Three Films Make A Post: This is not a love story.

Mother Mary (2026): Sometimes, I really like the films of David Lowery; this one, I really don’t. It’s the kind of film where everything’s a metaphor, but never a metaphor for anything that’s actually complex (or, frankly, interesting) enough to warrant being talked about exclusively metaphorically. The kind of film where every single line of dialogue – mostly uttered by Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in exalted stage psychodrama mode – is spoken portentously, full of pregnant (with metaphor, obviously!) pauses.

The kind of film that makes many gesture about being deep, but misses depth in its incessant efforts of performing depth. Much like the kind of pop star Hathaway portrays, come to think of it…

Twisted (2026): Darren Lynn Bousman, for his part, apparently never left the early 2000, and still directs exactly like he did 20 years ago. So expect the shitty colour scheme of his Saw movies, the would-be Tony Scott editing tics of his Saw movies, the random attacks of blur of his Saw movies, the score made by someone apparently tone deaf of his Saw movies. One might notice a tendency there.

Because our director really, really like to keep to his old standards, this also has the dumb-pretending-to-be-clever plotting of the Saw movies, and the tendency to waste a perfectly fine cast (in this particular case especially Djimon Hounsou and Lauren LaVera).

Santo vs. the Strangler aka Santo vs el estrangulador (1965): Tonight, even El Santo let me down, or rather, René Cardona did by couching some perfectly fine Santo vs the Phantom of the Variety Theatre business in so many musical numbers, re-titling this into Santo vs the Musical Number seems not just fair but simply more honest.

The sad thing about this is: whenever this lucha movie actually concerns the adventures of the Idol of the Masses, it’s genuinely good fun. Alas, the next musical number is as inevitable as metaphor overload in a David Lowery movie.

The Vampires of Coyoacán (1974)

Original title: Los vampiros de Coyoacán

Warning: there will be some third act spoilers!

A horrifying elderly luchador known as El Espectro (Nathanael León aka Franquestain) kills his opponents in the ring, despite moving as slow as an old man, um, zombie. Apparently, making a habit of this sort of thing is okay per Mexican law as of 1974 as long as it happens in the ring.

While the elderly threat is hanging in the background, lucha heroes Mil Máscaras (Mil Máscaras) and, alas, Superzan (Superzan) are called in by one Dr Thomas (Carlos López Moctezuma) to help him out with a little family problem: his daughter Nora (Sasha Montenegro) is suffering from a strange illness. How strange? The good doctor is utterly convinced she is being targeted by a vampire, who regularly visits her to slowly suck her dry. Mil and Superzan are easier convinced of the supernatural threat than the more sceptical El Santo or Blue Demon would have been, so they are soon staking out creepy mansions, watching a group of little people vampires carrying a coffin through the darkness and wrestling said little people vampires (because this is an Agrasánchez production), as well as hipster vampires. They are ably assisted by paranormal investigator Dr Wells (Germán Robles, cast as a vampire hunter instead of a vampire, probably to confuse us).

And what of El Espectro? He is obviously part of the vampire problem.

If you are into the joyfully cartoonish side of lucha cinema – or like me, into all of its sides, except the one featuring mostly filler or comedians whose shticks don’t translate – Arturo Martínez’ Vampires of Coyoacán is a rather wonderful experience. That is, unless you’re wrestles into submission by its beginning, which features a fifteen minutes lucha sequence with no importance to the film’s plot at all, shortly followed by another one, that at least kicks off the El Espectro subplot. Though it has to be said that the cut-able lucha sequence is dynamically choreographed enough not to put one to sleep, which isn’t always that way in Agrasánchez films.

Following that, it’s all acid rock driven joy: rubber bats, cheap but cheerful Mexican 70s gothic production design lit in all the colours of horror as instituted into law by Maestro Bava in Italy, shot by Martínez with surprising enthusiasm, borrowings from Dracula as well as from Doctor Mabuse, the usual luchadores versus vampires battles, little people that are indeed vampires this time around, luchadores versus younger more gothy/hipsterish vampires (who are even somewhat creepy) business. Whatever you can ask of this sort of thing, the film offers it in spades, all driven by a huge amount of pulpy energy that isn’t always a given at this developmental stage of the lucha genre.

It does of course help that Mil and his funky wardrobe are among the liveliest presences in lucha cinema – that man can dress as well as move – so much so even the dreaded Superzan doesn’t manage to annoy me.

From time to time, the film even makes clear that it is indeed a product of the more downbeat 70s, so you also get elements of a decidedly unhappy ending, where a young vampire woman first murders here father and then, realizing what she’s done, sets herself on fire and dies screaming. Which is quite the thing in a silly movie about luchadores fighting vampires.

Doctor of Doom (1963)

Original title: Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino

Mexico City is in a panic: young women are kidnapped, only to be found dead days later with curious head injuries.

As we the audience learn early on, a masked and mysterious mad scientist and his helpers are responsible for the dastardly deeds. They’re not actually out to kill these women, but “only” need them as subjects for their brain transplant experiments. Alas, or so the mad scientist explains, normal human bodies are just too weak to withstand the awesome power of this kind of science, therefore the dead women. But unwilling sacrifices need to be made, right?

There only survivor (Gerardo Zepeda) of earlier experiments is slowly devolving into an ape-man, but is at least useful when it comes to fighting off the police. Not that those guys are of much use, mind you.

Somewhat fortunately, the villains’ latest victim is the sister of luchadora Gloria Venus (Lorena Velázquez), who, together with her new partner, US import Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell), will involve herself in the investigation with rather more success than the cops.

For an early 60s lucha monster movie, René Cardona’s Doctor of Doom is rather surprisingly explicitly feminist in form and function, treating the female wrestlers as the same kind of hero you’d expect of their male colleagues, just having to present more glamorously while going about their business of fighting mad science and mad science’s products.

Though, again to my surprise, Cardona also portrays the kind of nonsense women have to go through El Santo never had to put up with, like having to romance mostly incompetent cops that talk as if they were solving the case while the luchadoras do all the work. There are some delightful reversions of lucha tropes here as well, like when romantic lead cop number one gifts one of those genre-typical radio watches to Gloria so she can call him when she needs help, only to be the one needing to use it to call her and Rubi to get him and his comic relief colleague out of a death trap. Also delightful is how sarcastically Campbell flirts with said comic relief colleague (while towering over him) – where the script might mean this as serious flirtation, the actress clearly doesn’t.

Apart from this inspiring and, again, delightful, feminist content, Doctor is the full load of everything awesome about lucha cinema, made at a time when the budgets where comparatively high, and really moody black and white photography was possible. Expect every joy of pop and pulp cinema you can imagine, treated with verve, a smile, and more than one good mad scientist rant, and delight as Velázquez and Campbell project a sense of fun not all of their masked brothers got, while also having much bigger hair.

Hellish Spiders (1968)

Original title: Arañas infernales

The planet Arachnea appears to be suffering from something of a food shortage, particular when it comes to the proper feeding of its Supreme Ruler, a queen who just happens to be a giant spider with the voice of an old woman. Fortunately, the Arachneans’ intrepid explorers have found a nice space pantry - a planet its supposedly sentient population likes to call Earth.

Turns out the inhabitants of that insignificant little planet have exactly the kind of food the Arachneans need: human brains. By now, Earth, or rather, its cultural centre, Mexico, has been secretly invaded by the aliens, walking around in human form and making a list of the most nutritious human, to be kidnapped and eaten shortly, without even checking twice.

Fortunately for brains in Mexico and the rest of the world, wrestler and all-around champion of justice and not-eating-brains Blue Demon (Blue Demon) begins thwarting the spider aliens’ plans. He’s such a superior example of humanity, the spider queen even forbids her people to kill him with their death ray – he’s just too good to waste. Thus, the usual tricks of lucha villainy – paralysation rays, the kidnapping of sidekicks, smuggling the Arachnean champion Arak (of course Fernando Osés) into the lucha ring to fight Blue – have to suffice.

This, directed by the sometimes inspired, sometimes not, Federico Curiel, is the pure stuff, a great example of the joys of lucha cinema, and proof that Blue Demon is just as glorious as El Santo.

This doesn’t just have everything you may want from a lucha movie, but also very little of those things you’d rather avoid: there’s no comic relief character! Only mildly boring ring fights! And musical numbers are kept over there where El Santo sleeps!

Which leaves much space in the film for the good stuff: Blue giving a scientific explanation for the phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion (“when there’s a neutrino imbalance, the thing or individual involved is ignited and it’s all over”) to his completely befuddled sidekick; Blue thwarting many an attack or kidnapping attack by wrestlers, I mean aliens, in pretty dynamic fight scenes; Blue casually solving cases for the police (as he regularly does, of course) in between wrestling matches; flying saucer effects that care not about your stupid tasty-brained human believability; curiously abstract alien base interiors that sometimes suggest you’re watching a really peculiar art film and not lucha pulp SF horror cinema; lots of brain eating; and a dude whose hand turns into a spider he then attempts to shove into Blue Demon’s face (which would be an illegal move in any wrestling match, if the referee hadn’t fled screaming).

