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A series of murders has police captain Robles (Crox Alvorado) baffled: Men of remarkable physique are found dead, with their brains removed, but without clue to how they exactly were removed. However, his trail leads to Don Felipe's (Arturo Martínez) gym, as all the deceased men were wrestlers who trained there. He even has the gym under police surveillance, but to no avail, one of the wrestlers, Lobo Negro (Guillermo Hernández), is killed in the gym and smuggled out without the police noticing. The culprit, a mad scientist (Carlos Riquelme), tends to hang around the gym at all hours dressed like a vagrant trying to sell lottery tickets, while his assistant (Yerye Beirute), dressed up as a laundry man, smuggles the corpse out with the dirty laundry. The mad scientist wants to create superstrong men by giving them animal brains to eventually take over the world (it's not really explained how), but so far his experiments have always failed.

Captain Robles decides to place an undercover man at the gym, and fortunately, his best friend, Guillermo (Wolf Ruvinskis) has set out to be a wrestler - and has fallen in love with Don Felipe's secretary Lucía (Columba Domínguez). Guillermo soon starts wrestling as the masked El Vampiro, and he's winning, and winning big, so much so that he catches the eye of our mad scientist, so before El Vampiro's big fight for the championship, he as Don Panchito replaces the ring medic's surgical alcohol with some poison, then sees to it that Guillermo is scratched on his arm and needs to be treated. And really, when El Vampiro wants to deliver his final blow in the title match, he just keels over dead. Our mad scientist meanwhile has been waiting for him in the morgue, pretending to be one of the corpses, and is quick to smuggle Guillermo out. And this time, his experiment works fine, and Guillermo comes back to life, stronger than ever (if basically a dumb brute). This gives the professor an idea of how to demonstrate his genius to the world: He has Guillermo replace the wrestler who fights as El Vampiro #2 (in the same mask and outfit), and in the ring, Guillermo pretty much takes apart his opponent, before hurling him into the audience. Of course this creates a mass panic, and in a turn of poetic justice, the mad scientist is trampled to death by the stampeding masses. In the meantime, Guillermo turns more and more into a hairy monster, roaming the streets and putting fear into the locals - before he kidnaps Lucía, climbs a highrise ... and ultimately Captain Robles tricks him into plunging to his death ...

The very first lucha libre film to tackle science fiction and horror, Ladrón de Cadáveres is really restrained in its approach in comparison to later horror/wrestling movies, and it refrains from being too formulaic, too (like it lets its wrestling hero ultimately become the monster). That's not to say this is a piece of art or anything, it's still more of a simplistic cross between crime flick, sci-fi horror and of course lucha libre, with the finale borrowing from King Kong quite heavily, but it's awesome fun to watch and sure has this naive charme of yesteryear's pulp cinema.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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