Neutron contra los Asesinos del Karate (1964)
(Neutron versus the Karate Killers)
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It would be nice to end this Neutronathon on a relative high note - and since the penultimate Neutron film, Neutron contra el Criminal Sadico, kind of made me want to scream, that shouldn't be too hard.  Or should it?  Though optimistic going into Neutron contra los Asesinos del Karate, I did have some fears, based on having recently watched in quick succession both La Mafia Amarilla and Blue Demon Destructor de Espias, that the film, due to its subject matter, might contain some of the same odious (but admittedly at times hilarious  - though in a totally guilty way) Asian stereotyping that those films did.  Happily, that turned out to not be the case, since the film's karate gimmick is simply used as an exotic means of committing mayhem for the villains, who - though they do include in their number one actual, honest-to-goodness Asian - are not represented as being any kind of "others".  At the same time, I'm not so sure if the discipline of karate itself was all that well represented, since the filmmakers seem to have taken it as simply a Japanese term for "Yelling while hitting".  Still, how could you really lose with this set-up?  A premise in which you pit Neutron against a bunch of Karate-chopping assassins has just got to deliver more thrills than the previous film, in which Neutron played Scooby Doo to an elusive, knife-wielding phantom.  Unless, of course, you play the story as a mystery rather than an action film, opening the film with a brief montage of the assassins' crimes and then spending the rest following Neutron's alter ego Carlos as he tries to track them down through dogged detective work.  Which is what they do, by the way.  Granted, Carlos' investigation does lead him to a shady karate school run by German Robles - a set-up which makes possible the gratifying spectacle of Fernando Oses beating up Chucho Salinas.  Otherwise, however, Neutron contra los Asesinos del Karate manages the downright impressive feat of taking a concept that involves a masked wrestler and a gang of unstoppable martial arts killers and turning it into an incredibly talky and boring motion picture.  Neutron's mask appears to have gone through yet another mutation since the last film, and it's one that leaves him looking disconcertingly like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction.  Given that, you've got to feel for the guy who, during an early scene in the movie, awakens to find Neutron standing at his bedside, bondage mask, oiled naked torso, tights, and all.  Neutron assures him that he's a friend, but I wouldn't have found that all that comforting:

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Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro (1960)
(Neutron, the Black Mask)
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Neutron represents one of two distinct types of Mexican wrestling movie heroes.  There are those like Santo and Blue Demon, who are real professional wrestlers simply bringing their ring personas to the screen, and those like Neutron, who are purely fictional characters portrayed by an actor (in this case, Wolf Ruvinskis).  Of course, there is also Superzan, who, though not a real wrestler, appears on screen alongside real wrestlers, which, to me, actually constitutes some kind of a hoax.  Anyway, Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro, the first of a series of Neutron films, starts off with some slick looking, Saul Bass inspired animated credits that look you right in the eye and promise you that you're about to watch the coolest movie ever.  What is then delivered is a film very light on Neutron and very heavy on long and consecutive scenes of verbal exposition.  This was especially hard on monolingual old me, because I watched the film on an unsubtitled dvd.  And maybe I'm wrong.  Perhaps the dialog in Neutron, el Enmascarado Negro is really great, brimming with droll wit and thought provoking philosophical insights.  But it appears to me that it's mostly just people filling in whatever new character has just shown up (which happens a lot) on what's happened in the movie so far.  In fact, our introduction to Neutron comes via one character holding up a photo of him and explaining to another character who he is, after which we don't actually get to see Neutron for well over half an hour, when he suddenly shows up and punches a bunch of cops in the face (yes, subtitles would definitely have helped).  Neutron, though he in every other way matches the luchadore m.o., does not actually wrestle in this movie.  And, though I'm otherwise no big fan of the lucha cinema practice of stopping the movie midway for a ten minute wrestling match, I actually think that, in the case of El Enmascarado Negro, that would have served nicely to break things up.  I've heard that subsequent Neutron movies are better, so I'm not giving up on the series.  After all, even this entry, despite it's longueurs, has a few things to recommend it.  For instance, I liked that, rather than giving us just one mad scientist, it gives us a tag team.  One of them, Dr. Caronte, wears a wrestling mask, while the other one, Dr. Walker, should, because his face looks like someone poured a can of menudo on it and let it harden.  I also liked the army of ape-like zombies that Dr. Caronte has at his command, because the scenes in which they appear come the closest to suggesting the kind of creep show thrills that, in much greater quantity, would have made El Enmascarado Negro much less of a chore to sit through.  If ever a movie needed some scantily clad vampire women - and/or a cyclops - this one is it.

