Lucha Loco by Malcom Venville
Review / November 25, 2022

While a lovely item to own, there’s not enough meat here to make it worth paying over the odds. Wrestling photo books is a niche category and harder to review that traditional titles. This is certainly much better produced and more visually striking than the likes of George Napolitano titles from the 1980s, One Ring Circus or Killer Pics. It’s a similar size and quality to Exquisite Mayhem, though without that title’s… distinctive… content. Lucha Loco is simply made up of around 120 studio portraits of Mexican wrestlers, with the left hand page of each spread being almost completely blank save for a brief quote from the wrestler. These vary immensely, ranging from motivation for being a wrestler to a significant number of comments about who does and doesn’t wear the mask in more intimate moments. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of wrestlers, chosen presumably on availability more than any other criteria, from major superstars like El Hijo Del Santo and the Villanos to El Gangster and the underwhelmingly named Chris. As you might expect, all but a couple are masked. As noted, the book itself is beautifully produced, with my first edition copy coming in a custom…