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Saturday, March 7, 2020

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.

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