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Operacion 67 (1966) !
(Operation 67)
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Operacion 67 and it's follow-up, El Tesoro de Moctezuma, represent a kind of a mini-saga within the larger Santo saga.  These films were the Santo answer to the James Bond craze, and as such they are the most streamlined and well appointed of the Santo films.  They are, in fact, the first Santo films shot in color, something that their comic book colorful set design takes full advantage of.  Though Operacion 67 marked a step up from Santo's recent poverty row past, it may have been a bittersweet victory for him, given that he was asked to share top billing  with an upstart young pretty boy named Jorge Rivero.  Mitigating this, I imagine, was the fact that, in order to ape the tone of the Bond films, the film had to provide Santo with an abundance of adoring, scantily clad women, so that he could display a callous indifference to them.  In so doing, Operacion 67 effectively slammed the door once and for all on the more saintly Santo that we see in the films of the early 60's.  Never again would we see the lone, celibate-by-all-appearances Santo lurking around his lab, waiting for duty to call.  Future films would more likely see him spending his downtime out on a double date with Blue Demon or lounging by the pool attended to by his sexy maid.  Such radical innovations aside, Operacion 67, being a spy film from the 60s, has the same plot as seemingly every other spy film from the 60s.  Said plot begins with the bad guys committing some kind of spectacular crime, after which the film's super agents are put on the case.  These agents' unbelievably badass reputation so precedes them that, as soon as they set foot in whatever exotic location it is that their assignment is to take place, the bad guys immediately begin trying to kill them by every impractical means possible.  The bulk of the film is then taken up by a series of action set pieces in which the villains repeatedly try to kill the heroes, until, finally, by means of their very efforts to kill them, the villains lead the heroes straight to their secret lair, which they blow up.  Thus the agents are freed from having to do any of the actual spying that they were hired to do by the fact that the villains have been throwing themselves at them since day one.  It seems to me that the villains might just relax, lay back in the cut for a while, and find out for certain if the agents' reputation is really warranted before risking exposure by going after them so aggressively.  It could turn out that they just have really good PR, that they're not all that competent, and that they might give up after a few days and go back to wherever they came from.   A little patience can really pay off, especially when you have a lot invested in a spectacular criminal undertaking.   Anyway, by saying this I'm not suggesting that I think the plot of Operacion 67 should be any more complicated.  If it was, I wouldn't be able to understand it, because it's not in English and the dvd doesn't have subtitles.  Regardless of this language barrier, Operacion 67 is a lot of fun - fun in the same way that a lot of the James Bond knock-offs from this period are fun, only inestimably better, because it has a masked wrestler in it.

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Profanadores de Tumbas (1965) ?

In a small room, a woman in a black leotard and fishnet tights go-go dances suggestively as two men play a classical piece on violin and piano.  There is no audience in the room.  The woman smiles serenely toward us as she dances, and the camera zooms in to focus on her hips as they undulate sensually ' if incongruously ' to the rather staid music.  Suddenly the violin, under its own power, leaps out of the violinist's arms, and the violinist finds that one of the strings has dislodged and wrapped itself tightly around his neck.  As the violinist strangles, the violin dances a few feet across the floor and then explodes.  The woman screams.  And the scene ends.  Now, if not for the go-go dancing, you might think that I was describing a scene from some early surrealist film ' and with that and other scenes like it, the Santo film Profanadores de Tumbas could easily hold its own against the anarchic absurdity of classics like Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'or.  In addition to the killer violin, we're also presented with a scene in which a wig tries to strangle its owner and then continues to hop across the floor once it has been cast off.  In another, a table lamp bleeds and drives its owner mad by flashing rapidly on and off and emitting weird sounds.  All of this lunacy is accompanied and complimented by the jagged editing, disjointed narrative flow and weird, minimalist sets that are typical of the four micro budget features Santo did for producer Luis Enrique Vergara in the mid sixties. (This is the third of the Vergara films, which were shot back to back within roughly a one year period with mostly the same cast and crew ' see also my reviews of Atacan las Brujas and El Hacha Diabolica.)  While the film overall is a bit slow and repetitive, it leaves you ' in a way similar to even the most mediocre David Lynch movies - with some weird and weirdly unsettling images that stick with you long after the finer details of the plot have been forgotten.  And to put an exclamation point on the proceedings, the climax is absurdly violent, featuring bodies torn apart by machinery, thrown into boiling pits of acid and shoved face first into blast furnaces.   I haven't seen anywhere near all of the Santo films yet, but it is very difficult for me to imagine that there is another in the series that's any weirder than Profanadores de Tumbas.

