La maldición de la momia azteca (1957)

... aka: Curse of the Aztec Mummy, The

Directed by:
Rafael Portillo

At the end of THE AZTEC MUMMY (spoiler alert so avert your eyes if necessary), Popoca the hollow-eyed, putty-faced, 400-year-old resurrected Aztec warrior was put out of commission with a stick of dynamite while criminal mastermind El Murciélago / "The Bat" was revealed to be disgraced and disbarred scientist Dr. Krupp (Luis Aceves Castañeda) in disguise before being hauled off to prison by the cops. However, some of Krupp's goons managed to get away and his right hand man Tierno (Arturo Martínez) and another gangster named Lobo (Guillermo Hernández) are busy scheming. They get all of their lowlife associates back together again and plot to somehow spring Krupp from prison. At the police station, cops get their first taste of one such attempt as an anonymous letter with a bat insignia on it arrives. After giving police a detailed description of Krupp's still-on-the-loose underlings, Dr. Eduardo Almada (Ramón Gay) returns home and reassures everyone, "We are finally going to have some peace!" Yeah right.

Eduardo's fiancée Flor (Rosita Arenas) reminds him about the possibly-still-active curse of the gods. As it is foretold, first her father will die (which already happened in the first film) and then his children (which means her). Eduardo insists that since they returned the breastplate and bracelet to the mummy's tomb, they have effectively stopped the curse. That should mean no mo late night mummy visits for them. Still, that doesn't explain why they aren't the least bit concerned about Krupp's henchmen being on the loose, knowing where their home is (they tried to break in there in the first film) and the high likelihood of there being a vendetta against the family.

While armed guards try to transport Dr. Krupp out of the city, they're ambushed by his goons on a back road. A gunfight ensues. All of the coppers are killed but there's an unexpected guest who arrives; a mysterious masked super hero / crime fighter by the name of El Ángel. He's so virtuous he dresses in white, wears a white mask and drives a white Rolls Royce convertible. Still, being good and dressing in tights and a cape doesn't mean you can't get your ass handed to you, which is precisely what happens to him. However, unlike the cops they indiscriminately popped, Krupp lets Angel live because he wants to kill him at another time "in my own way." Huh? Soon after, Angel visits Eduardo, Flor and company to warn them of the escape and gives them a "radio watch" they can use to contact him in case of an emergency.

Meanwhile, at Krupp's lair, he narrates a five-minute-long recap of some of the first film's events. Seeing how he knows all about the hypnosis session, Flor's past life as an Aztec maiden and how she knows the whereabouts of the ancient tomb containing many valuables, they decide to kidnap her and try to replicate the hypnosis session. They snatch both Flor and little Anita (Almada's daughter from his previous marriage) and beat the snot out of Almada and his assistant Pinacate (Crox Alvarado). The girls are taken back to the lair. Anita is locked up and Flor is given a drug to make her easier to hypnotize. Dr. Almada is lured there himself, gets beaten up again and is tied to a chair where we're forced to listen to Krupp recount his plans again. Warning: You will likely be seeing the word "again" a lot from here on out.

Thankfully, Almada's kid brother Pepe (Jaime González Quiñones) knows where the radio watch is and uses it to contact Angel and give him the address of Krupp's headquarters. Angel shows up and gets into another fight with the henchmen, which ends in him getting his ass kicked yet again, is tied up next to Dr. Almada (who also got his ass beat again) and is slapped around. Our "hero" is then dragged off to "the mortuary room" and locked inside. The floors start to slowly open up and underneath is a snake pit. Angel manages to jump onto a hanging light fixture and hang there, which gives him enough time to contact young Pepe to come and save him! All of this puts Angel in contention for the title of worst super hero in film history, something that is only solidified later on when Almada and Angel escape only to be recaptured and tied up again. Notice a pattern here?

While the original built up a little bit of intrigue at the start and eventually went somewhere (though it sure took its sweet time getting there!), this one is like a skipping record that keeps repeating itself over and over and over again. The mummy itself, which just pops back up after the bad guys remove a big rock sitting on top of it, doesn't make an appearance until the last fifteen minutes, is only in two scenes and is off screen even more than the previous film. It's basically used as a convenient plot device to take out the bad guys at the finale because our heroes are so incompetent! What this does offer more of is silliness and camp value, mostly in the form of horribly-choreographed fight scenes. There are also a few funny flubs, especially a shot of a car driving down a road where a female bystander accidentally walks into the frame, looks over, sees the camera and then quickly ducks behind a pillar to hide!

