These unsung heroes of vintage Mexican cinema mesmerized south-of-the-border moviegoers for a decade in low-budget pictures that threw together science, sex and action with low-budget abandon.
“Part of the charm of these films is that they are so atrociously underbudgeted and the effects are so cheesy,” said UCLA Film & Television Archive programmer Shannon Kelley, who curated the upcoming free film series “Aztec Mummies & Martian Invaders: Mexican Sci-Fi Classics.”
“To make something seem supernatural, they’d just add a strange warble sound effect in the background,” she said.
The Mexican film industry began churning out sci-fi on the cheap in the late ’50s during a period when the nation’s film industry suffered an economic downturn, said Kelley, who likened the movies to Plan 9 From Outer Space, the legendarily bad 1959 sci-fi flick by American director Ed Wood.
“The aliens all wore these very simple Mylar costumes,” she said. “Plus you have the posturing by the actors.”
Starting Aug. 14, five of these Mexican sci-fi gems get unearthed in Los Angeles for the UCLA film series. The lineup includes an Aug. 28 screening of The Ship of Monsters (La Nave de los Monstruos). In the 1959 movie, pictured top, two Venusian women, Beta and Gamma, crash-land in Chihuahua, Mexico. There they enslave a couple of handsome earthlings with their vampirelike bloodsucking skills.
