02 · 28 · 23

The beginnings of fantasy cinema in Mexico

Rafael Aviña

Chilaquiles and computers: one of the most curious and entertaining combinations in Mexican cinema. This attempt to send our heroes, fresh out of Ranchos Grandes and similar places, into infinity and beyond, confronting evil masterminds from other galaxies and extraterrestrial threats armed with nothing more than a pistol or a cape and a satin mask. The fact is that Mexican cinema would make the leap to the fantasy and science fiction genres based on several trends that would oscillate between genuine exploration, the relocation to Mexico of Hollywood products of those genres, open mockery, or unintentional humor in true classics such as Los platillos voladores, Gigantes Planetarios, or Santo vs the Martian Invasion, which showed the arrival of extraterrestrials in Magdalena Mixhuca. Strange and charming delusions that, without meaning to, revealed our production struggles and the unusual solutions proposed by screenwriters, filmmakers, and producers with the sole purpose of bringing us into the modern era.

If we understand fantasy as a genre of speculative fiction, Lo que va de ayer a hoy (dir. Juan Bustillo Oro, 1945) marks the true beginning of science fiction cinema in Mexico. The plot is as follows: in 1895—incidentally, the year cinema was invented—a dissolute and mischievous young man played by Cuban actor Enrique Herrera volunteers for an experiment to coagulate his blood, but when it cannot be liquefied again, he remains immobile in a glass capsule for fifty years. As a result, the protagonist wakes up and remains young, while his girlfriend and friends are elderly people surprised by this fact, until the granddaughter of a former girlfriend appears and the herodoes not miss the opportunity.

That same year, 1945, Emilio Gómez Muriel's El sexo fuerte was produced, in which a charro from Jalisco (Rafael Baledón) and an Andalusian bullfighter (Ángel Garasa) are shipwrecked and end up in the kingdom of Eden, where women take the place of men and the beautiful Queen Eva 45 (Mapy Cortés) is about to marry seven bearded men. In other words, it is a farce with hints of futuristic utopia —the weapons carried by women, for example— and feminism, similar to Cuando las mujeres mandan (1950) by José M. González Prieto, a Cuban-Mexican film withthe special participation of Germán Valdés “Tin Tan” and Marcelo Chávez. Here, Alberto Garrido and Federico Piñero, Agapito and Lizardo, Cuban and Galician respectively, escape the Korean War, take a plane, and land on an unknown island dominated by women. A group of them, attractive young women in hot pants, arrive in a jeep and take them to "The Land of Eva Liberta... “A sovereign nation where women rule and men are worthless.”

Shortly before, in 1948, Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” starred in Miguel M. Delgado's El supersabio, in which he plays the assistant to an elderly sage (Carlos Martínez Baena) who is working on an advanced formula that would turn seawater into gasoline, in a fantasy comedy showcasing the verbal skills of the “Mime of Mexico.” In the saga of La sombra vengadora, consisting of four anthological films directed in 1954 by Rafael Baledón, the hero wearing a black mask crossed by a lightning bolt (Armando Silvestre without a mask or cape, Fernando Osés under the hood) faces the diabolical villain nicknamed “La Mano Negra” (The Black Hand), who seizes a formula for producing narcotics and synthetic drugs, that is, a precursor to crack cocaine. To decipher the formula, he kidnaps several scientists, murdering those who refuse to cooperate. The adventures of La sombra vengadora and its sequels offer, in addition to scientific elements, effective approximations to B-series serials and fantasy horror, as shown by the appearance of Pancho Villa's head or a puma named Zombie that tears its victims apart with its claws.

Likewise, in the 1950s, Arturo de Córdova was able to make a daring leap between police melodrama and science fiction in El hombre que logró ser invisible (1957), by Alfredo B. Crevenna. This is the story of a man sentenced to prison for a murder he did not commit. However, thanks to a serum invented by his brother, the protagonist manages to become invisible and escape from prison to prove his innocence, although the formula has side effects that lead him to madness and delirium.

Finally, far from superior technology, but immersed in the cheapest and most sensationalist literature about UFOs that was beginning to become fashionable, Mexican cinema could only bet on science fiction through humor and the most pedestrian vulgarity. Thus, in Los platillos voladores, directed by Julián Soler in 1955, the poor Martians arrived "dancing the ricachá, ricachá, ricachá... as they call the cha cha chá on Mars,“ according to the lyrics of the theme song that Adalberto Martínez ”Resortes" sang as the Martian plumber busted a move on a futuristic dance floor —so to speak— next to his girlfriend Saturnina (Evangelina Elizondo), thus inaugurating Mexican-style alien cinema.

With Los platillos voladores, Mexican cinema moved beyond naive and hilarious simplicity to catch up with modern trends and scientific assessments of first-type extraterrestrial contact.

To be continued...

Translated by Adrik Díaz