102-The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy

Film Year:  1958
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Rafael Portillo
Starring:  Ramon Gay, Rosa Arenas, Luis Acevez Castaneda
MST Season:  1
Featured Short:  "Radar Men from the Moon:  Chapter One - Moon Rocket"

The Short

Serials.  They sound like as delicious as a bowl of Trix, but not quite.  Nowadays they’re best known for inspiring George Lucas to make Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the dark reality is they aren’t very interesting or exciting.

The short follows Commando Cody, a super-scientist with a jet-pack (who also may or may not be the inspiration for the 1980’s retro-styled comic character The Rocketeer).  He investigates atomic energy on the moon and discovers a plot by the evil civilization of moon men to conquer the Earth.

I don’t think one can adequately review a serial, so I don’t think I should try.  Given what serials are, Radar Men from the Moon seems par for the course.  My soft spot for superheroics enjoys parts of it, while my enjoyment of storytelling makes me yearn for something more ambitious.  Since it’s only the first chapter, I’m not grunting in frustration yet, but I do know that day will come.

The Movie

Believe it or not Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy is actually the THIRD film of an ongoing Mexican horror series based around the Aztec Mummy, being a sequel to Attack of the Aztec Mummy and The Curse of the Aztec Mummy.  Or maybe this is blatantly obvious, because two thirds of this movie is a damn flashback to these movies.  This extensive setup from the previous films establishes the mad scientist Dr. Krup who desires the treasure of Popoca, a cursed Aztec mummy who will rise and kill anybody who takes it.  His latest scheme involves building a cyborg to defend them and destroy Popoca.

Low rent foreign cash grab inspired by Universal’s The Mummy series, but once you get past that this Aztec Mummy schlock is a doofus time-waster that’s harmless.  The movie is slow and honestly has no actual story until the third act (if you can call only having one act of event a story at all), but seeing how I have never seen the other Aztec Mummy movies I’m particularly unscathed from it.  I’m sure if I had these scenes would be torture, much like that ten minute recap that opens Universal’s The Mummy’s Tomb, but right now I can live with it.

But I can’t in good conscience recommend the movie.  It’s a certain kind of bad that only certain types of weirdoes like me will enjoy.  And let’s face it, with forty minutes of recap and a pitiful twenty minutes of story, what exactly is there about this movie to recommend?  It could possibly be climactic fight between a robot and a mummy, but unfortunately it only lasts less than a minute (and the mummy pretty much plows through the robot with ease…oh spoiler alert, by the way).

Whether you like it or not, there was also a fourth entry entitled Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, a crossover with another popular Mexican series of female wrestlers.  Why oh why wasn’t this featured on the show too?  I would have loved to see women wrestling an undead corpse to the ground.

The Episode

According to legend, The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy was the very first episode of MST aired nationally.  And thus, MST as we know it started to bloom.

The riffing starts out with the very first short seen on the program, a chapter of the Commando Cody serial.  Shorts would of course become a mainstay in the series, however they soon discovered industrial and educational films were better suited for the format than serials.  However, the idea of riffing a serial is intriguing, offering up sort of mini-cliffhangers to try and keep viewers invested enough to watch each week.  But the nature of a serial is that they were catering to a youth culture that’s out of date, and didn’t mind/notice that what they were watching was the same each and every week.  Commando Cody is a failed experiment, but you wouldn’t know it here.  With the serial so fresh and the production so goofy, the SOL crew is firing on all cylinders.  They especially have fun poking at the logic holes at hand (“Isn’t ANY atomic activity on the moon unusual?”).  It would definitely seem like a match made in heaven.

“The Robot?”

“YAAAAAAAAY!”

“Versus the Aztec Mummy?”

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Moving on to the movie, which is a different beast.  We have a dreary and less spunky import from Mexico, a far cry from the lighthearted superhero antics of Commando Cody.  They struggle to keep pace with their fun opener, but mostly the movie kind of makes the episode.  It’s so bizarre and nutty that it kind of becomes required viewing for crap cinema lovers like myself.  The crew gets a respectable amount of zingers at the movies expense, and one also notes that they’re further experimenting with what kind of jokes can be made.  They play with the sound mix in this particular episode, as Joel stands up and muffles a singer’s mouth with his hand, muting the audio.  They also add the sound of streaming water in another scene, giving off the idea that a group of men are relieving themselves.  I find these instances amusing, because there’s a sort of interesting fourth wall break being made with them (hell, that might even be them breaking a fifth wall somewhere), but it’s easy to see why they never did it again.

Interestingly enough, the theaters seat tint is played around with in this episode, no doubt in trying to make the crew more visible against a black and white movie.  In The Crawling Eye they went all grey, this week they’re adjusting the tint based upon the darkness of any particular scene.  In instances where there is a lot of black, they switch to a grey tint like the previous episode, but for the majority of the movie they keep the theater seats black.  In future episodes they’d become more obnoxious with tinting the theater seats, so this one is definitely not the worst of their experiments with it.

The host segments are given a story arc this time around, and the crew is wrestling around with toys in the form of “Demon Dogs” this week.  There are highs and lows, and a lot of “marking territory” jokes being made.  It’s passable.  The invention exchange is a treat.  The Motorcycle Helmet Airbag is fun and the Chalk Man is delightfully annoying.

I enjoy this episode.  But one’s enjoyment of the movie will definitely affect the episode as a whole.  If you don’t watch the series partially to dip into the bowels of cinema, then proceed with caution.  I, on the other hand, had fun.

Good

The DVD

Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy was released in Shout Factory’s Volume XV set with solid presentation of the episode itself.

While not quite related to the episode in question, the first feature are host segments taken from the MST3K Scrapbook, showing off glimpses of the KTMA era of the series, which is unfortunately as close as we’ll get to seeing these episodes on DVD.

Also included are promos for the series and the movie itself.  Interestingly, the movie is advertised in a double feature with a movie called The Vampire’s Coffin.  Not so surprisingly, the other movie looks better.

The Commando Cody short was included on a DVD that was paired up with Shout Factory’s Volume XXV set, which featured all nine Commando Cody shorts.  This disc was only available by purchasing the set through Shout Factory’s website.