Wrestlemaniac (2006)

Director: Jesse Baget

Screenplay: Jesse Baget

Cast: Rey Misterio Sr. as El Mascarado, Adam Huss as Alfonse, Jeremy Radin as Steve, Leyla Milani as Dallas, Margaret Scarborough as Debbie, Catherine Wreford as Daisy, Zack Bennett as Jimbo, Irwin Keyes as The Stranger

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

With a premise about a homicidal lucha libre wrestler, someone like me who grew up with pro wrestling as an obsession would be interested in this. Back in the day, I was so disappointed I viewed Wrestlemaniac as one of the worst films I had ever seen. Nowadays, returning to this, I would never say something like that anymore. It is instead a low budget slasher you would have to come to with lowered expectations than I had, though it does start off with real wrestling footage over the credits, which is cool. The review is actually going to be fairly positive, in that in reality, subjective opinion on whether you the reader would enjoy this or not is really the issue here. Instead I like to view this as a legitimate apology to its director/writer/editor Jesse Baget.

They got an actual figure of note to play the titular homicidal wrestler, which does befit what the premise is about, though we will need to clarify one thing. that Rey Misterio is not the figure most, like I did, grew up with in the World Wrestling Entertainment company, nor if you are older and grew up with as the legendary figure of high flying acrobatics in the late World Championship Wrestling. That is Rey Misterio Jr., the nephew of the man starring in this, Miguel Ángel López Díaz, Díaz taking the name Rey Misterio Sr. to distinguish between the two. He is an important figure in his own right, a figure with a prolific list of records and acclaim, and in mind to an aspect of this involving the villain's personal "mask" collection from defeated opponents, a strong record we will get into about how many people he won the masks (or hair) from in lucha libre bouts. He is also the start of the Rey Misterio lineage which, alongside other figures who donned the mask, also includes the aforementioned Rey Misterio Jr., whose accomplishments alone are worthy to making his uncle proud internationally.

Surprisingly he is not the only other figure with a connection to the profession, as one of the figures who stands out in the cast as well is Leyla Milani, who plays the adult film actress Dallas. Milani, an Iranian Canadian actress/host/model, was in the WWE's own Diva Search, a talent competition to find female stars for their programming which, to be brutally honest, has not aged well as a concept in terms of "Diva" was entirely about figures who could be glamorous and seductive for the male heterosexual audience. This is an issue when wrestling fans and promotions have moved to having female wrestlers as credible as their male counterparts rather than figures meant to appeal to that audience only. This is not either to dismiss women who were comfortable to play to a glamorous image as a wrestler or non wrestler, be they manager to valet, or even played up to being explicitly sexual in their personas, who deserve as much respect in what they have contributed to the history of wrestling; instead the bigger issue is that the WWE's track record of how they have portrayed women, and uncomfortable scandals we will not get into to keep this review light hearted for a review about a deliberately nasty slasher, have left a bitter taste. Even in going back to the likes of the Diva Search competitions that company had will be something, especially because of the scandals, that will have new uncomfortable light. Thankfully, Milani's career is quite a diverse one so we do not need to linger on real history that needs to be brought up in a sombre, fully detailed written piece on the WWE's history of gender politics. By the time of this film, she had already become a model on the American version of the Deal or No Deal game show, alongside roles in a variety of other television and film roles, and by the modern day she founded and runs Leyla Milani Hair¹, a luxury hair care company which is adds a nice turn for a review like this to get into. It is certainly a tangent I did not expect to include, but it is a cool one to add.

It is a befitting thing then, in the traditional of legendary wrestlers like El Santo making films in Mexican genre cinema but not taking the mask off, that Rey Misterio Senior took on this role, a slasher film where an amateur porn shoot made the ill advised decision to get lost in the Mexican back roads, and end up at an ominous and abandoned ghost town. Alfonzo the sleazy director and star, three actress (one mostly unconscious from drinking too much most of the role), the camera guy with a knowledge of lucha libre wrestling, and the stoner who lent the van should have taken the warning of the sleazy owner of an abandoned gas station, which got a pop for me as it is Irwin Keyes as the nameless figure. Instantly recognisable, of all things in his list of cameos and turns in many genre and cult films, it is an obscure horror comedy Frankenstein General Hospital (1988) which made him stand out for me since youth, as the Frankenstein's monster. That this is the film, whether its virtues nowadays, I immediately think of when Keyes appears is funny with hindsight for the brief role he gets here.

