When American insomniacs were treated to the late night TV likes of Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (1958), they could never have suspected that what they were seeing was not merely a single serving of Mexican movie madness but the third chapter of a trilogy. Mexican popular cinema experienced a Gothic renaissance in the late Fifties concurrent with similar revivals in Great Britain and Italy; with the success of Fernando Méndez's The Vampire (1957) came a flood of evocative Spanish language spookshows focused on such time-honored monsters as vampires, werewolves and witches, as well as the occasional local bogey. Yet unlike the restless La Llorona (lachrymose star of Rafael Baledón Curse of the Crying Woman [1963]), the Aztec Mummy had no true currency in Mexican history, and shared a truer bloodline with Universal's The Mummy (1933) and its sequels. Director Rafael Portillo's three Aztec Mummy pictures turn on the machinations of a megalomaniac known as The Bat (Luis Aceves Castañeda) to steal priceless Aztec artifacts guarded by the cursed and deathless Popoca (Àngel Di Stefani), with the battle plan this time being the deployment of an automaton (Adolfo Rojas) impervious to Popoca's blows. As had the Universal mummy sequels, Robot vs The Aztec Mummy recycles footage from the first two series entries (The Aztec Mummy and Curse of the Aztec Mummy, both released in 1957) and was, for its inherent ridiculousness and other things it did not know were funny, given the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment in 1989.

By Richard Harland Smith