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El Robo de las Momias de Guanajuato (1972)
(The Theft of The Mummies of Guanajuato)
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This is the first sequel to Las Momias de Guanajuato, and, while Santo and Blue Demon are nowhere to be seen, the producers were at least able to afford Mil Mascaras' salary and keep him aboard for one more go around.   Helping out this time are Blue Angel, who looks like a Chippendale's version of Captain America, and El Rayo de Jalisco, who's on hand to confuse those of us familiar with La Sombra Vengadora by wearing a nearly identical costume.  What I love about this one are the interstitial bits featuring a shock zoom on a leering skull.  It's very reminiscent of something you'd see in a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon.  In fact, the whole movie has sort of a Scooby Doo feel to it.  The wrestler's gal pals, I'm happy to report, are in on the action this time and, whenever it's time to go poking around in a spooky tomb of creepy lair, the whole gang goes along - even when they lose the advantage of stealth by doing so.  The mummy make-up is especially puke-y for this one, and the climactic mummies vs. wrestlers battle is satisfyingly action-packed.  Up until that final battle, however, all of the wrestlers' physical confrontations are with the midget henchmen.  Now, I'm a big fan of the whole midgets vs. wrestlers thing, and in cases where the wrestlers in question are not exactly at their physical peak, I see the utility of such pairings.  However, it does seem like kind of a wasted opportunity when you have three wrestlers as obviously in their prime as those featured here and you spend most of their screen time pitting them against opponents who are one sixth their size.  At the same time, it's truly hilarious to watch a big, muscle bound lug like Mil Mascaras try to pretend he's being taken down by a gang of clamoring little people, so, given the choice, I guess I'll take the hilarity.  I also like that the main supporting characters here are a street kid and an older homeless man (the boy's father? - without subtitles I can't be sure), and that those characters aren't played for pathos like they typically would be in an American film.  These are clearly characters that the audience is meant to identify with, rather than pity.   These two witness the titular robbery and end up going to Mil Mascaras and his crew after the proper authorities scoff at their story.  This indicates a big change from the days when Santo functioned as an adjunct to the police.   Here the masked wrestlers are presented as those who the people turn to when official justice fails them.

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Una Rosa Sobre el Ring (1973)
(A Rose in the Ring)
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Una Rosa Sobre el Ring is a straight up melodrama, a soap opera set in the world of lucha libre.  Mil Mascaras appears in it, but it's really no more than a cameo, and he doesn't venture outside of his professional wrestling role to right any wrongs, heal the sick, or hurl any vampire midgets into other vampire midgets.  In short, I have absolutely no business writing about this movie.  Sure, I did watch it, but I've also watched open heart surgery on the Discovery Channel, and I don't feel like that makes me any more qualified to comment on the quality of its execution.  The problem is that the dvd of Una Rosa Sobre el Ring, like about half of those that I've watched in connection with compiling these diaries, has no English subtitles, so I had no idea what was being said, and wasn't entirely clear on all of the relationships between the characters.  If the cast of characters had included a mad scientist, or a mini-skirted femalien, or a werewolf, or a diabolical criminal mastermind, or an evil, disembodied brain, it would have been a different story, because those, for me, are part of a universal language.  If you at least give me a mad scientist and a burly guy in a wrestling mask, I can pretty much put all the rest of the pieces in place.  But the trials and tribulations of everyday life?  The vagaries of the human heart?  Come on!  I'm a guy!  I need you to spell that shit out for me!  Don't make me guess at it, otherwise I'm just going to get it wrong and piss you off.  Anyway, the little that I can with certainty tell you about Una Rosa Sobre el Ring is that it stars Crox Alvarado as an aging luchadore haunted by the death of an opponent in the ring.  But, hold up; now that I've said that, I realize that I can't really say with certainty that his role was that of an "aging luchadore".  It may have just been age inappropriate casting, with his obviously very advanced years not intended to be a focus of the story.  In any case, I definitely can say that a remarkable effect is achieved at the film's conclusion when Alvarado dons his mask and enters the ring against Mil Mascaras.  His formerly pendulous man-maries are suddenly rock hard, and he seems to gain a few inches in stature.  It's almost as if it's an entirely different person in the role.  Una Rosa Sobre el Ring also features a lady who becomes a nun, an impoverished orphan who gets slapped upside the head a lot by a mean guy who takes his panhandling money, and a guy in a suit who is repeatedly shown punching a buff guy with a club foot in the face and knocking him out, which I think is meant to be comical.  I could further pad this review by mentioning that its an Agrasanchez production and then go on to enumerate all of the technical failings that go hand in hand with that - but I just got finished jumping all over Agrasanchez in my review of El Hijo de Alma Grande and I'm exhausted from the effort.  Well, almost exhausted.  The sound looping in this film is really atrocious, giving us a 10 year old newsboy who has the voice of a 35 year old man, a crowd of people who visibly applaud yet emit no sound, and physical blows that sound full seconds after they're landed.  As far as the onscreen production values go, the fact that the film focuses a lot on people who are desperately poor works well within the typical Agrasanchez film's budgetary restrictions.  They're not so good at realizing a super villain's high tech lair, but a squalid hovel they can do.  As far as the story goes, as I said, I really can't say.  But there's a lot of exaggerated gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair going on that suggests to me that, were it's dialog understandable, Una Rosa Sobre el Ring might just be a lot of fun to watch.  Not fun enough to prompt me to invest in those much needed Spanish lessons, mind you, but fun nonetheless.

