EL SUPER-FLACO (1959)
Article 4822 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-15-2015
Directed by Miguel M. Delgado
Featuring Evangelina Elizondo, Pompin Iglesias, Wolf Ruvinskis
Country: Mexico
What it is: Comedy

A skinny weakling dreams of being strong and winning beautiful women. A mad scientist uses him as the subject of an experiment, and the weakling winds up with super-strength.

Having watched this comedy in Spanish without English subtitles, it goes without saying that I missed most of the verbal humor. However, it was very easy to follow, and much of the humor was visual. Still, one of the reasons it was so easy to follow was that the story itself is very familiar; I’m sure I’ve seen several variations of it by this time, and though I was a bit surprised by some events near the end of the movie, in general it was very predictable and mostly lacking in surprises. There’s a few musical numbers added to the mix, a wrestling subplot (hence the inclusion of Wolf Ruvinskis in the cast), a creepy lab, and a midget. From what I can tell, it’s passable and mildly entertaining, but unless the verbal jokes are really good, it’s no more than that.