Espanol SWAT

Zack:Is that Buddy from Charles In Charge? He's taking time out from Bibleman to battle Vega from Street Fighter.

Dr. Thorpe:I don't know, but this kind of looks like the greatest movie ever. It's like it's built on an entirely different set of rules. With most American movies, even the wacky sci-fi ones, you can look at the cover and kind of figure out what's going on, but I'm just drawing a blank with this one. It just sort of short-circuits the part of my brain that parses visual information.

Zack:Yeah, they're just kind of stacking up unrelated imagery. The only thing connecting all the layers is that every one seems to be wounded. Even the sky in the background looks like it's been assaulted with a rake.

Dr. Thorpe:Is this movie about a giant metal-faced woman in a Boy Scouts shirt who crushes infernal tramps to death in her giant serrated metal hand?

Zack:I think the giant metal hand is emerging from a vagina in front of the M-16 and then Buddy and his femandroid companion are staring at the person who is considering buying or renting this movie. The guy in the mask who has been hit with a shovel is the one holding the gun, I think. I guess that woman with her throat slashed open is one of those miniature Mexican women from a drainpipe somewhere.

Dr. Thorpe:Nah, I think the woman in the metal hand is actually a troll doll.

Zack:Wait a second, are Buddy and his android lady friend sharing the same pair of pants?

Dr. Thorpe:I think they're siamese twins, and they're trying to get into that big metal hand so it'll cut them apart at last.

Zack:This cover gets more surreal the more you look at it.

Dr. Thorpe:The giant metal hand also has a band-aid on its thumb, proving that even giant metal hands are vulnerable to nicks and scratches in the no-holds-barred world of incomprehensible Mexican video cover art.

Zack:It's like a fucking inkblot only instead of having no meaning beyond what your mind makes of it this one has infinite meanings for your mind to unravel.

Dr. Thorpe:I think you mean "to unravel your mind."

Zack:Yeah, it's pretty maddening. I just keep expecting to find a dinosaur or a vampire in it somewhere. Maybe an Indian chief and a jet fighter.

Dr. Thorpe:The metal-faced person reminds me of Lucio Fulci's "Conquest," the greatest hyper-violent surrealist Italian barbarian movie ever made. If this movie is anything like Conquest, we're sure to see some women being slowly torn in two by Wookiees.

Zack:If it is even vaguely related to Lucio Fulci it's sure to have naked women being brutally murdered, probably in a way that has a lot of rape overtones, like being skewered with a bedpost or stabbed in the vagina with a knife.

Dr. Thorpe:Hopefully some gruesome eyeball violence, too. I come for the misogynist murder-fantasies, I stay for the eyeball-rending.

Zack:Maybe he could work one in where a naked women gets stabbed in the mouth with a power drill and it goes through her brain and comes out of her eyeball.

Dr. Thorpe:I think when I'm done writing this I'm going to go rent this movie and find out what the holy hell is going on. I'll bet you five bucks that nothing in the movie has any connection to the box art, and it's actually a film about a hypersexual college student who poses as a gay theater director to trick women into undressing in front of him.

Zack:I bet the metal glove is in the movie. They wouldn't fetishize something like that if it wasn't in the movie. Other than that I'm not taking that bet.

Dr. Thorpe:The full title is "Una Trampa Infernal en un Teatro de Sexo."

Zack:If that metal glove isn't in the movie that would be like renting Maximum Overdrive and never once seeing the goblin tractor trailer.

Dr. Thorpe:Or renting Troll II and finding out that it does not contain even a single troll.

Zack:Or renting 2001: A Space Odyssey and finding out that it's just a plodding psychological thriller with religious subtext and an impenetrable special effects sequence near the end that seems to go on for eternity and will ensure you never watch the movie again.

Dr. Thorpe:Yeah, I would just feel violated and abandoned after something like that.

Zack:I wish I had watched 2001: A Space Odyssey before I saw Eyes Wide Shut because then I probably would have never watched Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick deserved to die after that one. It was sadism directed at the audience.

Dr. Thorpe:Lucky me, I never saw it, so in my mind it shall always remain a lighthearted sex-farce with plenty of lively orgy scenes and slide-whistling.

Zack:If you want to get a feel for it then just press the same key on a piano for 180 minutes while looking at a picture of a ball sack. I wonder if anyone ever bought the soundtrack to that movie. That's the kind of thing you buy someone as a gag gift and put the real present underneath it.

Dr. Thorpe:Underneath would be every movie-lover's fantasy gift: the three-legged pants worn by Pedro Fernandez and Edith Gonzalez in Trampa Infernal.

Zack:That would be a dream given form.

Dr. Thorpe:I heard those went for $45,000 at Christie's, beating out the mound of lycra hotpants from Arsenio for Vagina as the most expensive Mexican movie prop ever auctioned.

Zack:Third place was the fake beard used to create the Soccercabra. Spirit gum don't come cheap south of the border.

Dr. Thorpe:Although after the lycra shorts were peeled apart, they were sold individually for a sum totaling more than the cost of the three-legged pants, so they win on a technicality.

Zack:Yeah, but the bidding never would have reached that level if one of the girls who shucked the lycra shorts hadn't been having bowel problems. That Virgin Mother spray-pattern got Goldenpalace.com to bid her pair up to almost $6,000 alone.