So I started watching a lot of Mexican wrestler movies.  I mean, a lot.  It's not like I'd never seen one before and got carried away by the thrill of discovery.  They just all of a sudden got really good to me.  When you're an obsessive-compulsive film geek like myself, this will happen to you sometimes.  You'll immerse yourself in some particular genre and, over time, find that overexposure has rejiggered your brain chemistry - that elements of the movies that were once just predictable conventions have become endorphin triggers, bringing you back again and again to experience the enveloping, womb-like sense of rightness and comfort they provide.  Perhaps recognizing this as an appropriate circumstance for shame, I began to feel that I should harness this obsession to some kind of productive activity.  So I began to write about the experience, documenting my thoughts, my opinions... my feelings about each of the films I viewed.  This resulted in the collection of capsule reviews you'll find on this site, which now cover almost every film in all of the major Mexican wrestling film series.  Which is a hell of a lot.

At some point in all my obsessive watching and cataloging of lucha movies, it occurred to me that I also liked other kinds of movies, and that it might be nice to write about those as well.  This train of thought lead to the assortment of more lavishly illustrated, feature-length reviews congregating under the title "Other Reviews" on the site's home page.  Of course, many of these movies, like lucha films, feature adults in masks and skin-tight costumes perpetrating low budget spectacle while speaking in languages that I don't understand - and what that says about me I won't speculate upon.  But the general idea was to present a broader view of world popular cinema from the past, and hopefully, as I continue to contribute reviews in this area, I will accomplish that to some extent.  As you might glean from the reviews, a lot of these movies are personal favorites of mine, which is the result of me not having the time or interest to write in depth about films that I don't like or am just all "meh" about.

As for the lucha movie reviews, I should point out that they're extremely subjective - not to mention indicative of a not inconsiderable amount of self-involvement on the part of the author - and often very light on technical background and history (though, to compensate, I have included links to the IMDB listing for each film).  If you're looking for a more scholarly take, I would recommend showing tail to this site and heading directly here, here, and here  - as any accurate information I provide would probably have come from one of those sources anyway.  Furthermore, while other cult movie sites basically provide you with a reverse-engineered version of a movie's screenplay, I myself am not too big on plot summary.  Being a fairly promiscuous B movie thrill-seeker, if you tell me about a movie that has a cat and dog having a kung fu fight in it, I don't need to know why they're having a kung fu fight to know that I want to see that movie.  The fact that I also viewed many of these films on unsubtitled Spanish language dvds means that any summary I might attempt would be riddled with inaccuracies, since I had no idea what the characters were saying.  Still, I do try to give a flavor of the movies discussed - while touching upon what I consider to be their high points - and hopefully as a result provide something that will be somehow useful to the less discriminating lucha fans among you, as well as a novice-friendly introduction to the genre for the innocents.

Having made clear all of the things that this site does and doesn't have to offer, I hope that, if you find yourself here, it at least provides you with a moment's amusement.  More importantly, however, I hope that it affords you the opportunity to pause and reflect upon your own life and, in so doing, perhaps see that life in a bit brighter cast.  Because, unlike me, you don't have to watch absolutely every blessed Mexican wrestling film ever made.  And I do have to.  It's my job... apparently.