He enjoyed some notoriety and success, particularly in the late 1970s, as a result of his Jaws-inspired film Tintorera (1977), which became a cult classic.
He also managed to hire several once-popular American actors during this period, such as Joseph Cotten, John Huston, Gene Barry, Stuart Whitman, John Ireland, Arthur Kennedy, and Lionel Stander to help boost international ticket sales.
This brief period of international success waned in the mid-1980s, and he went back to Spanish-language Mexican "B-films" for the next few decades up to his death.
He commonly worked with either Mexican leading man Hugo Stiglitz or Andrés García, who both briefly enjoyed some international fame while regulars in Cardona Jr. films.
He dabbled in a variety of genres, touching everything from disaster movies such as Cyclone (1978) to horror films (Night of a Thousand Cats in 1972), sci-fi films (The Bermuda Triangle in 1978), and even sensational dramas of historic events as the Jonestown Massacre, as retold as Guyana: Crime of the Century (1979).