This felt a lot as if Luis Buñuel were satirizing his own common tropes about male protagonists whose bullish and grandiose façade betrays a fragile and wounded sense of masculinity, making them into toxic and dangerous ticking time bombs indeed. Although this is a rather farcical tale about a rich wannabe serial killer always utterly failing in his attempted murders, the drama here is played as straight as in any other Buñuel flick of his mexican era. Rather uncharacteristically for the director, this one almost hints at what might evolve into an unambiguously happy end.