Octagon and Mascara Sagrada in Fight to the Death (1992)

Was looking for some Paul Naschy movies on the old TV schedule and saw this was on (again, just one of the benefits of living in an area with a high hispanic population). I looked up the cast and outside of the two stars billed in the title (and what a great serial title that is! Be sure to join us next week, same time, for Octagon and Mascara Sagrada in…Ring of Fire! It makes me imagine a cool film noir starring luchadors, and this actual film I am presently watching will certainly have zero chance of being anywhere near as cool as this fake film I've just imagined. I have a feeling there's a reason why nobody talks about any of the luchador films post 1970s), the rest of the luchadors featured reads like a who's who of early 90s Segunda Caida favorites: Solar, Blue Panther, Fuerza Guerrera, Angel Azteca, La Parka, Universo 2000, Fishman, etc. I mean hot damn right?

We open with some guy picking up 3 ladies at a weird Flintstones-inspired bar. All the decor was fake rock and stone, with all of the tables inset into the floor, so while you walk through the place your feet would be at patrons head level, and you'd have to step down into your seat. One of the ladies is exceptionally foxy (this is likely Lina Santos) and really has the figure to pull off a slutty early 90s cocktail dress. You know she's sexy because when she takes off her sunglasses she bites the earpiece of them. That's like Sexy 101.

Elsewhere, presumably in Mexico, Octagon and Mascara Sagrada pull up to a hitchhiker on matching motorbikes, wearing windbreaker jogging suits the same color as their ring gear. Windbreaker jogging suits can really only look so cool (which is to say, as cool as your nana's retirement community friends) but Octagon's black suit with red and white paneling looks infinitely cooler than Mascara Sagrada's white jogging suit with teal and yellow. He desperately tries to salvage the outfit by wearing Keds style white sneakers with no socks. It somewhat works. Not long after they are working on their bikes in the countryside, where dozens of children are gathered, for reasons. The children are approached by a couple masked goons with guns (!), so our heroes run in to save the day. And this was the kind of shit I was hoping for, as Octagon and MS do great lucha exchanges in a real fight setting, all in the middle of a grassy field. Watching both of them hit body presses off of dirt mounds is too great, and MS works especially hard, even doing a high dropkick. Let me tell you, until you've seen a luchador hit a big dropkick in a field, brother you haven't lived. Once they sufficiently beat up the goons, many horseback cops with machine guns ride in and escort the goons off. Now, this field appeared to be very much in the middle of nowhere, so I have no clue why 6 cops on horseback happened to be riding by with machine guns and assault rifles, other than Mexico. I think the answer to many questions I will have in this film will be "Because Mexico".

To treat themselves for rescuing hundreds of orphans, our heroes go on a long and improbably gay hang gliding excursion. They literally ride their bikes up to a place that sells motorized hang gliders (the kind where you sit on a seat while flying, making it impossible to look like anything but a dingus), and we get a real time hang gliding sesh, while a twinkling piano instrumental (think the first 10 seconds of Tears for Fears "Head Over Heels") plays on a loop. I'm sure this movie was made as a way to market a new generation of stars, and what better way to get guys over than some pastel jogging suit hang gliding?

~El Tornado, Universo Dos Mil, & Fishman vs. Solar, Mascara Sagrada, & Octagon

Never seen Tornado before. He has a cool mask with a cyclone (or derp, possibly a tornado?) going up one of the cheeks and over both eyeholes. Sagrada is super fast and spry here, really funny that I saw a match just last week (a 2014 match) where he's literally twice the size as he is here. Octagon throws a cool spinning armdrag and Universo bumps big for him. Sadly there's no mat stuff and Solar is kinda portrayed as the weenie of his team (since he's teamed with the two stars of the movie) so mainly just takes abuse from the rudos. Just noticed that the referee is a super young and slender Tirantes. I really dug Sagrada throughout this whole match. He broke out a bunch of neat things (cool somersault dive from the top, big crossbody from the top to the floor, a cool move where he jumped up for a headscissors but just clapped Tornado's head with his legs). Tornado was a guy I've never seen before but took some big bumps, knew how to put Octagon over, and seemed like a good catcher. And I've never seen Universo so slim! Fun stuff all around.

Those three ladies from the beginning of the movie are back at some drug lord's (I assume) compound, and Octagon and MS are busting in on that shit. Octagon just jumps over a brick wall in his jogging suit, but Sagrada comes in driven by fucking boat! And he's standing on the front of the speed boat while some other sucker drives it! Just picture a boat approaching some sort of island fortress mansion, being driven by a shirtless man with a big fluffy mullet, with Sagrada standing on the bow of the speed boat, white/yellow/aquamarine windbreaker suit fluttering in the breeze. Onita fucked up by not riding the boat out to the ring in the same way. These rich assholes aren't gonna know what hit 'em.

Before the next match we cut to outside the arena and the three ladies are all in black catsuits, and they all have their hair up so you know business is about to be handled. They're getting tons of equipment strapped to them in a van, so I assume some sort of espionage or diamond heist is about to take place. The guys equipping them with their headsets and gear are also wearing black, much of it leather. However, they are parked directly under the one streetlamp in the entire alley, so really I have to wonder about their commitment to truly blending in with the night.

~La Parka, Fuerza Guerrera & Blue Panther vs. Angel Azteca, Mascara Sagrada & Octagon

Pepe Casas and Tirantes are back as the refs for this one. This match is more cut up than the other one, and it's intercut with diamond heist scenes. This match was much more of an Octagon showcase, with Panther bumping all over for his cool leg drag headscissors. Fuerza stooges all over for him as well, which is none too shocking for anybody who's watched 1992 AAA. Skinny Parka takes a real high backdrop bump, and Octagon does a bunch of silly bulldogs (the kind where you gently tap the back of the guys head) that BP tries his damnedest to sell. Match falls apart into a DQ as Fuerza gets his mask twisted backwards and accidentally hits Parka, who starts kicking Fuerza's ass all over the ring. Parka actually took a crazy amount of backdrops in this, so I'm sure this was a joy for him to film. I especially love the one where he essentially takes a Jerry bump but on a backdrop, so he hit Sagrada's shoulder with his ankle and then flips extra high up and over.

We get another extended hang gliding sequence, and this time the score has a looped sound effect of a woman's pleasure-filled moans. So that happened. "That last hang gliding scene was too gay! We need to sex this one up a bit more, in a suuuuper hetero way. ADD THE SEX MOANZ!" It's all done as Octagon and Sagrada are scoping out the evil drug lord's beach-front mansion, so they just casually hang glide around his pad while the drug lord and all his buddies are just out on his deck watching them hang glide. Bold move, heroes.

The ending of this (pretty flat) movie is…pretty flat. As Octagon and Sagrada scuba dive to retrieve the jewels (and that must have been joyous to film a scuba sequence while wearing a lucha mask) and do the old swaparoo and trading out the trash bag of jewels (right?) with a trash bag of empty jewel cases. When the drug lords go to sell their jewels and find all the cases to be empty, our heroes spring into action and do more awesome lucha sequences in a field. Nobody can ever convince me that a giant crossbody off the top of a car is less cool than one off the top rope into a ring.

So that's that. Again, there's probably a reason why you don't hear about lucha movies from the 90s.