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Pérez (Basil Rathbone) has spent the last 400 years in transit between
death and heaven or hell, with nobody but his always nagging skeleton as
company because he committed suicide but repented his sins in the last
moment - so is it up or down? Finally, God has made a decision: If Pérez
can make a woman fall in love with him and give her life for him, he'll go
to heaven ... but there is of course a catch, Pérez can't leave the
mansion he died in, and none other than Satan (John Carradine) himself is
to choose the women who will visit the mansion. Satan of course sets
some fun things in motion to complicate matters for Pérez: First he makes
a bank teller (Pompín Iglesias) steal half a fortune from his bank and
hide it in the mansion, then he sees to it that quite a few people,
including the bank teller's greedy aunt (Famie Kaufman a.k.a. Vitola)
learn where the money is hidden so they'll turn the mansion upside down
and try to scare each other off. And to complicate matters further, Satan
also sees to it that a mad scientist (Cameron Mitchell) with family moves
into the mansion, and especially his sexy daughter (Amadee Chabot) who
always runs around in underwear turns a few heads, while his female robot
Robotina (Jorge Delong) with a violent streak sees to it that there's
always enough action in the house, even if the professor's latest
experiment doesn't explode by mistake. In this flurry of events, Pérez
tries to pick up woman after woman, but to no avail ... until he crosses
paths with Robotina, who has just beaten a few of the treasure hunters to
a pulp and initially thinks Pérez is one of them - but then he tells her
about his life after death, and she, unloved by her creator and his
family, can sympathize. Eventually, all the treasure hunters are
captured by the police, and the professor invents a machine to find
Pérez's skeleton to grind it to a dust and therefore send him to neither
heaven nor hell but oblivion - but when he's almost done, Robotina throws
herself onto the machine and destroys it, giving her own "life"
in the process. Pérez is now allowed into heaven, but he's also deeply
humbled. One can't deny, Autopsia de un Fantasma
features some brilliant jokes one wouldn't come to expect from a
mainstream Mexican horror comedy for the whole family from the late
1960's, weird sight gags, absurd sequences and over-the-top ideas, several
of which would make even Monty
Python proud, plus the cast really seems to enjoy themselves -
but the film just lacks a coherent framework to go with this, so it goes
off into all kinds of different directions, and at times the clever jokes
give away to cheap slapstick and predictable punchlines, and the ending -
well, it's just a bit too cheesy to be interesting. And the whole thing
goes on for at least half an hour too long. All that said, for a Mexican
genre comedy for all ages, the film really is pretty good and interesting,
but the script could have done with a re-write or two to make this really
good.
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