If that’s not enough to make any friend of the adventures of heroic luchadores happy, let it also be said that Curiel may not have had much of a budget but a really good week when shooting this, so the film is actually well-paced, makes as much sense as this sort of thing needs to, and turns some sets – like that strange, strange spider alien base – into abstract-expressionist dreamscapes. It’s a genuinely impressive effort.

Also impressive, and pretty uncommon for the genre, is how much of the dialogue hits my personal sweet spot for the kind of pulp dialogue that nearly becomes a sort of unschooled poetry – there’s quite a bit of talk about humanity’s insignificance in the cosmos, and a lot of high-toned speechifying among the Arachneans who may not want to explain their plans to us humans, but surely have a great love for gloriously pompous announcements among each other. And who’d ever forget Blue Demon’s science lectures?

Santo vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter (1972)

Original title: Santo vs. la hija de Frankestein

Dr Freda Frankenstein (Gina Romand), the daughter of the original “It’s alive!” Frankenstein, has gone into the family business as a mad scientist. She has a lot going for her: a swanky – if somewhat cold – looking lair in the countryside, a trusted partner in Dr Yanco (Roberto Cañedo), and a bunch of goons in matching outfits to rob graves, kidnap women and whatever else needs doing around the home. Mad scientific success, however, isn’t guaranteed.

Her attempt to inject one of her minions with gorilla blood to achieve, um, who knows what, has turned him into Truxon, a guy in a gorilla mask (Gerardo Zepeda) she has to keep locked up and can only control with her considerable powers of hypnotism. Repeating the experiments of her father has proven somewhat more successful, and she is just on the cusp of creating her own Monster, whom she’ll dub Ursus (also Gerardo Zepeda, but in a different mask of dubious quality).

Frankenstein has also managed to develop a serum that not only stops aging but has a rejuvenating effect as well. This hasn’t just kept her and Yanco ship-shape, but is also a useful tool to recruit old losers into her goon squad and soften them up as victims for her love for controlling sadism and domination. Unfortunately, the serum is beginning to lose its power for the good doctor, and instead of the three months typically going between injections, she has now weeks at best – and the effects decrease ever quicker.

Our mad scientist has a plan, however. She just needs the blood of a very special person to create a more potent formula. Yes, of course it is the blood of Santo (Santo!), idol of the masses, friend of children, and so on and so forth. Santo’s blood, Frankenstein has found out, contains a much higher concentration of whatever stops aging, keeping him youthful, fit, and an all-around perfect physical specimen.

Just asking Santo for some of his blood wouldn’t probably not be kinky enough, and kidnapping him would prove difficult and inconvenient, so instead, Frankenstein sends her minions to kidnap Norma (Anel), Santo’s girlfriend. This, and a helpful blackmail letter, should bring the luchador right to her doorstep, which indeed it does, accompanied not by Blue Demon or Mil Mascaras, but by Norma’s sister Elsa (Sonia Fuentes). Various games of catch and release, monster mashes against Truxon and Ursus, and other shenanigans ensue. Also appearing: Chekhov's lair self-destruct lever.

At this stage of Santo’s film career, budgets were clearly pretty low, but there’s a willingness to make much out of comparably little and a pop cinema energy to Miguel M. Delgado’s Santo vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter the great man’s cinematic outings would increasingly lose. This is even one of those Santo movies where somebody even seems to have been committed to actual production design, so there’s a sense of visual coherence you don’t always get in lucha cinema. That the very early 70s fashion and colours pop very nicely on the print I watched adds to the pleasure here.

The film is comparatively focussed as well – there’s no odious comic relief, no musical numbers, the two ring fights are short and sweet – and the second one takes place only after the plot has been resolved. In fact, there’s no filler in the movie at all.

Instead, Delgado fills those parts of the movie that don’t concern Santo doing Santo stuff, vigorously, to really draw us into the world of our female mad scientist. There’s much fun to be had with her gleefully sadistic way of controlling her minions – which Romand hams up wonderfully – and many a silly-awesome background detail to enjoy. Why, some of the minions even have character traits, and if you look closely, there are even traces of actual relationships between these pulpy characters mostly here to get beaten up by a masked wrestler.

Because these are the early Seventies, the film is on the bloodier side of the Santo cycle – Ursus near fatal wound on a big cross in the graveyard next to Frankenstein’s lair comes to mind, or the moment when Santo repeatedly strikes an already beaten Truxon with a chain – and the fantasy in Fernando Osés’s script turns toward the macabre. There’s a scene in which a grumpy, rejected-by-Santo Frankenstein hypnotizes – yes, of course a colour wheel is involved – Norma into trying to cut out Santo’s eyes, for example. Of course, this isn’t a Fulci film, so the power of love protects, while the minions meant to watch Santo during this are so squicked out by the whole thing, they have to leave the room.

Yes, the film is making a joke here, and it’s actually funny. Which, come to think of it, happens in a couple of scenes, as if, freed from the yoke of the comic relief character, humour can suddenly work and add more to a lucha movie than annoyance.

In “things we never knew about Santo”: both Norma and Frankenstein agree that an unmasked Santo has the hottest male face ever to grace our planet. Obviously, we have to take their words for it.

Thus, this particular adventure of Santo is recommended even to those among my imaginary readers who don’t go for the idol of the masses as much as Norma, Dr Freda Frankenstein or this writer do. There’s cheap but awesome production design! Two monsters – well guys in bad masks – played by a single actor! Sadomasochist subtext! Mad science! A woman who screams whenever she sees someone with a wrinkled face! What more can one ask of any movie?

Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962)

Original title: Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro

A couple of centuries after they have been beaten by one of those naughty warriors of light, a coven of female vampires decide that now, in these dark times of 1962, it is time for female vampiredom to rise again, and get rid of those oatmeal faces they seem to have acquired while waiting for better/darker times in their coffins.

For that rising to properly work, the vampiresses need to find a woman to replace their current Queen Zorina (Lorena Velázquez), for some occult reasons I never understood, because Zorina seems perfectly well and happy, or rather, happily evil. Vampire priestess Tundra (Ofelia Montesco), who will be the brains as well as the face of this particular operation for the film’s first two acts, already has an eye on a replacement queen. Diana Orlof (María Duval), her candidate, may be the descendant of their last would-be replacement queen. That last time, things did not work out, leading to those centuries of waiting and becoming food-faced, but there are prophecies going around that suggest evil will win out this time. So it’s only a question of waking up three male vampires who are built suspiciously like wrestlers (and one of whom is of course played by the great Fernando Osés) for the strongman parts of the job, and take the win for Evil.

However, Diana’s father, Professor Orlof (Augusto Benedico), is close enough an associate of El Santo (Santo!) to possess his own Santo videophone, so when he finds his daughter threatened by malignant forces, he calls in his famous, ultra-capable and all-around perfect friend. Who will proceed to lurk around the side-lines of the movie for its first half, because this still belongs to that phase of Santo’s movie career when studios didn’t trust him to carry a film on his own. Thus, he shares the male lead duties with the Professor, Diana’s boyfriend and a police Inspector (Jaime Fernández).

Which really is the least fun thing about Alfonso Corona Blake’s Santo vs. the Vampire Women, for less Santo is never a good thing, even if the film at hand does attempt to cast his frequent absence as part of his mystique as a masked luchador and force for Good. This does of course also mean we lose out on scenes of a masked Santo in loungewear, cosy pyjamas, or romancing the ladies.

On the plus side, there’s everything else. The film begins as a lovely pulp gothic concoction with a dramatically lit vampire priestess expositing in a lair full of spectacularly fake cobwebs, upright coffins and improbable shadows, adds rubber bats and the much beloved (by me) vampire cape walk, and never looks back from there. What follows are some pleasantly zippily shot scenes of overcomplicated vampire plots, close-ups of “hypnotic” staring committed by pretty women, and rather more chases than you’d usually get in a Santo movie. The cops and a suddenly appearing caped Santo chase cape-running, woman-stealing vampires, Santo chases vampires, vampires chase Santo, Santo in his sports car chases a lone vampire towards a cross. I get all chased-out just talking about it.

There’s also the time-honoured sequence of a vampire (using deadly karate chops, Santo informs us) pretending to be one of Santo’s ringside foes to kill the great man and a resolution that hinges not on our hero fighting off the vampires, but on him fighting them long enough for the sun to shine through the unfortunate hole in their underground crypt-temple-thingie. Afterwards, our hero sets torches to the coffins, vampiresses screeching in horror, because this is not a film for the faint of heart, even if it is as deeply, infectiously silly as a proper lucha movie is supposed to be.

El Vampiro Y El Sexo (1969)

aka Santo in the Treasure of Dracula

aka Santo en El tesoro de Drácula

This is based on the version of the movie with added nudity and sleaze that was long thought lost, but recovered some years ago by some heroes of our times.

