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Ladrón de Cadáveres
The Body Snatcher
Mexico 1957
produced by Sergio Kogan for Internacional Cinematográfica
directed by Fernando Méndez
starring Columba Domínguez, Crox Alvarado, Wolf Ruvinskis, Carlos Riquelme, Arturo Martínez, Eduardo Alcaraz, Guillermo Hernández (= Lobo Negro), Yerye Beirute, Alberto Catalá, Lee Morgan, Ignacio Navarro, Alejandro Cruz (= Black Shadow)
written by Fernando Méndez, Alejandro Verbitzky, music by Federico Ruiz
review by Mike Haberfelner
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A series of murders has police captain Robles (Crox Alvorado) baffled:
Men of remarkable physique are found dead, with their brains removed, but
without clue to how they exactly were removed. However, his trail leads to
Don Felipe's (Arturo Martínez) gym, as all the deceased men were
wrestlers who trained there. He even has the gym under police
surveillance, but to no avail, one of the wrestlers, Lobo Negro (Guillermo
Hernández), is killed in the gym and smuggled out without the police
noticing. The culprit, a mad scientist (Carlos Riquelme), tends to hang
around the gym at all hours dressed like a vagrant trying to sell lottery
tickets, while his assistant (Yerye Beirute), dressed up as a laundry man,
smuggles the corpse out with the dirty laundry. The mad scientist wants to
create superstrong men by giving them animal brains to eventually take
over the world (it's not really explained how), but so far his experiments
have always failed. Captain Robles decides to place an undercover man at
the gym, and fortunately, his best friend, Guillermo (Wolf Ruvinskis) has
set out to be a wrestler - and has fallen in love with Don Felipe's
secretary Lucía (Columba Domínguez). Guillermo soon starts wrestling as
the masked El Vampiro, and he's winning, and winning big, so much so that
he catches the eye of our mad scientist, so before El Vampiro's big fight
for the championship, he as Don Panchito replaces the ring medic's
surgical alcohol with some poison, then sees to it that Guillermo is
scratched on his arm and needs to be treated. And really, when El Vampiro
wants to deliver his final blow in the title match, he just keels over
dead. Our mad scientist meanwhile has been waiting for him in the morgue,
pretending to be one of the corpses, and is quick to smuggle Guillermo
out. And this time, his experiment works fine, and Guillermo comes back to
life, stronger than ever (if basically a dumb brute). This gives the
professor an idea of how to demonstrate his genius to the world: He has
Guillermo replace the wrestler who fights as El Vampiro #2 (in the same
mask and outfit), and in the ring, Guillermo pretty much takes apart his
opponent, before hurling him into the audience. Of course this creates a
mass panic, and in a turn of poetic justice, the mad scientist is trampled
to death by the stampeding masses. In the meantime, Guillermo turns more
and more into a hairy monster, roaming the streets and putting fear into
the locals - before he kidnaps Lucía, climbs a highrise ... and
ultimately Captain Robles tricks him into plunging to his death ... The
very first lucha libre film to tackle science fiction and horror, Ladrón
de Cadáveres is really restrained in its approach in comparison to
later horror/wrestling movies, and it refrains from being too formulaic,
too (like it lets its wrestling hero ultimately become the monster).
That's not to say this is a piece of art or anything, it's still more of a
simplistic cross between crime flick, sci-fi horror and of course lucha
libre, with the finale borrowing from King
Kong quite heavily, but it's awesome fun to watch and sure has
this naive charme of yesteryear's pulp cinema.
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