You know, for as long as I've come back to this blog over the years (just to prove to you foul scoundrels I'm not dead), I always try to do so with a topic or facet of pop culture that I personally find interesting or unique, particularly anything of the obscure or niche variety. With this in mind, I bring to your attention a movie buried in the deep recesses of low-budget Mexican exploitation cinema, the incomparable BATWOMAN.
Bold! Noble! Enchanting! Audacious! Invincible!
As the keen observers among us might already know, this.... wasn't officially licensed by DC Comics. Instead, this late '60s production is something of a "worlds colliding" type situation, as it's a perfectly silly blend of two of the era's biggest fads, depending on which area of the world you lived in. In 1968 the Adam West Batman television series was on its last leg as it limped through it's third and final season (that is if you don't count New Batman Adventures...but why would you want to??), though burnout had not quite reached other parts of the globe outside of the US, as evidenced by the eagerness with which Filipino entrepreneurs endeavored to use Batman in a good slew of loose adaptations around the same time, each wackier and more over the top than the last.
The same mentality regarding adaptations, then, can be reasonably assumed to be the modus operandi of the men and women that saw The Batwoman through to it's completion. Now, concerning where Mexico was cinematically while this Bat-Mania was still ongoing; In the late '60s, masked folk heroes like El Santo and Blue Demon were captivating the Mexican public's attention through their daring (and amusingly cheap) exploits on the silver screen, battling Universal horrors to aliens and robots and beyond. It stood to reason the camp and colorful world of Batman and comic books in general would translate quite well to these garish affairs, and this is where director René Cardona and writer Alfredo Salazar hit the nail directly on the head and tapped into a force of surreal, bizarre, bad filmmaking that becomes all at once equal parts stupid and highly captivating.
So, concerning the plot...well, it's pretty straightforward, so please don't blame me for sounding relatively brief with my description of this film. Robert Cañedo plays Dr. Eric Williams, a nutter of scientist who is harvesting the glands of wrestlers (?) in order to revive a sea creature. To do...his....bidding, I guess? Fuck man, I dunno. Either way, the mad Doctor is hurting Batwoman's (Maura Monti) breadwinning considering she herself is a wrestler and it would be awful hard to wrestle without opponents, so it's up to our scantily-clad caped crusader to get to the bottom of this mystery. As you might expect, this film's greatest strength lies in that this framing provides a metaphorical jungle gym for various shenanigans to pollute our television screens in the most glorious way possible.
Batwoman punches, kicks, throws and awkwardly tumbles her way through hordes of half-assing villains and goons, all who try and fail to keep our heroine down. When Batwoman isn't out crusading, scenes alternate between Batwoman further investigating the proceedings and Dr. Williams hamming it up to the extreme, chewing his scenery and making sure the jabronis in the nosebleed seats could understand that "evil scientist" was his gimmick. It's kind of odd, charming, and amusing all at the same time. I appreciated Batwoman's more rough n' tumble approach to brawling, far too often (and in the proper Batman show) any time a woman fought her "moves" we're typically relegated to graceful, dance-like flittering, a "cutesy' way of fighting that almost unbearably reeks of it's era. Batwoman, on the other hand, approaches combat with the same level of readiness and courage of any of her contemporaries in the likes of El Santo.
Is Batwoman revolutionary? No. Is it good cinema? Also no. But despite it not having an original thought in it's head, this film has undeniable charm. A knowing spirit and an energy that makes the proceedings feel light and fun, it embodies the same cheeky attitude that the Adam West show pioneered and perfects the goofier aspects of Mexican superhero cinema, a marriage of concepts that results in a deliriously entertaining and fun film that isn't afraid to boldly present itself as a harrowing action/horror/adventure, and it's this genuine heart that makes The Batwoman worthy of a movie night.
It's kind of astonishing how little this film is really talked about online. It has references in places that highlight these kinds of movies, but it has no Wikipedia. No TV Tropes. It's IMDB page is sparse, as is it's Rotten Tomatoes. I understand that should this film get more attention there's every chance DC will finally bring the hammer down and instigate legal action, and then again they may not. All I ask of you is that if you have about 80 minutes to spare and maybe a bowl or two to kill, The Batwoman is a great time and you'll be left wondering why you didn't see it sooner. It's on Tubi!!
7.5/10
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