Week 8 (Aug 9 – 15) – Trash-Mex picks
Hey, Mario Almada was in over 300 movies, someone’s gotta help us find the good ones! Since 2010 Armando Hernandez has been one of the only people discussing Mexican genre pictures through his website trashmex dot com and the Trash-Mex podcast with co-host Joey Diaz. There’s ORO AUTÉNTICO on this list!
Remember years ago when aliens casually dropped an interstellar killer whale off on Earth? No? Well, director René Cardona III remembers. Before Keiko became a household name leaping over fences to freedom in the American heartland, he was clocking in as an extraterrestrial sleeper cell agent in Mexico. The plot—if you can legally call a series of disconnected sequences a plot—is basically a Twilight Zone episode written during a fever dream. Keiko is an alien scout sent to monitor human behavior. Fast-forward a bit, and his alien brethren return to exfil him because he’s stuck in a Mexican water park and looking a bit under the weather. Throw in a school field trip, the fact that every human has an alien doppelganger (making us the dark side of this before Us), telepathic communication so that the actors don’t have to voice-over dialogue and telekinesis that just happens and has no relevance to anything and guess what? You have a hearty stew. Something like albóndigas.
This movie is also a liar, starting with the title. Keiko is never in danger. If anyone is in danger, it’s the children, but even then, Keiko just floated by while a human actually had to rescue a drowning kid. And sure, half the runtime feels like an extended, highly confusing promotional video for a Mexican amusement park’s dolphin and whale show. But Cardona III also made Vacation of Terror, so I cut him a lot of slack. Is he the Mexican Lamberto Bava? El Hijo del Mario? Juan Old Junior?
Hugo Stiglitz made this and Tintorera… Tiger Shark. He made a lot more, but that’s the movie I’d show this with.
