Attack of the Mayan Mummy

In 1957 a neat little movie called The Aztec Mummy was made in Mexico.It was the forerunner of 3 more movies in the Aztec Mummy series.While these weren't classics they were fun to watch.

In 1964 Jerry Warren bought the US rights to the film Aztec Mummy. He cut out 45 minutes of the original movie.Why he did this is anybody's guess. He replaced the footage with 45 minutes of scientists & newspaper men TALKING!!These "characters" were inserted because they were cheap and were only used as exposition!

Remember ol' skip's rule of thumb:Using the first five minutes having actors doing exposition and you have a bad movie on your hands. Try sitting through the first 30 minutes of this agonizing film of truly mind numbing, boring "conversation". Truly cinematic Hell.

I would love to see the original movie again but alas it is probably lost to us now.This "cut" is the WORST movie in memory. Rhino just released it. Stay away from this. You've been warned.

Jerry Warren strikes again: the notorious schlock filmmaker takes a bunch of footage from Mexicos' "The Aztec Mummy", and adds interminable scenes, dialogue, and narration of his own. The "story" deals with an expedition to a pyramid, and experiments into regression and reincarnation. A woman named Ann Taylor recalls her past life, after which various scientists and treasure hunters go in search of gold.

In the meantime, in Warrens' excruciating new footage, characters rattle on about the plot for what seems like *days*. This viewer would confess to being fairly easygoing, undemanding, and not too hard to entertain in general, but even he would be hard-pressed to defend these exercises in tedium. The actors in question mechanically recite all this exposition in only the most uninteresting fashion, leaving the audience to remain very unimpressed and not caring about any of the characters. Only the scant few minutes in which the title entity shows up are any fun at all. Warren directs all of his material with a supreme lack of style.

I understand that the original "Aztec Mummy" is supposed to be good for some entertainment, but as usual, Warren does the source material no favours by editing it and utilizing it the way that he does.

Granted, Warren wasn't always THAT inept. His own movies, such as "Teenage Zombies" and "Man Beast", showed B movie lovers a good enough time. But this is quite simply boring. It could be seen as an endurance test for anybody who tries to watch it.

Four out of 10.

I am risking professional ridicule for saying this but there was one of Jerry Warren's movies that I actually liked, MAN BEAST (1957) which certainly no classic did have certain moments. Now this Mexican import is another story. In it's original form it was probably a good movie (I don't speak Spanish so I can only guess) but Jerry took it and actually made this an overly complicated hodgepodge that is breathtakingly boring. One scene after another of people sitting and talking endlessly, a few precious minutes of the original Mexican footage, and then more scenes of people sitting and talking. FINALLY we get into the main plot but Jerry has reshuffled the scenes so much the Mexican plot has been totally supressed. Scenes of American actors reacting to the South-Of-The-Border footage would be funny if the overall tone of this re-edited mess was not so yawn inducing. The mummy is pretty authentic looking but we lost the subplot of the evil Dr. Krupp and his attempts to steal the sacred Aztec breastplate showing the location of the lost treasure. And thanks to Jerry's re-editing 2 of the main characters appear to get killed when in the original film they survive! Yow! if you like Mexican scary movies do yourself a favour and see the ones imported by K. Gordon Murray. He had sense enough to just dub them and release them intact. Jerry Warren, shame on you!

Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1964)

BOMB (out of 4)

Director Jerry Warren made a career out of making some of the very worse movies ever made. Why is his name never brought up as one of the worst directors ever? That's probably because most people fall asleep within minutes of hitting the play button. When he wasn't making his own movies, which was rare, the director was buying foreign movies, cutting them to pieces and then filming additional scenes with American actors. The Mexican horror movie LA MOMIA AZTECA (THE AZTEC MUMMY) is the victim here as Warren takes a few of its scenes and adds all sorts of overly long scenes dealing with people talking. This is usually what happens on these butchers jobs but I was really shocked to see how little footage was used from the original picture and how long the added dialogue scenes actually are. It's hard to determine what Warren movie is his worst but this here was pretty hard to sit through for a number of reasons. For one, the dialogue scenes are just so drawn out and long that I couldn't help but nearly nod off during each of them. Even worse is the fact that the dialogue rarely makes any sense and it's hard to follow what they're even trying to say. Another problem is that there's not too much good footage from the original film but I'm going to guess this was due to the original movie not having too much footage of the actual mummy monster. Even in the original film he didn't show up until the end and that footage is here. When viewing the work of Warren today we already know his history and how he cut up pictures and added footage and narration. I can't imagine what it must have been like back in the day when this was first released and you just happened upon this awful picture.

More of the usual Jerry Warren mish mash, perhaps a bit different because of the larger amounts of original footage than other movies he inserted his work into. For this reason alone I think its worth checking out if you are interested in Warren's work.

Not the worst by any means, its strange how far apart both films are in many ways yet they do not feel incredibly distant from each other like in previous of Warren's outings. Its still quite incoherent and the editing its very messy but manages to bring some good cheese factor to it, wouldnt want it any other way.

This is definitely some of his laziest work regarding his directing, the long steady shots are much more visible and apparent than before. Other than that, its not the worst movie featuring a Mexican mummy, perhaps the dullness of The Aztec Mummy and the cheapness of Warrens additions are enough to make your average audience member be incredibly confused and bored. Its a decent example of this sort of schlock from the great "butcher" of B-films.