by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"

Having finished principle photography, the remaining crew returns to the van. Al, unfortunately, has forgotten that the reason they stopped at this ghost town was because he destroyed the van with his jackassery. The good news is that Dallas's dad was a mechanic, and at least a portion of his skill seems to have rubbed off on her. Not enough for her to know that you don't let your waist-length hair fall into the engine you're working on, but maybe she can fix the van anyway.

Faith in her ability starts to diminish when nightfall rolls around. Debbie heads off in search of the missing Daisy and Jimbo, Steve heads off in search of Debbie, and Al heads off in search of Steve, leaving Dallas to continue working on the engine. Maybe the repairs are taking so long has to do with the fact that she has no tools, apart from a flashlight.

Suddenly, all the lights in the town kick on. Al is concerned, but Steve is impressed, at least initially. They hook back up with Debbie and hear a strange sound, like metal being dragged along concrete. Steve remarks, "there's someone else here!" Yes, Steve, we had an entire scene devoted to you explaining that, complete with video evidence. Maybe it's the electrician making sure that the ghost town is always properly illuminated at night.

In spite of Steve's boasts about navigating a D&D maze in record time, Debbie is the one leading the search party. She discovers Jimbo sitting against a wall. But there's neither pot, nor empty baggies of Doritos anywhere. Something must be wrong.

Good lord! Someone covered his face in raspberry jam! The fiends!

I'm sorry, I was mistaken about that. Steve and Al burst in and exclaim that someone has removed Jimbo's face. Steve knows exactly who did it: El Mascarado. You see, when a luchador defeats an opponent, the opponent's mask is removed, thus shaming the defeated man into retirement. And boy, is there egg on Jimbo's face. Wherever it is.

Al throws a sissy tantrum and makes a run for it. He gets as far as the hallway before he spots the silhouette of El Mascarado, then it's back to the room with Jimbo and the others. When El Mascarado follows him and starts beating down the door, he retreats further, hopping out a window and leaving Steve and Debbie to hold the door shut.

Eventually, El Mascarado gives up trying to break down the door, giving Steve and Debbie the chance to catch up with Al. Al, in the between time, has barricaded himself inside a church. He's so terrified that he can't even do coke the right way, instead wiping a little on the corners of his greasy moustache.

Steve and Debbie's pleas for Al to open the door become more urgent when they spot El Mascarado. They yell and pound on the door, but Al refuses to let them in. Al fails to notice that their pounding has pushed a nail further and further through the door. He fails to notice because the nail doesn't appear when the camera pulls back, plus he probably wasn't expecting a few panicky slaps on a door to somehow push a single nail through it, but all that doesn't take away from the importance of this nail.

Steve and Debbie eventually give up and flee, El Mascarado beats on the door, but he eventually gives up as well. Looks like Al is finally out of the woods.

A porn director forgetting about the backdoor. What irony.

Ouch. Not only did the nail reappear between frames, but it worked itself out of the wood by a couple more inches. Far enough for El Mascarado to use it to give Al an impromptu tracheotomy.

But a small puncture wound in the neck is a pretty weak kill for a horror movie, especially when you're offing the most annoying character in your film. El Mascarado understands this, and after tossing Al around the room a bit, he's ready for round 2.

This wrestling move is called "La Dentista de Tijuana". Whatever can shut this guy up is fine by me, whether it be a horrifying sight or a mouthful of broken teeth. The sound of eggs being smashed off-camera is a bit of a distraction, but hey, it's a party.

After several more tosses, Al lands near enough to the backdoor that he can just barely crawl away...

Into the cemetery. And he crawls right onto a grave. How dead is this guy?

Really dead.

Here's where you get to see how the movie got the tagline "Let the face off begin"...

Just as Steve said, El Mascarado rips the face off his defeated opponent, in this case a sleazy porn director whose very existence was a crime against nature. Now, though, he's finally dead. The movie could've ended right here, and I would've called it a triumph.

But no, there are other victims scurrying about.

Steve and Debbie have found their way to a house with blacked-out windows, and a huge stack of boxes labeled "El Mascarado." Steve decides to look in the boxes for clues about the wrestler, while Debbie decides to scratch some of the black paint off the windows so El Mascarado will be able to see inside.

"This is about El Mascarado!"