Santo (El Santo), idol of the masses, the man with the silver mask, and so on, and so forth, has taken a time-out from fighting crime and smiting evil – as well as from his wrestling career, one supposes – to follow his muse as a genius scientist. Like Doctor Doom before him, Santo has developed a method for time travel. Apparently, you only need to bombard a person with radiation in just the right way to physically throw them back into the life of a historical ancestor. Which does sound quite reasonable, of course. Curiously enough, Santo is still looking for a human test subject. He knows it would be best to use a woman there, for, Santo informs us, women’s resistance against radioactivity is four times that of men; the female sex can also cope much better with the mental strains of time travel, so suck it, incels. As luck will have it, our hero’s need for radioactive material has led to him living as a house guest in the home of nuclear physicist Dr Sepúlveda (Carlos Agostí) for a time, where Santo’s immense charm and personality have hit Luisa (Noelia Noel), the daughter of the house, so hard, the two are now engaged, to be married once Santo has the science bug worked out of his system.

Of course, Luisa volunteers to become Santo’s guinea pig. After a bit of hemming and hawing, the great man agrees to her suggestion, and irradiates her, until she dies a horrible…No, wait, until she does indeed travel back in time. For reasons of science, Santo, Luisa’s dad and unspeakable comic relief Perico (Alberto Rojas) can now watch Luisa’s adventures on a little TV screen.

Turns out Luisa’s ancestor was a renamed Mina Harker in a compacted version of Dracula. This version of the Count (Aldo Monti), likes eye-liner, female nudity and very large breasts, apparently, so the film now tells us a sleazy, shortened vampire tale that ends with Luisa’s ancestor’s and Dracula’s death, and the revelation of the existence of Dracula’s treasure.

Because we’re now just at the half-way mark of our movie, Santo has forgotten to invent the video tape while he was at it, and is now in desperate need of physical evidence for the things he and the gang saw happening in the past. Clearly, finding the treasure of Dracula should do the trick. Because all of this isn’t far-fetched and complicated enough, an evil mastermind going be the moniker of Black Hood has gotten wind of the whole affair by judiciously spying on the greatest crime fighter in Mexico, and now puts various evil plans into play to acquire the treasure for himself. That Dracula is eventually going to be revived as well hardly needs mentioning.

Santo’s stint as – somewhat mad, if you ask me – scientist certainly isn’t one of the most straightforward lucha movies, seeing as it contains the narrative of at least two normal lucha movies as well as a mini vampire movie in its perfectly reasonable run time. Structurally, this of course turns it into a total mess, but it’s the sort of very fun mess that keeps boredom away with the power of Santo’s mighty fists, lots of sleazy vampire business, and so much pulp energy and nonsense, there’s even only space for a single ring fight in the movie left – and that one follows the old trope of Santo honourably fighting things out against a villain to become an actual part of the plot.

The sleaze and nudity our family-friendly hero usually doesn’t encounter are kept at arm’s length from him – most probably inserted without his knowledge after the fact – and completely belong to Dracula. So expect a small army of vampire women who have exchanged the traditional flimsy nightgowns for breast-free robes, and biting scenes that contain nearly as much moaning and sexual writhing as those in a non-pornographic Jess Franco movie. All of the sexual subtext of vampirism is turned obvious and clear text in a manner that makes this version of Dracula look like even more of a creep than usual. His love for branding his brides with a little bat tattoo doesn’t improve his case there.

Because much of this is so clearly inserted into the more stodgy vampire business and the lucha adventures, there are some lovely disconnects between the sexy (well) bits and the rest of the movie. The best – and most telling moment – is after we watch Luisa in the body of her ancestress (who of course looks exactly like her) having very moan-y sex with Dracula that clearly ends with an orgasm (subtle, the film ain’t). The cut back to Santo basically has the guy shrugging his shoulders and going “huh, so vampires are real”.

Which is a lot funnier than the movie’s actual comic relief. One has to congratulate Perico for dressing as if he time-travelled into the future and learned about the Daisy Age before being thrown back to his own time by an angry mob, but otherwise, his “I’m such a comical coward” bit gets old very fast indeed. Ironically, his supposed friend Santo does seem to think so as well, and so bullies and berates him incessantly. It’s as if the film itself were agreeing about Perico’s unfunniness, but instead of getting rid of him decides to use him to make its hero look like an asshole, too.

Otherwise, the film is high lucha fun, with some very spirited vampire acting by Monti and the mysterious Black Hood, more rubber bats than you ever wanted to see, embarrassing amounts of nudity, pulpy scenarios and fights that are on the varied side for a single lucha film, and a narrative that may not make a lick of sense but certainly shows forward momentum that is for once not stopped for musical numbers and pointless wrestling. And because director René Cardona had a very good week while shooting this, it even looks pretty good. If that doesn’t recommend El Vampiro Y El Sexo (or its sleaze-free version), I don’t know what does.

The Shadow of the Bat (1968)

Original title: La sombra del murciélago

Retired wrestler The Bat – El murcielago – (Fernando Osés) has quite the interesting life. Disgraced and crazed after a ring accident that left him disfigured, always wearing his bat-like ring mask, he’s dwelling in an old, dilapidated mansion that rather looks a lot like…some kind of…bat…cave with his main henchman Gerardo (Gerardo Zepeda) and a couple of hench-hangers-on. Despite being lit by torches, the place does at least have a TV though. Also, the Well of Rats and the Room of Bats. Still, a mad wrestler does tend to get bored from time to time, so the Bat regularly sends out Gerardo to catch him a beefy guy to wrestle with. Alas, Gerardo’s not very good at choosing victims, so nobody seems to even cause the Bat to break into a sweat; Gerardo also has the habit of murdering the wrestler’s involuntary sparring partners instead of just dumping their unconscious bodies in the city as he is usually ordered. Excuses like “I accidentally dropped him, now he’s dead, oopsie” seem to be a regular occurrence, making the Bat rather angry but never so angry as to convince him that all that kidnapping is a bit of bad idea, nor of suggesting the idea of replacing Gerardo with someone ever so slightly less murderous.

While hanging out in front of his damp cave TV set, the Bat watches a performance – certainly not the last one we will see in full during the course of the movie - of torch singer Marta (Marta Romero). She’s obviously the love of his life, so he decides to meet her and invite her to a nice dinner. No, wait, that would be insane! Obviously, he sends out his henchpeople to kidnap her.

Marta’s not that easy to catch, though, for her boyfriend Daniel (Jaime Fernández) is perfectly capable of fending off a less dangerous party of mooks. And when the next attempt at catching the Bat a singer looks as if it were to actually work, who just happens to drive by but everyone’s third-favourite crime-fighting luchador, Blue Demon (Blue Demon)!

Driving off the bad guys in his inimitable fashion, Blue then decides to involve himself in the case, helping to protect Marta as well as lending the police a hand in solving all the Bat-caused mayhem. And yes, there will be scenes of masked, be-caped, bare-chested investigative work before the climactic face-off between Blue and the Bat.

In a good week, Federico Curiel was able to direct a very fun and silly genre movie, and Shadow of the Bat must have happened in a very good week indeed, for this is a particularly fun lucha movie, the sort of thing that’ll leave people who love this kind of thing like me pretty breathless with enthusiasm about how enjoyably Curiel builds up this corner of the lucha-verse. It is, as you might know and/or expect, not just a place where masked wrestlers tend to be the police’s best friends, and the greatest heroes imaginable (cue half of the characters telling us how admirable Blue is, as if we wouldn’t see), but are also the best at pretty much everything else (except for remembering encounters with strange plants), and usually doing it shirtless, and often wearing a cape. In fact, I don’t think Blue’s ever not bare-chested in this one. But I digress.

As a director, Curiel is a particularly good hand at filming villains’ lairs, here having a lot of fun with the Bat’s icky, shadow-drenched cabinet of weird wonders, where a shaft full of rats for the punishment of crime-fighting luchadores or incompetent henchmen makes total sense. But the action seems to be of a better level than in most other lucha movies, too, with rather more dynamic staging as well as more creative choreography than can be the case in these movies. For once, there’s little ring-side action in a lucha film (hurray) – instead the film keeps the wrestling quota up with the Bat’s wrestling hobby, which integrates the lucha side of business a lot better into the actual plot than is usually the case, and even gives these scenes a bit of dramatic heft.

Another of the film’s strength’s is how fully it buys into the comic-book-like nature of the film’s oversized characters like Blue and the Bat (hopefully somebody’s new band name), and leaves reality in the most delightful way, while keeping to a logic of its own. So, for example, when Blue needs information about a peculiar plant connected to the crimes of the Bat, he’s not going to a botanist for his clues, but steps into Gothic horror land for a scene to visit a witch (Enriqueta Reza), which provides the film the opportunity to go through a whole awesome spiel of silly witch tropes.

The film is full of details like this. Another favourite is when Marta – who does of course eventually end up kidnapped despite Daniel’s and Blue’s best efforts – withstands a long and hilariously toxic masculinity 101 monologue from the Bat, who decides to punish her for not falling for his “your female softness will make me less crazy, love me or I’ll kill you, ain’t I a catch” shtick by imprisoning her in his very own lock-up for loves of his life. Of which there seem to be at least half a dozen at this time.

