Invasion of the Dead (original title: Blue Demon y Zovek en La invasión de los muertos) is a 1971 Mexican masked wrestler horror film directed by René Cardona (Night of the Bloody Apes) from a screenplay by René Cardona Jr (Guyana: Crime of the Century).
As the title suggests, the film features masked wrestler ‘superhero’ Blue Demon and Professor Zovek (real name: Francisco Xavier Chapa del Bosque), an escapologist and Mexican national hero who died in a helicopter accident during this production, battling with a zombie invasion that has been caused by a fireball from outer space…
“While the Zovek sections of the movie (the majority of the film) are fairly good, the added scenes with Blue Demon and Polo Ortín are awful: mostly shot in some kind of factory (masquerading as Blue’s secret crime lab, I guess), they are static and boring. People come to report odd happenings to Blue Demon (a flying saucer, a headless corpse), and he proceeds to lecture them about the historical precedents of such events! Sometimes Blue will “talk” to Zovek on the phone, to try and link up the two threads of the plot, but not even the “monsters”are the same: in the Zovek scenes, the walking dead are the revived (if slightly decayed) corpses of normal people (in one scene there must be at least 75 of these zombies chasing Zovek, a very impressive sight), while Blue Demon has to face a handful of Hollywood-style monsters (such as a wolfman, a vampire, and a burly black guy with fangs…” D. Wilt, University of Maryland
