Macabre Legends of the Colony (1974) User Reviews (3)

This luchador film is a bit different than the usual.

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 10 January 2021]

During the 1960 until even today, Mexican luchador (wrestler) movies have been huge business and many hundred of them have been made...perhaps even more. In these films, these masked wrestlers are usually heroes who battle the forces of evil...often in the form of aliens, monsters, zombies or just the run of the mill evil megalomaniacs bent on world domination! Seeing the masked wrestlers taking on these characters is definitely a sight to see and those unfamiliar with these odd films are in for a surprise when they see their first!

"Macabre Legends of the Colony" ("Leyendas Macabras de la Colonia") is a most unusual luchador film. While the do end up fighting against an evil witch, everything else about this film is unfamiliar territory for lovers of the genre.

The story begins with Tinieblas ('Darkness') finding a creepy painting in an antique shop and buying it...even after the owner says it's haunted and the last few who bought it promptly returned it! But apparently Tinieblas is an idiot and so he gets it anyway.

After a LONG wrestling match by luchador film standards (and they almost always feature one or two such matches), Tinieblas brings home a couple women as well as his luchador pals, El Fantasma Blanco ('The White Ghost') and Mil Máscaras ('Thousand Masks'....by far the most prolific of the three in films). During their party, the painting begins emitting smoke and soon they find themselves in 16th century Mexico! What's next? Well, apart from the witch, you'll just have to watch it yourself to find out for yourself.

The production values of this film are actually a bit better than usual for the genre as is the story. By luchador film standards, it's actually a bit sophisticated and clever....and suffers less from crappy make-up and masks than usual. Now I am NOT saying it's a great film...but it is better than usual and not laughable like most of the movies. Overall, silly but enjoyable and unique...and I like unique.

MAGIC!

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 17 May 2020]

Tinieblas - wearing an awesome brown suit - buys an ancient painting of a dead woman, despite the warning that it is haunted, because he thinks it'll help him with the ladies.

After a trios match with his partners El Fantasma Blanco (The White Ghost) and Mil Mascaras, they head off to a party with two ladies

Soon, they're battling a witch played by Lorena Velazquez, who was Thorina queen of the vampires in Santo Contra las Mujeres Vampiros. Her mother is the woman in the haunted painting and she's a living dead woman who demands human sacrifices in her unholy name. She also has an army of conquistadors (no, not Jose Estrada and Jose Luis Rivera) and Aztec warriors who end up coming to our time to wrestle a trios match against our heroes. And oh yeah - she claims to be La Llorona!

I learned from this movie that while Mil has many, many masks, he is no master of history. As they go back in time, he says that they are sometime between 1512 and 1520. The Spanish have already conquered Mexico in this timeline, but that didn't happen in our reality for many years aftward. Oh that Mil.

Your life is not complete until you watch Mexican wrestlers in all their finery battle rubber suited demonic soldiers.

This insanity comes from Arturo Martinez, who also had another film of Spanish zombies called The Mummies of San Angel. This one has a much better title, which translates as Macabre Legends of the Colony.

Time traveling Luchadores

[Pencho15 · 3/10 · 11 March 2013]

Mexican luchadores travel back in time and find themselves in colonial Mexico, where they try to get back to the present battling witches, Spanish conquistadores and Aztec warriors. Simply by reading the plot of this surreal film you have one certainty, there is absolutely no way this can be a good movie. Now, there are two kinds of bad films; those that are simply badly done and offer no reason to watch them, and those that are bad but turn out to be a lot of fun due to their inconsistencies and absurd. When you start watching Leyendas Macabras de la Colonia you are hoping to get this second kind of bad, but due to terrible acting, a plot full of holes and the attempt to make fun of itself it turns out to be a film of the first kind.

After opening with the obligatory wrestling scene, which is unnecessary, with ten minutes in which no story or character is developed, the luchadores Tinieblas, Mil Máscaras and El Fantasma Blanco join two ladies in the house of Tinieblas to celebrate their victory. There a cursed painting takes them back in time. That should be the cue for the mindless fun to start, but after some promising minutes in which the three masked men quickly dispatch a whole group of Spanish soldiers, and after we find Lorena Velázquez is an evil witch, the movie is incapable of keeping any interest.

Even for an absurd film like this the plot has too many wholes, we never know why the hell the painting was cursed, there is never a moment in which either the time travelers or the people from the past get some surprise about their situation, we spend a lot of time with the luchadores just walking around a house looking for a way in, we have to wonder why the hell Mil Máscaras and El Fantasma Blanco stand as simple watchers while his partner is about to be sacrificed, and after they manage to return to their time we miss any resolution to the story as they leave a wounded hero in the clutches of the witch which apparently can't be stopped, what happens to that? No one will know.

The acting is of course to bad, the main characters at least learned their lines, but there are a bunch of extras with nothing to do, the Aztec warriors are a bunch of fat people walking around in loincloths which makes a humiliating clothing for them. A group of Spanish conquistadores captured by the witch just walk to their cell with absolutely no expression in their faces, as if getting captured by supernatural forces was a daily event for them. And the two ladies that join the luchadores in their surreal trip (while given the chance to break the painting and taking them back to their time) serve no other purpose than showing up their bodies. Evidently they did not care to find real actresses for the roles and they just signed the first big breasted women that agreed to wear mini skirts and tight clothes.

All of this would be forgettable and funny if the film took itself seriously, but Leyendas Macabras de la Colonia commits the biggest sin a B movie can make, it tries to make fun of itself, therefore killing the chance of being actually amusing. For example the constant jokes about Tinieblas being a womanizer and a final wrestling match between Tinieblas and three over weighted Aztec warriors. A great B movie like Plan 9 From Outer Space are classics because they are in fact trying to make a great film, and all their mistakes are unintended, when a bad film is done with full conscience that it is bad and when it tries to exploit that to get laughs it usually fails as in this case.

This film could have been an absolutely classic for bad film lovers, but unfortunately the only thing that's good about it, is what we imagine we are going to see before we actually sit to watch the film. That's really a shame.