Osés, an important guy in the genre, and a bit of an expert in playing lucha villains as well as a regular scripter for these films, plays up the Bat’s particular brand of craziness rather wonderfully, making the guy bathetic, pathetic and physically impressive in a way that makes his somewhat peculiar lifestyle feel perfectly logical for him. Blue is, of course, Blue.

Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man (1973)

Original title: Santo y Blue Demon vs Dracula y el Hombre Lobo

Four centuries ago, a wizard named Cristaldi thwarted the combined efforts of Dracula (Aldo Monti) and the Wolf Man (Agustín Martínez Solares) to conquer the world. Of course, there’s a prophecy saying the terrible duo will return from the dead (un-undead?) to take up their old world domination project and take their vengeance on the descendants of Cristaldi. Now (well, in the early 70s), a hunchbacked criminal and occultist named Eric (Wally Barrón) revives the vampire and the werewolf hoping for monetary dispensation (though he’s shrewd enough not to bring the topic up with the the two).

First, the undead and the hairy one want their vengeance, though, and make their plans for the most sadistic way to ambush and murder the contemporary Cristaldi patriarch (Jorge Mondragón), a professor of SCIENCE, his daughter, and little granddaughter, as well as his niece Lina (Nubia Martí). However, Lina just happens to be the (very, very young) girlfriend of the hero of the masses, international man of mystery and adventure, lucha champion, inventor of the radio watch, and all-around fighter for justice, El Santo (Santo). So it’s easy enough for Cristaldi to ask a competent monster fighter for help. For once in a Santo movie, some of his earlier movie adventures seem to have happened in the film’s world, and our hero doesn’t poopoo the Professor’s explanations about the supernatural threat. He is, in fact, all in on protecting the attractive young women of the family against evil.

Despite Santo’s presence, the Professor is taken off the board to only return as a zombie in the last act; the wolfman goes undercover as a man named Rufus Rex (I would have called myself Lon Chaney, Jr.) to woo the Cristaldi daughter, and danger threatens from all sides. It’s the sort of situation where even Santo needs help, so he calls in the redoubtable Blue Demon (Blue Demon, if you must ask), who also makes a good chess partner, as we will learn. Together, they just might manage to keep at least someone named Cristaldi alive.

In the world of Santo movies, Miguel M. Delgado’s S&BDvsD&tWM takes up an upper middle position, quality-wise. It’s not what people who aren’t at least semi-regularly watching lucha cinema like this would call a good movie; on the other hand, the film, for the most part, lacks the cornucopia of filler business that make up the greatest parts of the truly bad entries into the Santo canon. So there are no musical numbers, zero painful hours of comic relief, and most scenes actually fulfil a function in the narrative. Admittedly, there are three short wrestling sequences that have nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of what’s going on, but that sort of thing does come with the territory of lucha cinema and would be bizarre if it weren’t included. Even better, in a weird but useful decision, the final wrestling match takes place after the actual narrative of the film has ended, so the easily bored can simply skip it and will miss nothing whatsoever.

Before that, there would be rather a lot to miss, though, for there is a lot of enjoyment to be had. As always, there are wonderful sequences of our masked heroes going about their masked daily lives, resting their weary bones and brains with a bit of chess, all the while wearing most excellent casual 70s outfits – Santo’s are bit more man about town, Blue’s tend to the more sporty – like all the best superhero dreams come true. The villains’ plans are needlessly complicated, too, and the film knows it. When Eric asks the undercover Wolf Man why the hell they are going through the whole rigmarole of seducing the Cristaldi daughter before kidnapping her when a more straightforward kidnapping and murder would be much easier, the dog-faced one simply explains that this would be too simple. Which sums up the ethos of horror pulp villainy beautifully, and enables quite a few fun scenes of Santo and Blue punching minion wolf persons and a couple of gangsters, so I’m all for it.

The production design, apart from Santo’s wardrobe, is rather on the impoverished side, with wolf man make-up that looks more like dog-faced boy make-up, and not exactly the most convincing vampire fangs, and sets that – apart from the Cristaldi home – do tend to the empty. However, someone involved the production clearly decided that there needs to be some fun, mildly macabre, or strange detail in each scene, so the nearly empty cave set with Dracula’s and Wolfie’s coffins also has a fire breathing bat and wolf head, vampire women are dressed in red full-body veils (okay, probably just red lingerie), and wolf people apparently practice a variation on the Holmgang on wolf persons who run away when beaten by Santo as well as their enemies. There’s also a magic dagger that is apparently a moral philosopher. Consequently, there’s nary a scene that doesn’t provide at least some moment of delightful entertainment.

I also particularly enjoyed Dracula’s portrayal as a right prick with an inflated ego, the kind of guy who delegates killing his enemies to his underlings even when it’s clear it’s not going to work (after attempt number three or so), and a guy you can absolutely believe will watch his last underlings get beaten up by masked wrestlers instead of attacking with them.

In a surprise move for a Santo movie, this year’s girlfriend Lina is actually doing useful things beyond getting kidnapped, even saving our heroes’ bacon at least one and a half times, all the while comporting herself like someone with certain signs of an actual personality. Hell, there’s even a moment or two here where I can actually believe she and the big S are close, which isn’t anything I’ve ever encountered in any lucha movie before.

So, it’s all very good fun, at least if you can be seduced into Mexican monster mash movies with masked wrestlers.

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.

Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (1974)

Original title: Santo y Blue Demon contra el doctor Frankenstein

There’s trouble in Mexico City! A mysterious madman kidnaps women, who are never seen again. That is, until he decides it’s better to let the corpses of his victims return as radio-controlled zombies who then proceed to kill their families. The police are clueless what this is all about, but the audience is quickly introduced to the bad guy, one Irving Frankenstein (Jorge Russek), owner of a pretty impressive beard, and the grandson of the original Doctor Frankenstein.

Apart from striking terror into the hearts of men, he’s kidnapping these poor women to perfect his brain transplantation technique. Sacrifices (preferably those of other people) need to be made for science, and for…love. For Frankenstein has the frozen body of his beloved tucked away in one of the many chambers of his silver corridor-heavy (okay, it’s one silver corridor filmed as if it were a labyrinth of corridors, but hey) lair, keeping her fresh so she doesn’t die from the brain cancer she has been diagnosed with. Once his brain transplantation technique is perfected, he’ll just pop the brain of another woman into his beloved’s body and…honestly, I have no idea how that’s going to help, but Frankenstein must. He’s the mad scientist after all.

Anyway, up until now, his only successful brain transplant has been moving the brain of a “South African giant” into the body of a very buff black gentleman - or, “a black giant from Africa”, as the totally not racist Frankenstein as a character in a film with not at all awkward racial politics calls him – whom he now controls via brain radio and who is his secret weapon when it comes to evil-doing, seeing as he’s super strong, impervious to bullets when Frankenstein tells him he’s wearing a bulletproof vest (he isn’t), and about as fast as a snail.

That’s not enough to fulfil the good doctor’s second goal, though, taking over the world with an army of brain radio controlled brain transplanted supermen. He has another super body lined up looking for a new brain, tentatively dubbed “Mortis” (which will turn out to be one of Frankenstein’s favourite names), and he has called dibs on a brain that would add enormous skill, intelligence and experience to the Mortis body. Of course, right now, that brain is still safely tucked away in the body of the idol of the masses, the great, the heroic, the singular Santo (Santo). And you don’t just go and try and steal El Santo’s brain directly.

Fortunately, Frankenstein has a plan for that too. He’s just going to kidnap young bacteriologist Alicia (Sasha Montenegro), and wait for Santo to come to him. Alicia, it turns out, isn’t just another younger woman Santo has a bit of an undisclosed romance with, she is a kind of non-legal ward to Santo and his fellow luchador, buddy and partner Blue Demon (Blue Demon), who apparently promised their mentor/her father to take care of her (not that kind of care, Santo!).

So once Frankenstein’s henchmen do indeed kidnap Alicia, he has two very motivated luchadores on his trail. Who, as it turns out, make better archenemies than brain donors.

In 1974, the movie adventures of Santo and his fellow luchadores weren’t exactly at their prime anymore. The budgets, never terribly impressive, had clearly sunken into the deepest depths, and quite a few of the lucha movies of this era seem to consist of more filler than movie. Veteran director (ending his career with 140 movies in his filmography!) Miguel M. Delgado’s vs Frankenstein is certainly no exception to the budget troubles (it is a Calderón production, after all), but Delgado does not torture his audience with days of comedy – there’s only some unfunny business about the doddering professor who is Alicia’s boss – nor are horrifying musical numbers rearing their ugly heads. There are two overlong, rather boringly staged in-ring wrestling sequences to get through, but that’s the sort of thing every movie about a luchador needs to include, so complaining about it would be churlish.

It’s not that the film does not include filler, mind you, it’s just that someone involved in the production must have realized that an audience going into a movie about Santo and Blue Demon fighting Doctor Frankenstein (and the good doctor is indeed fit enough to get beaten up by Blue Demon) will be more interested in spending some macabre good times with Frankenstein going about his day, seducing brain surgeons into working for him by giving them his de-aging elixir, letting his computer (with lots of blinking lights, so it must be excellent) compute the right cutting patterns for his brain surgeries, and ranting. These rants are presented by Russek with great gusto, quivering facial hair, and the air of crazy delight every good mad scientist in a very pulpy horror movie needs.

