Ever since El Santo took to the silver screen in the 60s and wrassled mummies, vampires, zombies and other beasties that don’t take very well to being placed in a vertical suplex, lucha libre (that’s Mexican styled masked wrestling, gringo) has been at the center of many Mexican B movies (often of the horror genre, but not exclusively so) finding a masked wrestler (often the legendary El Santo) climbing out of the ring after pounding the refried beans out of someone only to hit the streets, still masked, to fight crime and supernatural disturbances. Other B Mexican productions would just slip some lucha libre in there just because they could, such as Rene Cardona’s “Night of the Bloody Apes.” Throughout the years, masked Mexican wrestling would still pop up in movies every once in a while, even spreading to other countries (check out 2000’s Korean wrestling comedy “The Foul King”), but never has it been as prevailant as it was in the day of the hippie. Now, with Jesse Baget’s entry into the stalk and destroy horror genre, lucha libre raises it’s masked visage once again, this time caked with the blood of the innocent. Hooray!
A low-budget film crew, looking like they’re getting ready to shoot the next Skinemax epic, stumble upon an old Mexican ghost town on their way to Cabo. They wisely decide to stop and use this deserted spot as a film location, neverminding that vans full of sleazy, pretty young people never fare very well out in the middle of nowhere. And, of course, their presence disturbs the local boogeyman, a blood thirsty masked wrestler, El Mascarado, who’s more apt to snap into human flesh than a Slim Jim. So begins the inevitable cat and mouse game that finds the cast and crew of this indie “movie” crew at the deadly end of some rather potent wrestling moves straight out of hades.
Featuring hulking Mexican wrestling legend Rey Misterio Sr. as the title creep, “El Mascarado Massacre” gives you what you came for – blood, guts and boobies – and it wastes no time in giving up the goods. It’s a very true to form slasher type flick with a lot of running and screaming always met with a grisly demise. Movies like these depend laregely on two things – inventive/grusesome deaths and an interesting creep. “El Mascarado Massacre” has both. Rey Misterio Sr. is completely menacing as the Mexican wrestler gone bananas and it’s just good ol’ plain fun watching him dispatching this group of hammerheads. Wrestling has never been so full contact.
