The future was never easy for Mexico. It was something hecho en elsewhere as Mexico gazed on its past, dwelling on pre-Cortesian glories gone. North of the border, the United States developed the technologies of modernity, even exporting theories and images of the future. What here was an indigenous genre, the science fiction film, was in Mexico an appropriated one in which its own popular artifacts and idiosyncratic myths were grafted to an imported trope. A robot in mortal battle with an Aztec mummy; a masked wrestler repelling an invasion from Mars; Venusian babes in bathing suits falling for a charro from Chihuahua-often these films had bottom-of-the barrel budgets, meaning they had to skimp on the pie-plate props and the otherworldly attire as well. But beyond the rayguns, spandex space suits, and trashcan robots, mass conceptions about sex roles, technology, machismo, tradition, and xenophobia ooze from these films like an alien Blob. Enormously popular throughout the fifties and sixties, these wry and engaging sci-fi flicks say a little about Mexploitation and a lot about the popular imagination.
El sexo fuerte (The Stronger Sex), a rousing film about two unsuspecting men shipwrecked upon the shores of Eden, an Art Deco kingdom ruled by beautiful amazons, screens on June 25 in BAM's Gallery B as part of the Friday evening program L@TE.