Of course, as is genre standard, we also get a couple of scenes of Santo and Blue going about their day, charming ladies, be it wards or – and I quote – “beautiful police women”, having a nice ride in Santo’s sports car and so on, when they are not hitting henchpeople and radio controlled African Americans in the face.


So really, as a late-ish period lucha movie, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein is as good as you can reasonably expect, pitting our heroes against a proper madman and his crazy science experiments, presenting enough extra standard lucha horror tropes to keep anyone happy, and generally going about its business with a sense of delight not exactly typical of this phase of lucha cinema. And if you’ve seen enough of these films, you might just get an extra kick out of Blue saving Santo’s bacon for once this time around.

Past Misdeeds: Santo Vs. Las Lobas (1976)

aka Santo vs the She-Wolfs

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Santo's (El Santo!) sweet life of wrestling fools in the ring and getting kissed by the White Wolf Queen of the lycanthropes  (something that will not be important later on) is rudely interrupted by a sleazy private eye who tells our hero some random stuff about lycanthropy and hands him an envelope containing place and time for a meeting with a certain Cesar Harker (Rodolfo de Anda), werewolf hunter. Santo, after having fought every supernatural creature you'd care to name, and some others too, is still the great sceptic at heart, poo-pooing the whole lycanthropy idea and shrugging that strange visit off. One imagines Santo gets visits like that so often he has learned to be choosy whom to believe.

His opinion changes when our sceptical hero is repeatedly attacked by a pack of dogs with the awesome abilities to a) make the great El Santo very very afraid, and b) to disappear into thin air. Clearly, something supernatural is going on here, so the luchador decides that meeting up with Cesar will be just the thing to do.

At their very leisurely meeting (it's still the 70s) Cesar explains to Santo that the Harkers have a long tradition of werewolf hunting, helped by their freakish immunity to the curse of lycanthropy; quite unlike Santo, who will - thanks to his "dog" bites - have to do something against the lycanthropy problem or turn into a lycanthrope himself before the next Great Red Moon (whatever that is) rises. Fortunately, there's an old prophecy foretelling either the end of the world through a lycanthropocalypse or the end to the hairy menace by the hand of a legend or symbol of silver. That latter symbol, Cesar is pretty sure, would be Santo.

Practically, Cesar knows the lycanthropes are based quite close to the small village (still with its own doctor and chief of police) he and his family are living in, so he invites Santo to his home. After dispatching one of the incredibly ineffective lycanthrope assassins who seem to hound Cesar's every step (a random flashback shows he can't even play a relaxing round of golf without being attacked), Santo agrees. But being the responsible chap that he is, the luchador is first going to fulfil his contractual obligations and have a wrestling match; he'll be with Cesar a bit later. After all, possibly turning into a wolf person in the near future is no reason for the idol of the masses to not show up to a fight. My protestant work ethic is ecstatic.

The situation will be quite changed once Santo arrives in Cesar's home village, though. The werewolf hunter and the White Queen have killed each other off, leaving behind some very angry lycanthropes in need of a new queen, Cesar's twin brother Eric (Rodolfo de Anda without glasses), and various women and children who will soon enough be in peril. I'm sure there's nothing untoward in the crate that arrives from Transylvania the same night Santo does, like, for example, the King of Lycanthropes Licar.

The whole affair could become too much even for a hero like Santo, but Eric, a bare-chested, waxed, vest-wearer named Gitano (Carlos Suárez looking like a man who has a lot of fun here), and various armed villagers (when they're not trying to kill Santo for no reason I managed to discern) are there to pinch in.

One of the real joys of lucha cinema is the adaptability of the genre. As long as he stays a hero, a lucha movie doesn't need to interpret its central character as a standard masked crimefighter alone, unlike - for example - US superhero films do, leaving the door wide open for genre hopping of a kind that makes lucha movies surprisingly adaptable.

As is so often the case in the genre, the movies of the great El Santo are a prime example of this. Santo starred in Universal-inspired classic horror films, 60s spy movies, adventure films, unfunny comedies, pulp-y crime films, rancheros and inexplicably weird stuff. Basically, Santo dipped his toes in every genre except romantic comedies (unless you're a fan of the Santo/Blue theory) and melodrama (though there are of course lucha melodramas without Santo), turning every other genre into sub-genres of the great equalizer that is lucha cinema.

By the time Santo shot Santo vs. Los Lobas, the lucha genre had lost much of its popularity, leaving the tenacious wrestler pretty much in the cinematic dregs, seeing him work for producers churning out very silly, often surprisingly boring movies, on budgets that could probably not always buy shoe-strings for everyone involved. So it comes as a bit of a surprise - even more of it when you add Santo's generally family-oriented image - that Las Lobas is a lucha entry into the genre of somewhat bleak, very dream-like 70s horror that does actually set out to be a real movie instead of random reels of Santo, musical numbers, and travelogue footage. Las Lobas also turns out to be one of the weirdest entries in Santo's filmography not produced by Vergara.

What's probably even more surprising is how well this attempt works, with directors Rubén Galindo (last seen here letting Santo fight against garbage bags) and Jaime Jiménez Pons creating an often nightmarish, always illogical, mood out of cramped looking shots taking turns with strange, yet strangely compelling compositions, a gritty looking aesthetic that's always rubbing against the weirdness of the plot and ideas, effectively dim lighting, and editing whose rawness emphasises the strangeness of it all by roughing up the film's flow. I'm not sure Galindo and Pons were planning to make their film quite as strange as it feels, and that its technical peculiarities weren't just based on a mix of budgetary troubles and ineptness on their side, but it's the results that count, and the results are, as my American brethren like to say, awesome.

Among the things about Las Lobas that may be clever or may be just accidents is the film's tendency to portray Santo as a bit more human and fallible than he often is: he's fleeing from his early dog attackers in a very undignified way (what is it with Galindo and letting Santo high-tail it?), actually needs the help of others, and even loses fights without being tricked into losing them. One might think this time around our hero's actually in danger, which is - of course - a pretty clever thing to find in a horror movie.


But really, it's the mood of the film that makes it as special as it is. It's one of those films where the strangeness of the visuals - lycanthropes who look like bearded ladies in fur bikinis carrying torches standing in a circle around their queen, the White Queen laughing a threatening laugh from the roof of a building, a party with circle dancing turning into a minor lycanthrope massacre - and the peculiarities of the script - a main character dying only to be replaced by a twin who is exactly like he was, the character who is built up as the Big Bad dying quite early leaving plot threads and an ancient prophecy dangling, the rules of lycanthropy changing with every second scene, connections between characters never really getting explained - really come together to form something like a fever dream through which the audience drifts; it's just that this fever dream has a masked wrestler in it, too. And, as a wise man once said, everything's better with a masked wrestler.

Past Misdeeds: Santo contra los asesinos de otros mundos (1971? 1973?)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A horrible monstrosity that looks a lot like a bunch of people crawling around under a tarp or inside of garbage bags kills important leaders of Mexico's industry. It's so very very sad. The tarpster serves a certain Malkosh (Carlos Agosti) who uses his awesome ability to appear on a television in police chief O'Connor's (Marco Antonio Campos) meeting room to try and blackmail Mexico into paying him a lot of money, or else, more "important" people will die.

Fortunately, the police has a not-so-secret weapon: El Santo (El Santo!), the idol of the masses, greatest man on Earth, Blue Demon's secret nemesis (etc.) is on the case before you can even cry out in excitement. One might doubt the great man's technique - getting himself overrun by Malkosh's car after he has already gotten rid of the bad guy's henchmen, and then caught - but his results are great.

So, after winning a little gladiatorial bout against a Roman-style guy with small shield and short sword, then another Roman-style guy with trident and net, and then a not terribly Roman-style guy with a flame thrower, our hero guns down Malkosh and his men with a machine gun. Malkosh's a good loser and informs Santo, while dying very politely, of the origin of the monster. Basically, moon cooties. Malkosh also tells Santo that his former henchman Licur (Juan Gallardo) is planning to use the moon cootie monster to rule the world. I imagine Licur's plan looking something like "1. Control moon cootie monster 2. ???? 3. RULER OF THE WORLD!!!".

Licur seems to need the help of "space scientist" Dr. Bernstein (as played in one of his regular guest appearances by Santo's real-life manager Carlos Suarez) for some parts of that plan, and has already kidnapped him. For some reason, Licur has forgotten to kidnap Bernstein's daughter Karen (Sasha Montenegro) too, but Santo is sure that his new enemy will try to sooner or later, so it's a simple job of protecting the girl, saving the scientist, wrestling Licur and his henchmen into submission and somehow getting rid of the moon cootie monster for our hero.

