While I’d be the first person to shout “Viva El Santo!” in a crowded Olvera Street bar, I’d also be the first to admit that Mexican masked wrestling doesn’t begin or end with El Enmascarado de Plata (The Man in the Silver Mask), aka Roberto Guzman Huerta (1917-1984).  I wrote about El Santo back in September but I’m here today to talk about one of his esteemed competitors/colleagues… Mil Máscaras.  With a name that translates as “1,000 Masks,” you never knew what to expect from Mil, who was born Aaron Rodríguez in 1942.  If not quite as prolific as El Santo, he certainly put in his time with all manner of opponents, living, dead and undead.  In Federico Curiel’s LAS VAMPIRAS (1969), Mil went toe to toe with the King of the Vampires (John Carradine) and his bevy of befanged beauties.  In LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO (1972) Mil joined up with Blue Demon and (in the film’s final frames) El Santo to take on a deathless luchador and his crumby mummy horde; later that year,  Mil had to round up a clutch of pop-up mummies resurrected by the demonic Count Cagliostro in EL ROBO DE LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO (1972).  Mil has been semi-retired since 1991, the year he won the World Heavyweight Championship, a title he held until 1994.

Mil Máscaras had a very specific backstory in his first star project, appropriately titled MIL MASCARAS (1969) and directed by Jaime Salvador.  The film’s screenplay, by Ramón Obón, depicted Mil as a war orphan rescued from Europe after the devastation of World War II and raised by scientists, who nurtured the foundling into a non anti-Semitic super-human.  That origin isn’t entirely abrogated by MIL MASCARAS: RESURRECTION (2007), which is currently playing the festival circuit, but it is scuttled in favor of a more mythic backstory that etches our selfless and effectively faceless superhero as one in a endless line of protectors of the earth who possess “the mind of a scientist, the soul of an artist, the body of a great athlete” and an impossible to define “something that separates him from other men.”  That combination of strengths is tested when the blood of a willing sacrifice is used to resurrect the rotted corporeality of The Aztec Mummy, who has designs on nothing less than world domination.

Written by Jeffrey Uhlmann (who as an actor wears the dusty tat of The Aztec Mummy), MIL MASCARAS: RESURRECTION has the sieve-like logic and goofy charm of the great luchador films of the 1960s and 70s.  When we catch up with Mil, he is being dumped by his girlfriend Donna (Stephanie Matthews) in a fancy restaurant because she can’t commit to a man whose face she will never be allowed to see.  Called in to assist a police investigation concerning the theft of hemoglobin from various local bloodbanks, Mil retreats to his secret lair and uses his high tech crime computer to determine that the next robbery will take place at the only blood bank in town that hasn’t yet been robbed.  (Although the film’s setting isn’t given, the countryside is dotted with Aztec ruins, the local police station has a map of Missouri on its walls alongside the Mexican flag and the map of blood banks that appears on Mil’s computer screen is of downtown Berlin!).  With the help of a scientist friend (Kurt Drennen Mirtsching), who is currently perfecting a cyborg “Idaktor” (which looks to have been assembled from empty pork-n-beans cans and a welder’s mask), Mil manages to stay one step ahead of the Aztec Mummy’s evil plans, forcing the villain to pull out the ultimate stop: to resurrect a legion of the dead to flood the world with hopelessness and horror.

Of course, good trumps evil at the end of MIL MASCARAS: RESURRECTION but co-directors Andrew Quint and Chip Cubera throw in some fun curveballs along the way towards that fait accompli, best of which is an 11th hour save by a cadre of free fighter good guys (among them the sons of Santo, Blue Demon and Hurrican Ramirez), who show up just in time to take on the  Aztec Mummy’s zombie hirelings (there will be powder) and allow Mil to turn his genius brain and both hands to grappling with the bad guy, who has by this point abducted Maria with a mind toward making her his mummy bride.  If you aren’t pumping your own fist in the air as Mil declares “My fist is the only bride that Fate has for you – prepare for a painful consummation!” then you’re as dry and dead as the Aztec Mummy.  Guest roles in this first-ever English language Mexican masked wrestler film are contributed by HALLOWEEN‘s P.J. Soles (as herself), WWF wrestler “Handsome” Harley Race (who in his prime was matched with both El Santo and Mil Máscaras), and Richard Lynch (of THE SEVEN-UPS, GOD TOLD ME TO and INVASION U.S.A. infamy) as the President of the United States, who speaks for all of us when he declares in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “Thank God for Mil Mil Máscaras!”

Information about the production and for the purposes of booking MIL MASCARAS: RESURRECTION can be had by visiting the official website or calling (573) 884-2129.