This and the third film in the series - THE ROBOT VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY - were imported to the U.S. and horribly English-dubbed by K. Gordon Murray. Both were distributed by AIP, who sold these to TV. Due to the English dubbed version, this was also much easier to find on home video for a number of years. Something Weird put it and Robot out on both VHS and DVD and there have been a number of other releases, culminating in a box set of all three now-restored films distributed by BCI/Eclipse.

★1/2

Devil Dynamite (1987)

... aka: Devil's Dynamite

Directed by:
"Joe Livingstone" (Godfrey Ho?)

Oy vey! Here's yet another incomprehensible mess from Filmark International, this time involving a silver super hero, drug lords, gamblers and hopping vampires. Large chunks of the movie were swiped from a 1979 crime drama called The Casino Giant (aka City of Vengeance or aka Duel in a Gambling Den) as well as a second film called The Stunning Gambling, made in 1982. Most of the rest of the footage was made by one "Joe Livingstone" who may be producer Tomas Tang or may be Hong Kong cut-and-paste master Godfrey Ho or may be someone else entirely. Reference books and most websites credit Ho with the direction, so I will be listing him as such too unless I hear definitive proof to the contrary. Not just content with borrowing from two other films, much of the same footage used here was also seen in another Ho / Tang hack-job called Ninja, the Violent Sorcerer, which credits director "Bruce Lambert" and is listed on IMDb as being released in 1982 but was probably slapped together sometime later (a Hong Kong film database claims 1987). Yes, this is all confusing as hell but that's par for the course with nearly all of the output from Tang, Ho, Filmark, etc. Maybe one day someone will figure this all out.

And while we're on the subject of confusing, all of this spliced together and re-dubbed footage boasts three completely different plots simultaneously running parallel to one another, never really gelling together and all duking it out for our attention. There's no winning this particular battle, though, None of this makes a lick of sense. There's lot of fighting and numerous WTF moments sprinkled throughout, but this doesn't really cut it as a good bad movie. It's mostly just confusing, senseless, frustrating and just plain boring to sit through.

Using a voodoo doll, American drug lord Ronald has managed to put a Taoist priest under his spell and forces the man-of- the-cloth to tend to four hopping, blue-faced vampires who become more and more powerful with each drop of human blood they consume. These karate- fighting bloodsuckers can appear or disappear at will and are only kept in check with a piece of spell paper attached to the forehead. Meanwhile, "gambling king" Steven Cox (Kuan-Hsiung Wang) has just been released after ten years in prison and has vengeance on his mind. Steven wants to get back at Madame Mary (Elsa Yeung) aka "the bitch who betrayed me," for not only getting him arrested but also helping to destroy his previous marriage and driving his wife and kids away. Mary is now engaged to a young, apparently not-very-observant policeman named Louie (Lau Seung-Him), has taken over his home and casino business and is now known as "the queen of the underworld."

Elsewhere, a man named Alex (Suen Kwok-Ming) is living a double life as a crime fighter named "Shadow Warrior." Decked out in a baggy silver outfit, silver boots and silver motorcycle helmet, Alex battles not only the vampires, but also the evil priest, the American mob boss and their black-clad ninja henchmen, all of whom are working for Mary. So who is Alex working for? Well, apparently a guy named Mr. Ivers (Chung Tien Shih), his yellow-robed Taoist "master" and Steven Cox... I think. There's lots of double-crossing and even double-crossers being double-crossed, characters flipping allegiances and a bunch of people running doing things that don't necessarily make any sense. It's impossible to keep track of all of the characters and what they're up to. I'm not even fully convinced the people responsible for dubbing this understood what was going on.

Also thrown into the mix are a bunch of annoyingly-dubbed kids playing vampire games, a hidden case of gold buried on the beach that numerous characters want to get their mitts on, an "anti-sorcery mirror," long scenes of the Taoist cutting his hand, bleeding into a bowl, playing around with fire and sparklers (which I guess is the "Devil Dynamite" of the title) and conducing vampire training sessions, tons of random fight scenes and some laughable dialogue ("Do unto yourself what others want to do to you... CUT YOUR BALLS OFF!!") There's also one scene that is repeated in its entirety two times for no apparent reason. At the very end there's a fun fight sequence between some of the more colorful characters but it's too little too late by that point. The entire cast listing in the opening credits is fake, though martial arts fans may recognize "Lady Kung Fu" Angela Mao Ying in about 30 seconds of the recycled footage.

To my knowledge, this was first issued on VHS here in America on the Star Classics label in 1990. IMDb claims it was released before then by TransWorld, who also released numerous other films from these same people, like DIAMOND NINJA FORCE (1988) and The Vampire Is Still Alive (1989), but I can find no evidence of that. In 2006, BCI / Eclipse released it on DVD as part of their "Eastern Horrors" collection. That set also includes the similar and equally awful, though slightly more fun, ROBO VAMPIRE (1988).

★