A meagre plot description like this can hardly do justice to Rubén Galindo's Asesinos De Otros Mundos. Sure, the whole thing might sound goofy, even for a film in a genre about the heroic exploits of masked, evil-smiting wrestlers, but the special beauty of this one lies in its love for loopy details. Galindo has no time for filler scenes (in fact, there isn't even a single one of the obligatory ring fights to bring the film up to length in it), because he has to include not one, but two evil masterminds, one or more (the script doesn't seem to be able to decide how many monsters there actually are - the characters usually speak in singular about it, but if it's only one, it's better at teleporting than a killer in a slasher movie; also, stealth) tarp monsters, and quite a few scenes of Santo heroically running away from said tarp monster(s).

The loopy details Galindo seems to love so well are often of the kind that can only lead to awesome or uncomfortable questions. I mean, why exactly does O'Connor have a replica of Santo's head in a cupboard in his office? Is it like the Bat Signal, but really, really weird? How does Malkosh's TV telephone work? How many monsters are there, exactly? And while I'm asking questions, two gladiators and then a guy with a flame thrower, Malkosh? There's also a lovely moment when Santo realizes that Karen hasn't been kidnapped yet and automatically assumes that Licur will try any moment now; because that's what the daughter of a scientist is for, right?

I have to admit that I'm in love with the randomness of Asesinos's script. Its wild and illogical leaps of imagination may not work as "good writing", but delight my inner child with their sheer comic book/pulp recklessness, and their willingness to just go for badly prepared ideas like the two masterminds business the second of whom is never even hinted at until half of the film is over, or the surprising - to say the least - "Santo turns into the Spider (Master of Men) and shoots everyone" scene. (And yes, I know this is not the only case of Santo using lethal force against an enemy, but he doesn't usually leave behind this many corpses). The only thing that's missing for complete lucha nirvana is a scene with our hero in mask and pyjamas, but he's wearing a very red cape throughout the whole of the film to make up for that lack.

Equally random as the script is Galindo's direction: it's an improbable mixture of the usual point and shoot style of early 70s lucha cinema  and sudden bursts of arty scene framing and camera angles. "Why not pretend it's a film noir for a minute" seems to be Galindo's motto here, and certainly, why not?

I'll probably hardly need to mention it, but the film's already pretty fantastic weirdness is further strengthened by the random jazz soundtrack (supposedly by the excellently named Chucho Zarzosa, but probably a random assemblage of records that were lying around during editing) that jumps from jazz funk, to easy listening, to some awesome atonal stuff, without a single moment where music and action on screen have anything to do with one another.

And then there's the monster. Moon cootie monster is one of those horrible creatures that move so slowly they can only devour their victims when these victims crash their cars, or don't know how to run, or never look around, or dislocate their ankles, but it's also as adorable as three to ten people crawling around under what might be a bunch of garbage bags stitched together can be. I posit that someone who doesn't at least smile when the thing starts crawling around, "threatening" people must be dead inside.


Basically, Asesinos De Otros Mundos is the dream of every twelve year old lucha fan (there are still twelve year old lucha fans, right?), scripted by someone who is writing like a twelve year old himself. In other words, it's lucha perfection, and exactly the sort of film that makes questions of "good" or "bad" absolutely irrelevant. Asesinos De Otros Mundos just is.

Past Misdeeds: La Mansion de las 7 Momias (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Sophia de la Garza (Maria Cardinal) is having a bad week. Not only has her father just died, but she has inherited quite a bizarre problem. Sophia's father, you see, was the reincarnation of an earlier de la Garza, who was governor of the town of Antigua Guatemala. 17th century de la Garza had made a pact with the devil that not only gave the horned one possession of his own soul but also those of the people he governed (which does not sound like non-heretic Catholic theology to me). Fortunately for them, the governor later repented, and managed to find some sort of loophole in his contract with Satan that leads to him being reincarnated in his male descendants and somehow being able to protect the souls in his care from his former master.

Unfortunately, de la Garza cannot be reincarnated as a woman and has no children beside Sophia. Sophia's only way to keep her father's soul and those of everyone else safe is to take possession of the treasure of the conquistadores that is another part of her inheritance and giving it to the descendants of the former slaves of the town. But before she can actually take possession of the treasure, Sophia has to survive three increasingly strange tests (the best one of which is about catching a rotating and biting skull), somehow fight the seven mummies guarding the treasure, see through the intrigues of three immortal servants of Satan and find out that her boyfriend is a jerk.

Fortunately, Blue Demon (hooray!) and his friend Superzan (boo!) have been invited by said boyfriend jerk to beautiful (at least that's what the film tells us repeatedly) Antigua Guatemala for a vacation, and are in their function as luchadores only too willing and able to help a damsel in distress out by wrestling a few mummies and evil boyfriends. Sophia's case is further helped by a mysterious mute hunchback and the painful comic relief stylings of a creature named Manolino.

As it goes with lucha movies from the late 70s that carry the frightening name of "Agrasanchez" in their credits, I went into La Mansion without expecting much worth seeing. To my delight, the film turned out to be rather more fun than I had expected.

Sure, Superzan is his usual charismaless void, and Manolino an abomination even compared to other cases of odious comic relief characters, about on a level with Bollywood's Johnny Lever, but that's the worst I can say about the film.

Apart from Manolino, there's all plot and no filler - and you could argue that Manolino isn't as much "filler" as part of a conspiracy to drive the viewer insane. Not even the usually unavoidable twenty minutes of ring fighting take place, a truly wondrous thing in a sub-genre in which the same four scenes have lengthened the running time of about ten movies. And really, why would I want to watch Blue wrestle anonymous wrestler number one when I can watch him and Superzan using an evil boyfriend to ram down a bunch of mummies, or a scene in which these heroes very matter-of-factly discuss the business of selling their souls with that most evil servant of the devil - a lawyer?

The film's background story is rather complex and involved - even more than my plot synopsis lets on - piling on so many weird incidental details that it's difficult not to feel charmed by them. There's also an undercurrent of guilt for the genocidal tendencies (which are only explainable by having them working with Satan himself, it seems) of the conquistadores and their descendants that's very atypical for Mexican pulp cinema as I have experienced it.

The plot does of course only work because neither Sophia nor the wrestlers nor Satan himself are all that clever, but I've never confused Blue Demon with Sherlock Holmes, so that's not much of a problem.

Another positive surprise is Rafael Lanuza's direction. Lanuza is also responsible for Superzan y el nino del espacio, one of the worst movies I have ever seen, so I didn't expect him to do any actual directing here. Turns out I was wrong, and while Lanuza provides some of his trademark shoddiness ("high" points: a frigging hand on the camera during parts of a fight scene, and the total confusion between day scenes, night scenes and day-for-night scenes, as if the sun and the moon were randomly teleporting around the sky), he also provides a lot of very comic book looking shots that suggest he did actually think about what he was filming instead of just vaguely pointing the camera into the direction of the actors.

Lanuza also makes good use of the locations in (beautiful, I tell you, beautiful) Antigua Guatemala. Picturesque ruins, a very pretty graveyard and a neat little swamp are much preferable to that field (you probably know which one I mean) half of the Campeones Justicieros films seem to take place in. From time to time, the ruins and some judicious red lighting even manage to look a little creepy, which combined with the usual alright mummy make-up and cute little Satan with his cute little horns turns the film into something close to a comics code approved horror comic on celluloid, with all the good and bad that description entails.

This is also one of those films with Blue - or Senor Demon, as most people in the film call him - in which he is the wise, older luchador to whom young and stupid Superzan looks up to instead of El Santo's sorely tried, and frequently brainwashed or evil-betwinned, side kick. In La Mansion de las 7 Momias, Blue is as much the hero as in his solo films, with pesky Superzan deservedly listed behind the Cardinal, who manages to look rather awesome in some dubious outfits, in the credits. As it should always be.

Past Misdeeds: Mision Suicida (1973)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Mexico City, during the Cold War. A Soviet spy ring - as we later learn under the leadership of Nazis with fitting names like Otto and Elke - kidnaps the Nazi war criminal and expert in brainwashing techniques Doctor Müller (Juan Gallardo). They need him to prepare the unsuspecting women populating their secret spy training camp in Santo Domingo for their real work. These women, you see, think they are just training (for who knows what?) at a very special gym that just happens to have a lot of swastikas in some of its rooms. In truth, they are meant to be the Soviet Unions new elite spies who are supposed to start an awesome series of sabotage missions in the USA in the near future. They just need to be convinced, and that's where Müller will fit in.

Alas, he really shouldn't be seen in public with his face, so the Nazi Soviets first need to kidnap the daughter (Elsa Cardenas) of famous cosmetic surgeon Dr. Thomas. This act will in turn provide them with the opportunity to press the good doctor into their services. Surely, there are no cosmetic surgeons in need of money anywhere to be found.

The bad guys' kidnapping spree doesn't escape the attention of that most spyhunting of all international police organizations, Interpol. Interpol's big shot Topaz (Cesar Del Campo) decides that this difficult Nazi Soviet/Soviet Nazi problem can only be solved by the premiere example of manliness we worship as El Santo (El Santo!).

