Once in a while, you just need the most basic slasher film to clear your mind. Wrestlemaniac is that movie. Also known as El Mascarado Massacre, it’s as simple as this: a group of six kids driving through Mexico to make a porno film stop at a ghost town and start to get their faces ripped off by a masked Mexican wrestler.
Wrestlemaniac has all the best ingredients. It’s only an hour and fifteen minutes. There’s an annoying-as-fuck stud running the show. There’s a smart chubby dude. There’s a stoner dude. There’s a hot mess drunk chick. There’s a sweet, pretty blonde chick (who resembles Naomi Watts). And there’s a sextastic chick with bodacious boobs.
And you don’t have to be a wrestling fan to appreciate the movie. After all, the mask is pretty creepy, and the killer walks and stalks with his bare, beefy chest held high.
One of the first things we see is hot big dick. Seriously. The stud is using a lighter that says Big Dick on the side. And it only gets better from there. There’s girl-on-girl action with boobs. The stud takes his shirt off and joins in. Plus, we get killer POV, a cool setting, atmospheric shots of the ghost town, and the perfect number of genuine jump scares.
At first, it seems like all kills are going to happen off screen, but then suddenly we are treated to some seriously grisly gore, including face peeling and victims being absolutely beaten to a pulp. It’s cringe-inducing and just enough to give the movie an edge. And it all culminates in one of the best chase scenes ever!
The final girl may look like a porn slut bimbo, but this babe has brains, brawn, and boobs, and she uses them all. There’s even some sexy, misogynistic final girl humor during the intense and suspenseful chase. She runs around in heels. Her short shorts get caught on something and she ends up running around in her underwear. And she spread her legs to fit into a tight hiding space, which leaves her tight hiding space wide open.
Hysterical…and hot if you’re into that sort of thing.
And for the rest of us, this guy gets shirtless. You just have to overlook how annoying his character is and his horrible hairstyle in the movie. Yes, actor Adam Huss isn’t always a lesbian loving prick in movies, as you can see….
If you devour slashers like they’re going out of style (bite my tongue), there’s very little not to like about Wrestlemaniac. I personally felt there was one part that tripped up the film a little, and that was a sequence in which the chubby dude, right after discovering they are being pursued by the wrestler, conveniently finds and stops to listen to a tape that gives the wrestler’s back story. The scene blows the pacing momentarily and is pretty unnecessary; the chubby dude already told the urban legend about the wrestler, and the little bit of info we learn could easily have been part of his knowledge of the wrestler.
I also wasn’t crazy about the fact that they pulled the old trick of putting one of the final scenes as the opening of the movie. And you know how it is when you have to struggle to not let the ending of a movie tarnish the fun you had watching it right up to that point? This is one of those times. The conclusion was a bit of a letdown and complicated the climax. But even so, I would definitely put Wrestlemaniac on my go-to list when I want to show something fun at a horror gathering. If you like guys in speedos with your monsters, you could even do it as a double feature with Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies, which I blogged about here.
