The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957)

The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957)

An evil doctor, banned from practice because of his unethical experiments grafting human and animal body parts that don’t belong there, and now a supervillain known as The Bat, escapes police custody and schemes to get his hands on lost Aztec treasure.
To do this, he must kidnap an archeologist and amateur past-life regression therapist’s fiancé to have her locate the loot via forced hypnosis.
A vaguely Santo-like superhero called El Angel appears from nowhere to stop him.

The gold treasure is not merely intended as bullion but consists of a couple of magical artifacts which might be exploited for their supernatural value, (a la Indiana Jones– we even get a snake pit!)
The past-life flash-back sequence is virtually lifted from Universal’s The Mummy (1932) and merely redressed in quetzal feathers.

If you came for mummy mayhem you came to the wrong place. The mummy first appears briefly only in the last ten minutes of the short feature and functions merely as a deus-ex-machina. A second brief appearance is more impressible staged, but it’s all much too little, and much too late.

Even though the film is cropped to the wrong ratio, the MVDVisual transfer is beautiful considering the film’s origin, (see below for a comparison with a painfully fuzzy Mexican release). I don’t know if the original Spanish voicework would be an improvement, but the English version is a low-energy letdown.
The script is very much like a radio play, and the visuals are there mostly to simply illustrate the script. Even if a kid were to use just his imagination while listening to the soundtrack, he’d get more exciting results than what we get by actually watching the film.

A bizarre Mexican ensalada of The Mummy (1932), Batman (1966-68) and hints of Jonny Quest (1964-64) all tossed along with Santo dressing.
It’s not the mind-numbingly terrible film you might expect, but unlike the masochistic Manos, The Hands of Fate (1966) experience, it’s precisely the mild/bland level of entertainment which can be vastly improved by receiving the MST3K treatment.

I’d love to see a sequel where the ur-Quest clan adopts the mummy, they all have exotic adventures together, and they live happily ever after.
This of course, is hardly what we eventually got.

If you think I’m gonna recommend this film, you must be plumb loco.

P.S. ‘Pinacate’ means stinkbug.