?) and the film ends with a surprisingly ambitious sequence borrowed from another sort of classic horror film altogether.
The rest of the film is never as atmospheric as that opening, despite some moody lighting…in the gym. We only get a few glimpses of a cool mad scientist lab with a strange double operating table, and most of the film is devoted to mystery and detection rather than horror.
Still, it’s not a bad example of the Mexican horror film and it should keep the fans happy (particularly the Lucha Libre fans). Yes, Mexican horrors like Monster, The Bloody Pit of Terror or The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales are better.
But then, they don’t have any masked wrestlers, do they?
rivets on the poster 