Just Who Are Those Masked Men?

In the 1973 film “Santo y Blue Demon Contra Dr. Frankenstein,” two masked Mexican wrestlers (Santo and Blue Demon) grapple in the ring, using a fast, acrobatic and theatrical style of wrestling known as lucha libre. Afterward, they don sports jackets, and, still in their masks, dine out with their girlfriends. After a little smooching with the ladies (still in the masks, always in the masks), they race muscle cars through the streets, fell some female zombies, free some kids from a burning orphanage and prevent Dr. Frankenstein from swapping Santo’s brain with the dead Mrs. Frankenstein’s. Then they wrestle some more and go have a cocktail. Or maybe the orphans were in “Santo Contra Los Zombies.”

It doesn’t really matter, as the 150-plus films known collectively as Cine Luchador, made between the 1940s and 1980s and starring the masked Mexican wrestlers known as los luchadores, hinge on fantasy and camp, not deep story-lines.

“Cine Luchador is part of a genre called ‘churros.’ The films are meant to be sweet, tasty and quickly consumed,” says Rita Gonzalez, Director of Program Development for Latin-American Cinemateca of Los Angeles (LACLA), which will host a Cine Luchador festival today and Friday at the Palace Theater. While LACLA’s previous events have tended toward classic Mexican films, Gonzalez says they wanted to “broaden things a bit” and tap into an appetite for lucha libre (“free fighting”) she’s seen growing in L.A.

“I started noticing two or three years ago the popularity of Mexican wrestling with a non-Mexican audience, things like masked wrestling at clubs in Hollywood,” she says. “Cine Luchador taps into the interests of young subcultures in L.A.; they’re really drawn to the iconic image of the anonymous Mexican superhero.” As for the films themselves, Gonzalez says they have no American equivalent.

“In the ‘40s, Cine Luchador started out sort of serious and melodramatic, styled after the downtrodden boxer-solitary sports figure fighting a personal battle,” she says. “But over the years, it began to cannibalize different genres--horror, sci-fi, whatever was popular. And the later ones from the ‘70s get really hallucinatory, with the luchadores fighting Martians and Nazis and lesbian vampires. The element of kitsch seems to be international and is appreciated by everyone.”

“Lucha libre has inspired millions of comic books, over a hundred movies and made national heroes of the wrestlers. And yet when I got involved in lucha, I couldn’t find anything in English,” says Keith Rainville, who since 1996 has published the ‘zine From Parts Unknown, devoted to all things lucha. “Seriously, it only takes one viewing of eight guys in masks beating the crap out of each other to become totally hooked.”

Live lucha libre matches are always between goods guys (tecnicos) and bad guys (rudos), and there’s never any mistaking who’s who. “The fights are completely partisan; it’s always a morality play,” says Rainville. “The good guys come out gleaming, kissing babies, shaking hands. The bad guys are obvious villains, snarling and riling up the crowd. The two get in the ring and the good guy always wins. Or if he doesn’t, he wins the next week.”

Like Gonzalez, Rainville has noticed a distinct desire for lucha libre within the local arts community and the subsequent spawning of new lucha-influenced works, from the sublime--the fourth of Rafael Navarro’s graphic novels about the Chandleresque lucha detective Sonambulo, “Sleep of the Just,” has just been published--to the silly: This past Saturday, Kids’ WB launched the new animated series “Mucha Lucha!”

The biggest addition to the local lucha scene is Lucha VaVoom, a live event that takes place Wednesday at the Mayan Theater. Billed as a “Sexo and Violenca Extravaganza!” the show will feature lucha legend Mil Mascaras wrestling El Hijo del Santo (son of Santo, lucha’s biggest star who, when he passed away in 1984, was buried in his mask); burlesque and wrestling by the girls of Velvet Hammer; a “Mighty Masked Midget Match;” a DJ spinning lucha-centric music; comic Blaine Capatch, host of Comedy Central’s “Beat the Geeks.”

“And we arranged with the car club the Misfits to drive the luchadores to the theater in these fully tricked-out, hydraulic, flame-throwing lowriders,” says Liz Fairbairn, who organized Lucha VaVoom. A costume designer and former manager for the band GWAR, Fairbairn has been a lucha fan since two luchadoras (female masked wrestlers) landed in her lap during a match in Ensenada.

“They’re beating on each other, and the entire arena is screaming at me to hit them back,” says Fairbairn. She’s sitting in the stands at Lucha Libre Mexicana, live lucha libre matches that take place on Sundays in a ring set up behind the Anaheim Marketplace. “Lucha’s been around forever, but underground--with gringos at least,” says Fairbairn, as “Bad to the Bone” blares from a makeshift sound-system, and eight buff men in varicolored masks and velvet capes and neon-pink wigs enter the ring and start preening and trash-talking. “Really, it’s the coolest thing I’ve come across since punk rock.”

The crowd of about 100, mostly Latino kids, heckle a white wrestler with shouts of “bo-li-llo!” (“white bread!”), a skinny one with “super-flaco!” (“super-skinny!”). The fighters grapple and grunt, pratfall and catcall, and acrobatically bounce off the ropes. The crowd cheers its favorites, and when the fights end, mills around the luchadores for autographs--and to touch the superheroes in the flesh.

“There’s no reason why lucha can’t make it in the States,” says Rainville, who believes lucha libre, with its carnival element and family appeal, is about to give the bad-boy WWE a run for its money. “When a six-foot muscle man in a gold-and-black costume steps into the ring and fights an evil green ghost, if that can’t turn you back into a kid, I don’t know what can.”