Thoughts on ZORRO, Part 5: The 1970s-80s comedies (spoilers)

Since I’m going for a comprehensive overview of all American Zorro productions, I guess I have to cover the 1972 softcore sex comedy The Erotic Adventures of Zorro, which has its own entry on Wikipedia and astonishingly has recently become available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime, albeit in slightly blurry standard definition. But I’ll try to make it brief, since even if you don’t mind softcore porn, a lot of it is pretty creepy and unpleasant due to the attitudes of the era. Content warning for sexual assault, incest, and homophobia. The film, directed and plotted by “Col. Robert Freeman,” loosely borrows its plot structure (such as it is) from Tyrone Power’s 1940 The Mark of Zorro. It opens with the evil Alcalde Luis Bonasario (Jude Farese) and his captain, Esteban Velasquez (John Alderman), who share their given names with their 1940 film counterparts, collecting excessive taxes from the people, with Velasquez and his comic-relief sergeant taking a farmer’s two virgin daughters as…