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!
Miguel M. Delgado’s Bellas de Noche is the movie that kicked off the entire ficheras explosion—a raw, neon-soaked slice of urban nightlife that captured a very specific, pulsating heartbeat of Mexico City in the mid-seventies. It’s the first of the Cine de Fichera sexploitation movies, which is a subgenre of Mexican cinema, a mixture of Cine de Rumberas and the commedia sexy all’italiana.
The title refers to women hired by cabaret owners to sit, dance and drink with customers. The women earned tokens (fichas) for every drink they persuaded a customer to buy, which could later be cashed in. They were the spiritual successors to the glamorous rumberas of the 1940s and 50s, but operating in a much seedier, sweatier and desperate reality.
Germán “El Bronco” Torres (Jorge Rivero) is a down-on-his-luck boxer who just lost his fighting license and has to hustle for a living. He ends up working as a bouncer at the El Pirulí cabaret. It’s a chaotic den of vice where he falls hard for Carmen (Sasha Montenegro), a kind-hearted fichera trying to make her way through a world of limited options.
Meanwhile, El Bronco crosses paths with a struggling pimp known as El Vaselinas (Lalo El Mimo), who is drowning in gambling debts to local gangsters. To help El Vaselinas pay off his dues, El Bronco sets up a sleazy trap at the club: he helps a local taxi driver named Raúl get the keys to a private room so Raúl can seduce his unsuspecting girlfriend. The catch? The poor girl trapped in the crossfire is none of El Bronco’s own chaste sister, Lupita (Leticia Perdigón ). Mix in musical numbers by the legendary Sonora Santanera, turf wars between aging club owners and a cavalcade of desperate characters and you’ve got a frantic, comedic melodrama that moves at a hundred miles an hour.
You can watch this on Tubi.