Together with Interpol agent/nightclub singer Ana Silva (Lorena Velazquez), Santo puts his incredible physique and utterly brilliant intellect to work against the fiendish plan of destroying the Free World through a lot of girls in bikinis. But where to start? Oh, right, probably with one of the masses of henchmen piling onto Ana and Santo wherever they go.

Mision Suicida is one of the finer movies that the idol of the masses did during the 70s. It's not always a good sign in a Santo movie when our hero has no supernatural threat to wrestle with, but a combination effort of Soviets and Nazis (which seem to be just about the same in the confused mind of scriptwriter Fernando Oses)is nearly as effective an attack on all the is good and decent (or a night club) as a team-up of Dracula and the Wolfman. That the the weirdly stylish Santo of the early 70s is an excellent hero for a cheap-skate spy movie in the Eurospy vein is self-evident.

At this point in his career, Santo's films had already begun to sprout carcinogenic growths of filler as if they were characters in a body horror film, and were therefore always at risk of being buried by nightclub sequences, painful comic relief and random archival footage - at times even all three things at the same time - so it comes as something of a surprise that I can report Mision Suicida contains only two nightclub sequences, no comic relief and barely a hint of archival footage. The nightclub sequences themselves are also some of the less painful found in Santo films. Although the music in them certainly isn't great shakes, the pain is somewhat alleviated by ye olde "shake some (clothed) tits into the camera" gambit; it's not high-brow, but it is a lot less painful than a horde of moustached guys wearing large sombreros, or whatever that thing during the Mummies of Guanajuato was.

There's just no time for filler here, because what Mision Suicida lacks in budget it tries to make up for with lots and lots of action scenes, especially brawls in a classic serial style, two or three car chases (mildly paced), an explosion, and Santo kinda-sorta wrestling a shark in one of the lesser shark wrestling scenes of the sort of cinema which features shark wrestling scenes. The film's break with the often stately tempo of lucha cinema in this period at times reminds of Turkish pop and pulp cinema. Mision Suicida and something like Deathless Devil are obvious brethren in spirit, both films going for a not necessarily artful yet breathless style of narrative that replaces actual plot through one damn, hopefully exciting, thing after the other and tries to drive the audience into a state of excitement by their sheer determination to entertain with the little they have in their possession.

Lucha director veteran Federico Curiel (director of some of my best loved and of my worst loved Mexican genre movies) seems to put a lot of energy into the brawls, ramping up the excitement level through use of (often quite shaky) handheld camera work to replace the more typical static shots used for fights in a lucha film. Curiel's gamble of risking something slightly new pays off quite well and the fights are some of the more exciting ones to be found in the genre.

It's also nice to have a Santo movie in which the female lead is shown to be vaguely competent too, and though Velaquez (who every right-minded person loves for her part in the Wrestling Women/Las Luchadoras films) isn't allowed to get all Emma Peel on Santo, she is doing a bit more than just filling out her clothes. Which, by the way, are often of that matter-of-course 70s bizarreness that alone can make films of the time worth visiting.

The whole string of minor nightclubbing, major fighting and evil moustache-twirling of the moustacheless is held together by a soundtrack that is the tackier little brother of spy movie funk. For once, a lucha movie of this era and its soundtrack have something to do with each other. Well, if you ignore the women judoing to a bit of easy listening, that is.

Apart from all this, Mision Suicida is of course also full of the little bits and pieces of weirdness every lucha film needs to contain. And yeah, a masked wrestler working for Interpol just isn't enough of the "weird" for a film like this. Honestly, if Santo can build a time machine, he can also work for Interpol,  so scenes like the utterly puzzling (that is, filmed so that you don't have the slightest clue what's going on) shark wrestling sequence between Santo and something that might be rubber or a dead shark in a swimming pool or the over-complicated plans of our bad guys (who seem to have quite enough ready agents without needing the brain-washing at all) are absolutely needed to truly put the movie into lucha land, where it will forevermore proudly cavort among the other adventures of sharply dressed wearers of masks.

Santo: Infraterrestre (2001)

Santo (Hijo del Santo) is unofficially beaten in the ring by the mysterious Blue Panther (Blue Panther) when a bunch of muscled guys wearing black sunglasses jump into the ring to kick the crap out of the idol of the masses.

When Santo reviews the fight on his supercomputer, he realizes his opponent can’t have been a normal human being for somehow, he just shakes off hits that could have killed a normal opponent (making Santo a likely killer in the ring!?) and seems to be able to change his centre of gravity at will. Before he comes to any further conclusions, Santo is called in for his part-time job as police special agent.

There has been a series of mysterious disappearances and kidnappings in Mexico. The only witnesses to the misdeeds are a traumatized boy who just happens to idolize Santo, and a woman the film doesn’t make any use of, so I don’t know why she’s even in the script. What’s a mystery to our hero and the police is common knowledge to the audience for we have long since been informed the kidnappings are the work of the race of alien reptilians living underground who once ruled the Earth.

Consequently, Santo, police child psychologist Dr Alma Monreal (Diana Golden), and a handful of cops are soon crawling through the sewers - and what lies below the sewers – punching bad guys in the face. And would you believe it, Blue Panther is one of these bad guys!

On one hand, it’s difficult for me not to love Héctor Molinar’s attempt at reviving the beloved character of lucha hero El Santo for the movies, with good old Son of Santo playing his dad’s part; on the other, it’s not difficult to admit the resulting film isn’t really as good as one would hope. Of course, I’m still going to recommend it.

However, this is quite a few levels above the worst outings in the original Santo’s film career by sheer virtue of the film actually seeming to try to entertain its audience, with comparatively little foot-dragging, and a script that has some excellent silly ideas. The main problem is Molinar’s direction, the sort of effort that isn’t clever enough to film around the problems of the obviously ultra low budget of the production, using blocking that makes the cramped sets and boring grey walls of dubious origin that represent everything from a police station to sewers to an alien underground dwelling look even more cramped, with seemingly little thought put into the visuals at all. Molinar’s also not very good at filming the – surprisingly numerous, at least – action sequences. The latter is a particular shame because Hijo del Santo (or his stuntman – I don’t want to make the distinction) is actually a fine screen fighter, and the brawl choreography is pretty fun too, so it would have been nice to see the punching and wrestling presented in an appropriate way instead of Molinar’s often badly angled and underlit shots.

Still, as a lucha movie fan, I’ve gotten used to quite worse direction from the late Santo films, generally made worse by an air of apathy Molinar’s film never shows, and while it’s a shoddy little film by any interpretation, it does provide us cursed by the lucha gods with a decent enough bit of fun, good film or not.

Santo: Infraterrestre also includes some excellent additions to the all-around silliness of lucha cinema, providing Santo with a flying car (cue bored looking policemen who don’t react to Santo’s car suddenly flying away as a horrible – yet awesome – CGI effect at all, because clearly, on planet lucha you see this sort of thing every day), his own satellite in space (called PLATA-1, of course), as well as said supercomputer. Furthermore, the film posits the presence of an underground civilization of reptiles that is then basically shrugged off by our hero because he beat the big bad (and his main assistant), and surely, it’s better not to tell anyone we have alien neighbours right under our feet. In further Santo news, the film also teaches us that Santo is the kind of guy who dresses up for a visit to the sewers in his best shirtless cape ensemble, and looks rather freshly oiled too, which really makes Infraterrestre a part of the Santo canon no sane person should miss.

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On WTF: Hairy Beasts! Santo Vs. Las Lobas (1976)

The month of hairy beasts continues when I encounter what may be the best film ever made: Santo vs. Los Lobas. It's not just a duel of the ages, but also a seriously strange, and very serious horror movie as they were only made during the 70s. The inclusion of Santo is icing on an already incredibly tasty cake.

My column on WTF-Film continues with the appropriate gushing, so you know what to do.

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,lucha,horror,reviews,el santo,ruben galindo,rodolfo de anda,gloria mayo,carlos suarez,other places,hairy beasts

The Big Muscle Tussle: Las Vampiras (1969)

aka The Vampire Girls

(This write-up is based on the original Mexican, Spanish language version of the film, which - as far as I've been told - differs considerably from the English language one.)

Throughout February, the members of M.O.S.S. have decided to bring some meat onto their exoskeletons by taking a look at film's most beefcake-y heroines and heroes. After the agents of M.O.S.S. have - among others - already descended into bloody pits of horror, examined the abs and pecs of Italian versions of Greek and biblical demi-gods, and put Dara Singh under a microscope, what better next point of investigation is there than a film featuring the most stylish Mexican luchador, the incredible Mil Mascaras?

Mil Mascaras (Mil Mascaras!), wrestler, pilot of small airplanes and masked fighter for good, makes, as is his habit when not fighting mummies, accidental contact with the world of the Weird. First, he nearly crashes into a driving car that lacks a driver, unless it was driven by the bats that fly from its window when Mil investigates. Then, a bit later, the African wrestling champion - subtly dubbed Black Man - Mil was supposed to fight disappears from his locked dressing room without his clothes, with a few bats fleeing the scene of the crime once Mil has broken down that pesky locked door.

