The Vengeance of the Vampire Women (1970)

Original title: El Santo en La venganza de las mujeres vampiro

Dangerous times in Mexico city. Mad scientist Doctor Igor Brancov (Victor Junco) and his henchmen have discovered the coffin of former vampire queen/high priestess Countess Mayra (Gina Romand). Brancov wants to revive her so she can donate some of her precious vampire blood to him, with which he could finally finish his project of creating a perfect man. Apart from removing a stake, all it needs to turn Marya from her current state of an unmoving prune-like corpse is the blood of young women. And those are easily kidnapped.

Indeed, Marya is back on her feet again sooner than you’d believe, ready to start creating as many new vampires as possible to eventually rule the world. She is thankful to Brancov, but before she’s going to help him, she has just a tiny favour to ask of him: she really needs a hand in killing the descendant of the man responsible for her staking before she’s willing to do much else. Of course, said descendant is no other than El Santo (El Santo), everybody’s favourite luchador, monster hunter, and crime buster. He is rather difficult to kill too, and perhaps not the ideal man to disclose one’s existence to when you’re a mad scientist or a vampire. Plus, Santo says he’s bored with all those normal crime cases, so he is all too willing to team up with Inspector Robles (Aldo Monti) of the police and Robles’s spunky yet kidnapping-prone reporter girlfriend Paty (Norma Lazareno) to do something against Mexico City’s newly arising bloodsucker and mad science problems.

Despite regularly showing its budget, this entry into the manifold adventures of dear Santo is a particularly fun one, really leaning into being a proper pulpy horror movie of the kind Paul Naschy would have made in Europe, just featuring a masked luchador. The latter element does of course make everything even better than it already is, always.

Directed by Alfredo Curiel, this shows little of the more annoying flaws lucha cinema could be cursed with: there’s very little filler, the plot moves merrily along and the comic relief is next to non-existent. Why, even the mandatory ring-side wrestling sequences are part of the plot and are rather more dynamically edited together from the usual wrestling audience set, and an actual match, lending them rather more of an air of excitement than is typical for these parts of lucha movies. Curiel – in a move really uncommon in these films – shoots the wrestling matches rather dynamically too, with a lot of handheld camera to add to the feeling of being very close to Santo.

In fact, Curiel seems to have been rather enamoured of handheld shots throughout the film, using them in the tiny but properly gothic vampire lair with its symmetrically placed coffins, grubby backlot streets and Brancov’s mad science lair, making the most out of what must be rather cramped sets by getting really close to the action more often than not.

And while these sets do show their budgetary limitations, they are also full of those tiny details that turn a cheap set into pure joy. Brancov’s lab with its mysterious multi-coloured fluids, for example, is further enhanced by early 70s pulp technological wonders of the bleeping and blooping kind, as they all should be. This sort of thing is sure to make one’s inner twelve year old rejoice. As do scenes of vampire women flapping their see-through (but with underwear underneath, this still being a Mexican movie for an all-ages audience) gowns before jumping into their coffins, or ineffectually flapping around our heroes during a fight, the Countess hypnotising Santo’s adversaries in the ring into trying to kill our hero, as well as trying to mind-whammy said hero into losing. And who doesn’t want to see a proper montage of vampires creating more vampires?

The film also seems to particularly delight in showing Santo as a very early 70s kind of badass, lounging around in mask and swimming trunks and complaining that all he ever encounters these days are boring, common criminals like a very strange version of Sherlock Holmes, or remarking that something’s not right when a beautiful woman sneaks into his bedroom at night to murder instead of seduce him. It’s self-conscious about the silliness of the lucha movie genre without going the camp route. Speaking of Santo’s bedroom, the place does look very 70s bachelor, and also includes a big painting of Santo’s masked face on one of its walls, as well it, and every other bedroom, should.