FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved
Video Vulture
by John TebbuttI continue to hear about movies that sound amazing but are difficult to find. Here’s the latest addendum to my growing wish list of obscure nonsense. If anybody knows where to find these gems, please let me know!
· The Santo movies: There was a time when the only places in Mexico that had air conditioning were movie theatres. Because of this, the bijous were always packed, regardless of what was playing. There was a huge demand for product – foreign films, local films, anything. It was at this point that Mexico created a unique film genre: wrestling superheroes.
Pro Wrestling was already a popular "sport" in Mexico. It closely resembled wrestling as we know it, with two important distinctions: a) the competitors wore masks to hide their identities (after a match the loser got unmasked and had his head shaved); and b) they would maintain their secret identities all the time. You’d see masked wrestlers walking around in the street, buying groceries, etc.
In the movies, wrestlers such as Neutron, Mil Mascaras, and the Blue Demon would play superhero versions of themselves. They’d start out by defending their titles in the ring, and then get a signal from the crime computer that they were needed to save the city from vampires or something.
Word has it that the best of these movies star the undefeated silver-masked grappler, El Santo. You’d think that the films of an internationally popular star like Santo would be easier to find. Oh well.
· Pictures From High School (1990 - 92): People who turn up their noses at anime porn are missing out. At its best this stuff is creative, outrageous and extremely funny. U-Jin’s acclaimed Pictures From High School consists of an ingenious series of short (five to 10 minutes) humorously erotic skits, packaged together on three 40-minute videotapes. It hasn’t been released in Canada yet, but it sounds amazing.
To give you an idea of what to expect, here’s a synopsis of one story, "Sailor-Suited Akko-Chan vs. the Giant Dirty Old Man."
A commuting pervert catches sight of a schoolgirl’s panties, and immediately transforms into a 200-foot-tall monster of lust. Rampaging through Tokyo like a horny Godzilla, he drips acidic semen on the streets and causes mass destruction while merrily humping an office building. Meanwhile, mild-mannered schoolgirl Akko-Chan comes to the rescue, assuming her own 200-foot superheroine proportions (inadvertently allowing every pervert in the city to look up her skirt). An obscene battle royale ensues.
Sounds good, eh?
· For Your Height Only (1982): How can you not be curious about a spy movie starring a midget James Bond? Two-foot-nine-inch Weng Weng plays agent 003-1/2 in this tasteless Filipino satire of Ian Fleming’s popular franchise. He seduces women, parachutes out of a highrise using an umbrella, and beats up six full-size henchmen at once, running through their legs and biting them on the butt.
· Three Mighty Men (date unknown): More than anything else, I want more Turkish movies! I’m not talking about art-house stuff like YOL, I mean the outrageous, cheaply made, enthusiastically bonkers oddities from the ’60s and ’70s! Lion Man was like a shot of heroin – now I gotta have more. The weirder, the better. Anything featuring Turkish superstar Cuneyt Arkin would be good. (For example, The Man Who Saves The World, a $1.98 sci-fi epic featuring K-Mart monster costumes and footage stolen from Star Wars.) So would the Turkish version of Star Trek, Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda.
I really want to find Three Mighty Men, a wild sounding adventure in which Mexican wrestler El Santo teams up with Captain America to do battle with the villain of the piece – Spider Man! Only a country with no enforceable copyright laws could come up with such a bizarre assortment of foreign characters.
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