Really? It's about El Mascarado? The reel you found in the envelope labeled "El Mascarado", which you found in the box labeled "El Mascarado", next to a half-dozen other boxes, all of which are labeled "El Mascarado"? That's incredible! I thought it was going to be about Riki-fucking-dozan!

The tape, entirely in Spanish, explains the origins of El Mascarado. Steve, who knows a smattering of Spanish, periodically stops the tape to translate the important parts:

- In treating El Mascarado, the doctors gave him "like fifty lobotomies and it didn't help for shit!" For the sake of comparison, a pumpkin receives around twenty lobotomies before becoming a jack-o-lantern.

- The residents of La Sangre de Dios were used as "test subjects" in some way that apparently lead to their deaths.

- El Mascarado's only goal is to destroy, and that one should not enter "el quadrilatero"

- El Mascarado follows "the rules of wrestling"

The last bit gets Steve especially excited. If El Mascarado truly follows "the rules of wrestling" (apparently there are explicit rules in that sport regarding the removal of your opponent's face), then defeating him should be easier than they thought.

Steve is so confident that he doesn't even think much of El Mascarado punching down the door. Debbie, on the other hand, convinces him that they need to leave. They flee into some kind of small mine tunnel where Steve explains the plan: according to the rules of wrestling, a wrestler whose mask is removed is finish. Therefore, "we take his mask off, he's done." Well that's a relief. Here I thought they would have to do something difficult like kill him. Instead, all they need to do is incapacitate him and remove the mask that has been carefully tied onto his head. Piece of cake, or as they say in Mexico, "un pedazo de flan".

The particulars of Steve's plan will have to wait, however, as El Mascarado has followed them into the tunnel. They run to the other end and throw a pair of double doors into a pitch black room. Eventually, Steve locates the light switch.

They've inadvertently stumbled into El Mascarado's lair. And there's no way out, save back through the long, narrow tunnel that El Mascarado is currently walking down. Yep, things are looking mighty grim for these two.

Suddenly it dawns on Steve: the four oil drums with the rope tying them together; they form a wrestling ring, aka "the squared circle", aka el quadrilatero! First of all, if that is supposed to be a ring, and if El Mascarado is supposed to follow the rules of wrestling, I'm pretty sure he would've been counted out by now. Second, Steve starts looking for potential weapons around the room, but he completely ignores the folding chair against the wall. Has this guy never seen a pro wrestling match?

But foreign objects are a surefire way to get yourself disqualified. That means there's only one thing left to try:

Steve pulls out his El Tigre mask and laces it up. Sure, his flabby body may not match up to that of a mad wrestler who was pulling off faces while Steve was talking his babysitter's ear off about lucha libre, but Steve has seen a lot of wrestling footage. Surely it will translate into real world experience.

What follows is a beating so heinous and one-sided that they can't even begin to show it. Okay, truthfully, they probably just didn't want to show how El Mascarado wasn't nearly as tall as you would expect him to be, especially compared to Steve and Debbie. Rey Misterio Sr., the wrestler who portrays El Mascarado, is 5'9". Not all that short, but certainly not "monstrous killer wrestler" tall.

In the midst of Steve's sound beating, Debbie tries to escape. Only her legs quit working for some reason, so she tries to crawl away.

Oh, cheeky photography. Well, best to get it from Debbie while we can. She won't be much to look at once El Mascarado is finished with her.

El Mascarado takes Debbie and delivers the slowest, gentlest backbreaker I've ever seen. Steve, meanwhile, is fine, though covered in blood. He's not bleeding, but maybe the floor is just really bloody. Anyway, he watches with passing interest as his friend's back is broken, then once he's sure El Mascarado is ready to fight again, he makes his move.

Things are going pretty well for Steve, right up until El Mascarado starts fighting back. He swats Steve like a fly, then gives him a nasty arm breaker. Then El Mascarado decides to add insult to injury, unleashing a flurry of wrestling kicks (i.e., kicks that coincide with a stomp on the ground) before going for the coup de grace:

That move probably doesn't feel so good without a springy mat to land on. At first, it looks like El Mascarado is going for the face rip, but no, he's merely pinning Steve and providing his own three-count. Another victory for El Mascarado! Time to celebrate.

I guess he needed to warm up before trying to remove Steve's mask. At any rate, the muscle under the skin effect is looking better each time.

There's still plenty more of Wrestlemaniac to see!
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