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Wrestlemaniac (2006)

Dir: Jesse Baget

Three guys , Alphonse (Adam Huss), Jimbo (Zack Bennett) and Steve (Jeremy Radin) head out to Mexico with three girls, Debbie (Margaret Scarborough), Dallas (Leyla Milani) and Daisy (Catherine Wreford), to make a porno flick, as you do.

They end up (of course) getting lost and running low on gas. The one building they come across in the desert is a derelict gas station with no gas.
It does have (autarky) a weird attendant though (Irwin Keyes) who tells them the only place around that’s not 100 miles away is a desert town called "La Sangre de Dios" (‘The Blood of Christ’), but he advises them not to go there (of course) because of the legend of ‘El Mascarado’!

Steve is a huge Mexican wrestling fan (as well as being a rather huge Mexican) and knows the legend;
"La Sangre de Dios" was supposed to be a ghost town where the mysterious, utterly psychotic wrestler El Mascara do (real life wrestler Rey Misterio) was sent to get ’fixed’ after he ripped a guy’s eyes out!
Legend has it that El Mascarado was in fact a Frankenstein’s Monster creation made up from the body parts of three of Mexico’s best wrestlers!

With basically no choice and in the hopes of finding a cool locale to shoot their skin flick they drive to the deserted town, despite the warnings of much doom.
Sure enough it’s not long before our would-be filmmakers are at the mercy of the psychotic man mountain that is El Mascarado, a friendly chap who likes to rip people’s faces off…

Despite the general perception modern horror of a more bloody bent has had a bit of a comeback recently and some genuinely nasty treats have been served up. And the American Indy scene (where things actually get a mainstream release) is in better shape than I has been for a long while.
Some of the new product of this mini-boom has been dire (“Heartstopper”, “Sickle“) but some, at least to me, has been pleasantly surprising (“See No Evil”, “The Hamiltons”, “Hostel II“) and with this little flick writer/director Jesse Baget has (despite the problems) delivered another title that slips into this ‘pleasantly surprised’ category.

Amazingly we are given characters that you don’t automatically hate, quite a feat today.
And even the arrogant Alphonse is written, and played by Huss, so broadly that the jerk is actually pretty amusing.
Alphonse is the kind of gut who, when explaining why he‘s ended up making porno flicks and not ended up as the next Scorsese, states “Who gives a fuck about ‘Taxi Driver’ today? But ‘Deep Throat’? Now that’s a fucking classic”.
And he delivers another telling gem when he gets annoyed at Steve because they’re lost (despite him doing the driving) and Steve should simply know where they are anyway;
Alphonse: “Aren’t you Mexican”?
Steve: "Yeah…but I was born in Seattle dude”.

As the portly Steve, Jeremy Radin is very likeable and Steve makes a good and unlikely hero and although everyone else fits into the ‘stock Slasher character’ box all of them do the job and no one is so hateful you actually want them to die as soon as possible.
And veteran Irwin Keyes ("House of 1000 Corpses") is a joy in his little cameo and really lifts the film just when it was starting to need it.

Baget’s screenplay knows it’s playing the parody game in it‘s set-up and content, but thankfully it’s not to the detriment of furthering it’s own legitimate plot.
The sex film angle of said plot delivers some nice girl on girl action (and some not so nice plastic titties), but again the titillation content is so blatant in it’s presentation (and lots of wiggling arses are indeed presented) that you can’t help but smile at the juvenile fun of it all.

And smile is quite frankly all you can do when one of the girls picks a hiding place that means she has to sit in front of the camera with her knees up to her head and her legs spread so wide that her denim shorts are barely able to cover the creamy goodness within.
Gratuitous set-ups have rarely been so damn gratuitous. But Baget obviously knows what he’s doing and hopes we are astute enough to go on the ride with him and as such so we are more than happy to let him play his exploitation games.

We do have problems though.
The biggest of these is that are first two kills are basically off-screen. Not good when, during any build-up (no matter how well done), the audience is waiting for that first kill. That first kill has to be a good ’un to repay the anticipation and grab the audience.
“Wrestlemaniac” makes this initial mistake worse by then finally having the other characters discover the first body only to reveal just a bit of red gloop smeared on the face of an actor who we then clearly see gulp despite being supposedly dead. Not good people. Not good.
Thankfully we do get to see the next kill and it’s a pretty damn good, blood spurting, demise with perhaps the most gratuitous bit of mouth destruction since that truly nasty moment in Argento’s classic “Deep Red”.

The film also manages to pull off a couple of moments of nastiness and cruelty thanks to giving us, in the middle of the generally tongue in cheek chaos, some nice moments of interaction between characters, as they briefly bond in their desire to escape death and put up a fight, where the threat they face is treated with deadly seriousness.
There’s literally buckets of blood later on, and a couple of not too bad gore FX, but the blood is a bit gloopy , the face-ripping sequences (though it’s a nasty idea) are only passable and those first two off-screen deaths (we only have six characters to play with don’t forget) were a big mistake.
But there’s still enough bloody mayhem here to satisfy…just.
And El Mascarado himself makes for an unusual villain given his look and (utterly fantastical) background and although he’s never really scary his brute force means that he makes for a genuinely dangerous foe.

“Wrestlemaniac” is a little bit of (eventually) blood-soaked fluff with a skipped-over plot of much silliness and a short running time that tends to rush things at the end.
But for what it is, for it’s laudable unpretentiousness and for the obviously good time had making it that manages to come out in the final product, it still manages to get a recommendation from me.
So give it a chance and be pleasantly surprised.