The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy (1958)

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

This film has, you must concede, a magnificent title. And it was, I correctly assumed, the perfect film for the Friday of a knackering week where I wanted something very undemanding.

I’m nearly always ridiculously anal about not watching either sequels or remakes until I’ve seen the original, and this bonkers ‘50s Mexican horror/sci-fi insanity is not only the third film in a trilogy but more than half the film is taken up with footage from the first two- and there’s an absurd amount of narrated recapping before anything happens. But, and let’s not pretend otherwise, I’m not going to see the first two.

This is an easily watched hour of hilarious runaround with absurd concepts (past life regression! A hilarious mad scientist called Dr Krupp! A hilariously ‘50s robot that only appears in the last ten minutes and from which the hilarious Dr Krupp intends to make a mechanical army to do his bidding!), but underneath all this low camp nonsense is a pretty standard Egyptian mummy film with the rather cool variation that, with this being a Mexican film, the mummies, pyramids and cultural trappings are all Aztec rather than Egyptian. That adds something culturally cool into the mix, however tokenistic it may be.

The film is a load of old tosh, of course. But it’s fun and quick to watch.