DVD, Digital Release: Cassandro the Exotico!

Digital, DVD Release Date: Sept. 17, 2019
Price: DVD $16.59
Studio: Film Movement


Cassandro the Exotico! is a documentary that offers a candy-colored portrait of a lucha libre legend—a gender-bending LGBTQ+ performer—in his waning years in the ring.

Famed as much for his flamboyant drag and sky-high pompadour as for his show-stopping kicks and flips, 47-year-old Saul Armendariz — known in the wrestling ring as Cassandro — is a champion “exotico” wrestler, a luchador who performs in drag with generous doses of camp vamping between back-breaking suplexes. His trailblazing ascent as one the industry’s first openly gay wrestlers has resonated internationally for a quarter century — the story of an underdog and a queer icon simultaneously fragile and mighty.

Shooting entirely on 16mm, filmmaker Marie Losier here captures the moving, at times humorous, and always colorful dualities of her inimitable subject who’s regarded as the “Liberace of the Lucha Libre.

 

Buy or Rent Cassandro the Exotico!
on DVD

About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.