While his manager/assistant/boyfriend (I dare you to watch the scene where Mil and the guy are driving around looking at each other with corny lovebird eyes and not think "boyfriend") and a frightfully incompetent cop (Dagoberto Rodriguez) mock and laugh even when the plot-relevant news show the cop insists on watching while sitting in Mil's living room shows a report about a downed plane from Transylvania that was left by a bunch of bats instead of a pilot and passengers, our hero knows what's up: the vampire threat has returned to Mexico, and if the police won't do anything, a luchador will.

Mil Mascaras is all too right with his analysis too. There are in fact vampires at large, or, to be more precise, vampire women dressed in leotards lead by Aura (Marta Romero) who are out to take revenge on humanity for all the killed male vampires, which, I have to say, is pretty good motivation. If they can get new male blood in the process - preferred is the blood of athletes, it seems - it's just icing on the cake.

The only male vampire left is Branus (John Carradine), a doddering old fart Aura keeps in a golden cage in her throne room, so it's understandable the vampirettes are seeking more pleasant male company.

After the audience has learned a bit about vampire politics, it's back to Mil, who - after some research that costs his secretary Alicia her life, but teaches us that vampires need a specific sort of blood and a fitting climate to survive, has found a graveyard once suspected of vampiric activity (it's one for atheists and evil-doers, you see, so there are no crosses there). There he meets roving reporter and wearer of felt hats Carlos Mayer (Pedro Armendariz Jr, for no good reason given higher placement in the credits than Mil). Carlos has come to the same conclusions as our hero, so they decide to unite their vampire-fighting powers. Their partnership doesn't start off too well, though, for the first thing they do is accidentally (well, kinda, for what did they expect would happen when they break down a wall with bat noises coming from behind?) freeing Veria (Maria Duval) the widow of Count Dracula himself from imprisonment.

Veria soon finds her way to the other vampires and starts a subplot about her and Aura fighting about control over vampiredom. Their big political difference: Veria wants to reinstate Branus (who, as will later be revealed, only fakes part of his dementia) as king of the vampires, while Aura really prefers to find someone a bit more attractive and less pompous. Someone, like, say, a certain masked wrestler, perhaps? He is a perfect specimen after all.

Among the multitude of Mexican masked wrestlers who have had screen adventures of varying quality and insanity, Mil Mascaras has always been my favourite, for he unites the (maybe dubious) charisma of his peers with a quite peerless dress sense. As the connoisseur of lucha cinema knows well, Mil takes his "thousand masks" moniker very seriously, and not only changes his mask regularly and to great effect (my personal favourite in the film at hand being the mask with a circle pattern - only a real hero can get away with literally painting a target on his face) but also has some incredible fashion to go with his masks. Mil's preference for things like torero jackets, glitter and blindingly intense colours either make him the dandy or the glam rocker of the lucha set; both are roles deserving admiration, and if I were in the habit of throwing underwear at beefcake-y guys, Mil would be the one I'd try to hit. Damn you, heterosexuality.

In other words, if one ever had any doubt that part of the appeal of musclemen like the heroes of our theme month is purely and simply sex, one Mil Mascaras movie will make things clear; if one ever had any doubt that muscleman can be stylish and cool, one Mil Mascaras movie will get rid of that, too.

For people less in love with lucha cinema and Mil Mascaras (barbarians, I call them), the big selling point of Las Vampiras will be the appearance of John Carradine, already right in the middle of his embarrassing phase. It's difficult to say much positive about anything the man did at that point of his career, but in Las Vampiras case, I can at least admit that he's putting so much misguided enthusiasm and scenery-chewing self-irony in, it's difficult not to approve. Carradine's interpretation (one might suspect self portrait) of the classic cape-wearing vampire as someone wavering between unruly senile wreck and dirty old man - with a whiff of the alcoholic, of course - has a somewhat disturbing effect. At times, it's brilliantly funny and fun, but in other moments, when the playing of being a senile wreck and Carradine actually being down and out become hard to distinguish, it turns into something I found difficult to watch without cringing, and that did disturb the sense of silly fun I got from the rest of the movie. In a very different film, I would assume Carradine's performance, and the whole gender set-up of the film to be consciously subversive of traditional gender roles as seen in horror movies, but really, who am I kidding here?

For this sort of consideration cannot stand up to the fact that this is first and foremost a classic lucha monster mash, just one where the producers could afford what was left of a former horror star to mug a bit for the camera.

Fortunately and of course, there's nothing at all wrong with Las Vampiras being what it is, especially since it's not just a lucha movie, but a lucha movie made by Filmica Vergara, a Mexican genre production house whose films always had especially low production values, but which also more often than not used these production values to achieve a mood of the bizarre, creating (probably accidentally) a form of cardboard surrealism that holds all of the promises the bare concept of something like lucha cinema makes, yet the genre itself not always fulfils.

So this just isn't a film where Mil Mascaras and some reporter guy have a big fight against beefy vampire slaves, but one where said vampire slaves are dressed up in (literally) red shirts and berets - for no discernible reason, yet to my great delight; a film where a big ritual to find out which of the two main vampire women are going to lead vampiredom from now on consists of a prolonged jazz dance number with a lot of wing-like arm-waving, followed by a torch duel; a film where half of the vampire women like to stand on pedestals, staring into the void, just waving their arms slowly up and down, up and down, whenever something exciting happens (now that I think about it, they are a lot like Harinam Singh's vampire women without the chairs they "fly" on); a film where the vampire king's coffin (all the coffins here look particularly comfy inside) can be recognized by the big fat golden (cardboard or wooden) bat sitting on it; a film where a masked wrestler shoots silver bullets at the fakest of fake bats. In short, a work of deep, ridiculous beauty.

I could now begin to complain about the problematic construction of the film's plot (like the way it wastes Maura Monti in a few scenes as Armendariz' girlfriend, whose only reason to exist is so that Carradine has somebody to kidnap and Armendariz somebody to kiss after the film's climax), the static direction of Federico Curiel (whose films often are shot this way, unless he had one of this creative weeks, which did happen from time to time), or the sometimes clever, sometimes jumpy and rough editing, but the film's technical flaws do nothing at all to ruin the sense of pure joy I get from Las Vampiras, so I won't.

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,reviews,the big muscle tussle,federico curiel,lucha,horror,mil mascaras,john carradine,maria duval,marta romero,maura monti,pedro armendariz jr

In short: Santo Contra La Magia Negra (1972/3)

In his part-time job as an agent of Interpol, most heroic masked wrestler El Santo (El Santo!) is given the mission to travel to Haiti and protect a certain Professor Jordan (Guillermo Galvez) and his new-found formula to transform uranium into something "worse than an H-bomb" from The Enemy.

As soon as Santo arrives, he is attacked by zombies. The local evil secret voodoo priestess Dejanira (Sasha Montenegro) - for inexplicable reasons called Bellamira in the subtitles - has thrown in her lot with foreign agents (as played by good old Fernando Osés and good old Carlos Suárez) and now tries her damndest to get rid of Santo, acquire the professor's formula, and dig up a lot of uranium.

Did I mention the Professor has a daughter played by good old Elsa Cárdenas? Well, you know what will happen to her in the end, though Dejanira does not use her to blackmail the scientist - she prefers her scientists zombified. Turns out dead people can do science pretty well.

In theory, the idea of El Santo, the idol of the masses, travelling to Haiti and fighting against zombies, an evil white voodoo priestess - there's a also good black(!) voodoo priestess -, and agents of what the dubious subtitles call "the orient", is one to let my heart beat a little faster with joy.

Alas, veteran director Alfredo B. Crevenna's film isn't the awesome pop cinema concoction I dreamt of. Rather, it's one of those movies where the film crew seems to have taken the opportunity of an international co-production to get in some choice vacation time - producing a film seems to have been a mere secondary affair. Expect a bunch of shots of Haiti, then another bunch of shots of Haiti, then a scene of Santo looking tired and bored, then a scene of a mock-documentary styled voodoo ceremony with a real animal killing (classy), then a minute of sped-up action, then Osés and Suárez being very relaxed, and then some more hot voodoo ceremony action, and so on, and so on.

I'm all for shooting a film like this on location and giving it a certain amount of authenticity and local colour, a sense of place, but Crevenna overshoots that goal with way too many scenes of dancing and the carnival in Haiti, until "look at this awesome place!" turns into more of a "let's take a long, long look at my vacation pictures!" situation.

It sure doesn't help that most of the actual action of the film is so pedestrian. Fights between a masked luchador and zombies just shouldn't look so damn disinterested.

On the positive side, there's some damn frightening 70s fashion worn by Montenegro and the horribly underused (yeah, I know, it's her vacation) Cárdenas, some Mexican-Haitian funk on the soundtrack (for once just possibly not library music), and at least half a dozen scenes that have the pleasant goofiness that is all I demand from my lucha movies - I'm especially fond of the zombie professor. It's just unfortunate that these joyful elements are buried under the nastiness of the unnecessary cruelty to a goat, and Crevenna's holiday videos.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,in short,lucha,horror,el santo,elsa cardenas,sasha montenegro,fernando oses,carlos suarez,alfredo b. crevenna