It's spring in the pre-or-post disease era, time to crack open the Youtube and dive into my weirdest/best discovery de la Mexico since La Maldicion del la Llorona (1963). Long unavailable in English either dub or subtitles, it's now got quite legible subtitles on El Youtube -aqui!
SHIP OF MONSTERS
(1960) Dir. Rogelio Gonzalez
***1/2 / Youtube Image (via Professor Craigles) - C
It's a familiar tale, sure. I won't bore you with a list of the legion of comedians who've gone to the moon or Venus to find all sorts of babes suffering from an extreme hombre shortage (a sorry lot, the earthmen usually are: fading off the B-list, chemically-addicted, cursed by terrible bangs)
And that's the key difference here: Eulalio González! Ay dios mio! Pipporro! And he's cool!
He possesses a genuinely disarming smile, a naturalness in his awed reactions; a dewy twinkle in his dark glassy eyes, and a gently lilting yet masculine baritone voice that deepens to a questioning smolder at the end of every sentence. He's also got a great kind of hippity-hop Elvis tango dance style that's funny without sacrificing very palpable sex appeal. An inexplicable juke box in his kitchen provides the instrumental back-up to his songs, which he performs to the agog wonderment of his alien women visitors (while their robot plays with his little brother outdoors). Though a comic foil in a lot of other vaquero movies (it says here), Gonzalez shows a great way with each of the ladies in turn: he's passionate, confident, and a little confused with the good one; flattered but firm in his 'no!' to the one who transforms into an evil vampiress and frees the monsters from their frozen cave hiding place to run amok. He holds fast. If a spark flies, it's true love and worth being faithful for even if you just met them both at the same time. I never understood why Flash would turn down Aura when Dale is just some blonde earth woman he barely met an hour earlier.. until now.
Ana Bertha Lepe is Gamma (the good one) and Lorena Velázquez is Beta, the bad one --obviously! She played many vampire and other kind of wrestling women in the course of her illustrious career (often battling Santos or the Blue Demon and--in one case--the Aztec Mummy). These ex-Miss Mexico beauty queens wield ray guns and rock tight-fitting uniforms and generally strut about the Chihuahua flats. The alien monster male samples kept on ice from other planets are each unique and cleverly-if-cheaply--constructed. All are done with a mix of who-cares papier mache and giddy ballsy passion. And they talk! They make rational decisions, and they can make love as easily as they kill. Even a sabre tooth tiger skeleton man gets his opinion considered (and has a great Tom Waits-style croak of a voice). The alien girls are always in control, able to pause Emilio in mid sentence to check up on the words he uses that they don't understand, accessing what we in our futuristic world might call Alexa reading from Wikipedia. My favorite line is when the narrator of the video they're watching to learn about Mexico notes (while showing scenic travel footage) that's it's a lovely country and "for all they've tried, the Mexicans haven't been able to destroy it."
I have fallen in love with this film so much I don't even mind that Lauriano (Gonzalez) has a little brother, Chuy, (Herberto Davila, Jr) with whom he lives alone on a big ranch outside Chihuahua. I generally can't stand sci-fi films set in southern climates as they always have cute impish kids in them, but Chuy is no imp who should be in school instead of acting as guide for the American hero, instead he is an able assistant around the ranch, following Gonzalez around, going off to play with the robot when the talk gets adult. And when the monsters fly into action, Chuy even tackles and kills one of the monsters all by himself with the fury of one of the kids in Over the Edge or The Bad News Bears! Imagine Abbott and Costello doing anything but running in a similar situation and you begin to understand what the males of America are up against. And these two women aren't afraid to either kick ass or make love to the monsters right there on camera. This has to be sexiest film presumably aimed at a younger audience since Young Frankenstein.
That's basically all there is, some outfits worthy of Artist and Models (I could see this film as a collaboration between Tashlin and Bunuel) and some lovely female flesh on display--but each woman is super strong and capable and there's never a thought of turning the good one into a household drudge at the end, someone to gratefully darn socks and make the chiles. A wild seductive dance in a foggy secret alien cave chamber stand as the juicy highlights of a film with no lowlights whatsoever. Would it was available on one of those great discs from the (now sadly defunct) La Casa Negra DVD label. Or, ideally, Criterion!
Alas, it is not - Sigh, the Youtube version is it. Alas, too - it looks like this is Piporro's only foray into sci-fi, and it's a durned shame. I would have been pleased had he tackled more monsters. Why not have Piporro vs. La Llorna!? Piporro vs. the Blue Demon y Santos! Dios mios! Ah well, at least we have La nave de los monstruos, kind of.
Man, am I losing my mind? I've been watching Tarkovsky, Godard, and Suzuki on Criterion too. I swear ta god, I'm fancy. Criterion should have me do one of their "Adventures in Moviegoing" collections. I'd frickin' nail it.
Man, am I losing my mind? I've been watching Tarkovsky, Godard, and Suzuki on Criterion too. I swear ta god, I'm fancy. Criterion should have me do one of their "Adventures in Moviegoing" collections. I'd frickin' nail it.
