I stumbled across a “Batwoman” movie from 1968, and I gave it a watch. Of course, I thought that it would be the Batgirl I was familiar with from my comic book days – a lady wearing a black suit and blue hood, etc. Anyway, it turns out this movie was filmed in Mexico and was a Spanish take on the character. It is my understanding that DC authorized this movie. Also, in my defense here, I wasn’t enough of a Batgirl fan to know that “Batwoman” didn’t come along until much later. So, let’s talk about this film that offers an interesting piece of culture applied to a comic book hero from a remarkable era of time.
As this movie was filmed in Mexico, the original language was Spanish. This put an interesting stereotypical Godzilla twist on the movie – lips moving and not matching speech. The movie displayed Mexican customs too like kissing as a greeting. Seeing the different pieces of culture was interesting. To some people, things like this are overlooked. Having been a student of the Japanese culture, I have learned to look for these types of differences in cultures from across the world. There’s a lot more than just language that makes a culture unique.
Culturally speaking, here again, the bad guy was odd. He was a “mad scientist” that lived and functioned from a yacht. Everyone called him “master” and his assistant was named “Igor”, naturally. I think that perhaps this was a play on American culture. The Frankenstein character has been well known and loved since the 1930s. “Frankenstein’s” monster in this film was a fish man that resembled the Creature from the Black Lagoon a little. Anybody from my generation remembers Rita Repulsa from the Power Rangers and how she would “make her monsters grow.” That’s what this was like – the monster went from a small figure to a man-size creature.
The Batwoman costume was missing a lot of parts. It was a Batman hooded cape with a bikini instead of the suit that I was expecting. This is what initially tipped me off it wasn’t the normal Batwoman character. What about the Batmobile? The car in this film was very similar to the Batmobile from the 60s Batman, which is another interesting piece of culture. Batman was huge in America during the 60s so, I assume that the culture in Mexico was just piggybacking off that popularity. In addition to large parts of the costume missing, there were a lot of missing “bat” gadgets too. Everybody knows how Batman had the bat belt that included a “Bat” everything in it. I think she threw a smoke bomb and used a makeup compact that turned into a pistol. This was a funny scene because she pulled the pistol on five armed men. They all immediately complied, which is completely unrealistic. This reminded me of Superman ducking when they threw the pistol at him. This was a vintage comic book-based movie and luckily, I wasn’t expecting much realism.
Overall, this was culturally cool. I don’t foresee a rewatch for me though. The fight scenes in this movie were terrible and poorly choreographed. You could tell that the lady doing the action didn’t have any martial arts training at all. The film was super slow and hard to sit through – it just drug along. If it wasn’t for the cool 60s stuff in it, I don’t think I would have even finished this one. If you’re a big DC fan, Batman fan, or Batgirl/Batwoman fan, give it a watch and develop your own opinion.