WRESTLEMANIAC

Six young people are traveling on the dusty roads of Mexico in a van looking for the right location to shoot a hard film. Running out of fuel, the boys stop at an abandoned gas station where they receive directions from the strange owner to reach the nearest city to refuel; moreover, the man tells the boys about a ghost town not far from there, where it is said that El Mascarado, a lucha libre champion, was isolated one day went mad and killed his opponents. The six young people set off and come across the ghost town, where they decide to take refuge following a breakdown of their van; but there they will discover that the legend of El Mascarado is not just a legend. About 20-25 years ago they were called Hulk Hogan, André The Giant, Roddy Piper; they were great stars of wrestling who found a second fortune even in Hollywood, playing heroes and antiheroes of the big screen, blockbusters and niche films, always ready to fight and throw themselves headlong into any shabby action scene. Today wrestling has returned in vogue, exciting adults and children and, as twenty years ago, lending its "characters" to the world of cinema. But a completely new trend is the association that is seeing the champions of the sports-spectacle involved with the horror genre, perhaps for a simple marketing strategy that sees the typical consumers of wrestling coincide with those of contemporary horror cinema. And so, after seeing The Rock in "Doom" and Kane in "The Eye Collector," here comes Rey Mysterio Sr. in "Wrestlemaniac," a debut film by young director Jesse Baget, who, in addition to directing, writes and edits his film. "Wrestlemaniac" is a clever film, one of those works built ad hoc by exploiting current trends, so much so that it contains at least a dozen typical elements of the horror genre in vogue in recent years and half a dozen clear references to globalistic pop culture of the third millennium. The main source of inspiration is undoubtedly "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by Marcus Nispel, a film that literally revived a genre creating a series of semi-clones, successful and unsuccessful; in this case we have a partially successful film, in which a slaughter show is staged that is quite enjoyable, whose fundamental elements seem to perfectly respond to the stereotype: dusty and suggestive landscapes, a sparse group of twenty-somethings who seem to have come straight from the early '70s, a rickety van, dialogues full of "fuck" and "shit," a gas station in the middle of nowhere, a car accident that forces "ours" to an unscheduled stop, breasts in the wind on at least one occasion and a bloody boogeyman with superhuman strength, all seasoned with the right dose of sadism that every script now requires. Originality, therefore, is lacking, but it is undeniable that the fast-paced show flows wonderfully and entertains with gusto; some sequences are quite successful, such as the bloody death of the director and the fight in the ring, and a discreet taste for staging and a beautiful photography help to raise "Wrestlemaniac" above the average of home video products. The boogeyman played by Rey Mysterio Sr. (uncle of the much better-known WWE star) is a luchador, a type of wrestling characteristic of Mexican tradition, and clearly refers to another wrestling and cinema star of the past, namely El Santo, luchador and protagonist of countless South American films spanning the '60s and '70s. The El Mascarado protagonist of this "Wrestlemaniac" is a former wrestler who, having gone mad, killed his opponents during a match and now lives confined in a legendary ghost town: to be honest, the myth behind El Mascarado is not entirely convincing; surely something more suggestive could have been thought of; however, seeing a clone of El Santo, dirty and very bad, in 2007, has its effect and will not fail to infuse a dose of rowdy fun in the connoisseur of B-movies. In conclusion, "Wrestlemaniac" is a slasher that owes much to the new saga of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and manages to entertain with a handful of splatter scenes, a fast pace and an essential narration. To be avoided by the more demanding viewer looking for novelties. It deserves half a vote more.