Suddenly the room erupts in panic as a black clad, hooded female figure makes a dramatic appearance on the landing above the dance floor. It’s The Black Rose, a Robin Hood-like cat burglar who preys on the rich for the benefit of the city’s poor and downtrodden.
I didn’t know if Noboru had it in him to make a ‘real’ movie. But he really nails it with Karate Robo Zaborgar. The story is funny and surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the original material
Yatterman was like a self-indulgent child banging pots together, desperate for someone to pay attention to how hilarious it is.
For as formidable an assemblage of luchadore might as Santo, Blue and Mil to descend upon one small town there has to be some kind of secret agenda. And, indeed, there is
One need only glance over the many titles in the lucha movie genre to see that there is a long history of enmity between Mexican wrestlers and mummies. This goes all the way back to 1964, when Elizabeth Campbell and Lorena Velazquez threw down against a pop-eyed, reconstituted Aztec warrior.
Unfortunately, we only get the gist of things here, as the latter half has been, as far as anyone can tell, forever lost. Onar films did their best to fill in the gaps by summarizing the rest of the action via a series of stills and narration that take us through to the final shot of the film.
The episodic structure of the film keeps it from ever getting dull, and there’s usually not more than a minute or so before a skeleton is ripping off a woman’s top or a superhero is punching a villain’s car.
The resulting era of movies eschewed any attempts at the Gothic classiness of the earlier production and simply went for goofball comic book action. Think of it as the luchadors’ Jun Fukuda years.
For me, though, I prefer to see Santo and Blue on the same team, despite — or perhaps even because of — the much documented ill will between them. It might just be that the fact that they would rather have been tearing one another’s heads off provides that element of friction so necessary to the chemistry of all great screen couples.
The drama never gets too intense, the overall look is bathed in that inimitable bright 1980s glow, and the score happily percolates with songs by R.D. Burman at his most lightweight and catchy.