Keyes warns of an old ghost town where a wrestler who gouged his opponent's eyes out got shoved into, which gets more elaborate for what is a very short film, less than eighty minutes, and director-writer Jesse Baget clearly made with limited resources. Suffice to say, we have a masked wrestler named El Mascarado who just appeared to destroy the Russians at the Olympics in wrestling competitions, likely to have been built from the bodies of multiple luchadores by scientists, but was an ill advised figure to represent his country of Mexico as he murdered his opponents in training. Considering some actual Mexican genre films - The Batwoman (1968) by René Cardona is about luchadores being kidnapped to create a race of fish men - it is a wacky premise you can work with even in a gory slasher premise. What we get is prime example of the 2000s straight-to-DVD era of lower budget genre films, which will inevitably get their Bleeding Skull or retrospective articles to praise them and get nostalgic about. There is certainly an aesthetic to them too now enough time has passed from my younger self hating this, which stands out from the 2010s equivalent in that this visual looks like it was shot just before the clear sheen with high definition cameras of the 2010. With its mix of greyness and moments of dark shadows, it has a grungy feel as a result, and this has enough budget to find a solid location for the ghost town. Set it up well in set design at a lower budget, it is limited to a few cast members and is simplified in the structure, but we do not have a film here like in the 2010s which could have been shot in someone's house, not an insult to those films but showing there was a higher budget here as a comparison.

It is a film, by coincidence, that manages to still be strong in content but with the ironic hindsight that this not be as extreme as other films of this time period. Saw franchise films were out and about at this time, and "torture porn films" were popular enough that, with a trailer on the same British Revolver release DVD I viewed for this review appearing, even Saw found itself so popular to have a low budget film clearly inspired by them like Are You Scared? (2005) exist. Wrestlemaniac comes at an interesting point where there was a greater easing of some nasty gore in British film classification, and means that the films which got the eighteen certifications, the highest outside of porn classification, had to be much more brutal or have content which was more an issue for the classificators, a real turn of time from our notorious Video Nasties era of videotape censorship. It leads to some unintentional results out of the film's hands as, whilst there is some gruesome stuff here, it is odd to have the amateur porn premise as an initial construct as, with a film that was rated as suitable for fifteen year olds in the United Kingdom to see, it merely leads to one scene of a little female nudity. The script is more interested in vulgar one liners off the back of a sex comedy and some cursing, and does not feel sleazy for the possibility of that premise at this time, nor years later, at all. It feels less like this was a compromised part of the film, but that Wrestlemaniac found itself in a shift in horror films of that era where those Saw films, or Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), were theatrical releases that got nasty and wide distribution.

It is a slasher film, and not of the post-Scream (1996) era of self reflection, but a throwback to the older eighties ones, specifically so many which came out off the wave of Friday the 13th which got their hands on one good location as this does, and did their best with what limited production they had. A Doom Asylum (1987) came to my mind this viewing, barring the broader comedic beats, in terms of one location of the titular asylum, some actors and some gore. Slashers even the eighties had archetypes and stripped down plotting, let us not lie. They are charming for their fans, but the basic structure of them, with the acclaimed exceptions or those who deviate, have the same pace of this in setting up the archetypes and then letting the killer pick them off, this one not even needing a weapon, and more boss in using his bare hands as a result. The aesthetic differences, and how the characters are written, are obvious twenty years on from the eighties here, though even the nastier tone is not really that distinct to a time period of when the film was made.

The immediate thing to point out, that I should have not expected, is that this was an actual lucha libre slasher film even with an actual luchador in the main role. No one is killed with flying head scissors or powerbombed into a bed of spikes. Forgive the use of actual wrestling move terms for the non-fans for a moment, but the closest here is death by backbreaker and a top rope (top off a barrel) body splash, but not much else. It is a masked hulking brute in the centre just in a lucha mask, which means that this really does not play to the ideas of the medium. Wrestling in cinema is surprisingly not large, as beyond the luchador films which would include filmed bouts, usually it is real pro wrestlers in acting roles but not expecting them to bring their skills from the squared circle into the scenes. The only true nod to the medium is the concept of mask vs. mask wrestling types. Except the versions where a wrestler, non-masked, sacrifices their hair on a match, the loser would be forced to unmask if both or one put their masks on the line, a tradition especially significant in Mexican wrestling which did cross over at times over the years in other companies around the world. Here however our killer, when you do not have a mask, compensates for this by peeling his victim's faces off. This does, alongside present the idea of Achilles' mask, does mean that the film is still gory especially when it gets to the "mask" collection.

It does everything it wanted to do as a film, including an abrupt choice of final girl which does change things up. Alongside a score full of drones and tense electronica which is distinct, by composer Jim Lang, this does something as well which does require a HUGE SPOILER WARNING NOW. That being that this is the rare slasher film where the villain wins. Going to find himself in the van left after this, heading outwards into the world even if involving ripping more faces off, it comes less as nihilistic but an abrupt change of pace I have to praise the film for, with SPOILERS ENDING NOW. Truthfully, Wrestlemaniac is just not my film in taste. In the right context, I could see people liking this, and it did not deserve to be buried by my younger self. Film making is hard, and as the time has passed and I have seen more of the lower budget films being made over the decades, Jesse Baget is like many from this time onwards, directors who plug away with work and went through the trends that were popular or considered practical as a director in this area of straight-to-DVD/straight-to-streaming era of cinema. Even cult figures of the eighties, the golden VHS age, like Jim Wynorski or David DeCoteau eventually did this, and that goes from making horror films to either making a Christmas film or a cute animal film by the time you enter the 2010s. In the case of Baget, he did a film in 2014 that was both at the same time, named The Three Dogateers, which meant that he did one better.

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1) Leyla Milani Hair's main website.