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Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida (1969)
(Santo versus Blue Demon in Atlantis)
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That title promises so much.  It's also very practical.  You can be certain that no one ever had to ask what Santo versus Blue Demon in Atlantis was about, since the title, following a strict journalistic model, provides us with the who, the what and the where (with the how - by wrestling - being clearly implied by the stars named therein).  The reality, however, is that, other than the special effects sequences, the action in this film is pretty generic.   Furthermore, all of the special effects sequences are lifted from Japanese kaiju movies (as in, the actual footage from those films is inserted into this film), so there's just not that much new to savor here.  The film starts Santo and Blue's onscreen partnership off on a bad foot, it being one of the many that presents Blue as  an evil-doing pawn of the bad guys (here it's the actual Blue, who's been hypnotized by the Atlantians, though other films would use the device of a cloned double or impostor).   It also gives us one of the most blistering examples of pointless filler in lucha cinema history by showing us several minutes of Santo sitting and watching black and white footage of a musical number from another film on television.  If ever a film was screaming a warning to its audience that it wasn't worth their time, this is it.  (What was the poster's tag line?  "Bring a book"?) Atlantida also suffers by comparison to Operacion 67, because it tries to go for the same James Bond feel, but without the panache and relatively lavish budget of that earlier film.  On the mitigating side, there are some good fights and some decent underwater footage, but, unless you're OCD like me, I'd skip this one and move on to Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos.  Now that's a picture!

Read my super-deluxe review of Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida at Teleport City!

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Santo contra el Cerebro Diabolico is entertaining to the point that I forgot to be pissed that Santo was barely in it.  I've mentioned elsewhere that many of these early films relegate Santo, despite his marquee status, to a fairly peripheral role, essentially having him on hand just to help the film's traditional hero when there's heavy lifting to be done.  Cerebro Diabolico takes that to an extreme by putting him in a part that might have better been filled by an animal star like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin - though Lassie would undoubtedly have gotten more dialog than the single line that Santo's given here.  And what's really striking is how unnecessary Santo seems to the movie.  Both of the stars, Fernando Casanova and Ana Berthe Lepe, are appealing enough - and their characters resourceful enough - to carry the film on their own.  And the script doesn't go out of it's way to create scrapes for them that cry out for Santo's intervention.  (Well, except for one, which I'll just call "the interminable head-cinching scene", in which you keep expecting Santo to burst in and put a stop to the madness, and he never actually does.)  Up until the point, well past the films' halfway mark, when Santo appears onscreen with the other principals, I was actually beginning to wonder if this was a case where footage of Santo was inserted into an already completed film.  Add to this the fact that, because the movie, though set in modern times, is basically a western, the presence of Santo, with his gizmo-filled laboratory and tricked-out sports car, is sort of incongruous.  The filmmakers seem aware of this, too, because, at those times when they do put him onscreen, they're very quick to usher him off again once he's finished with the required business, and to keep him off for a good chunk of screen time from that point on.  This isn't to say that he doesn't have his moments, however.  Among other things, we get to see Santo charging to the rescue on horseback, preventing a plane from taking off with his bare hands, and taking part in a climactic brawl during which he dispatches all but one of the villain's henchmen by tossing them off a cliff (which seems a bit harsh, seeing as they'd all had the courtesy to fight him mano a mano, without drawing their readily available sidearms on him).  As with Santo contra Cerebro del Mal, the brain referred to in the title is of the "criminal mastermind" type, not the disembodied, pulsating sentient organ you might have been hoping for (so far, only Blue Demon contra Cerebros Infernales has been brave enough to give us that).  In fact, this film has no supernatural or science fiction elements at all.  But what it does have is lots and lots of fist fights.  I would say that Santo contra el Cerebro Diabolico is for people who like to watch people hitting each other what Winged Migration is to people who like to watch the awe-inspiring miracle of avian flight.  All in all, this movie is a very enjoyable example of Mexican popcorn cinema, but it's not one to turn to for filling your daily Santo requirement.

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Santo contra el Doctor Muerte (1973)

Santo contra el Doctor Muerte is unique in the annals of Santo for being a Spanish production, filmed in Spain with a predominately Spanish cast and crew.  Given that this is essentially a Euro-Santo film, I was really hoping to see Santo take on some homicidal lesbian nuns or naked lady vampires - and maybe even hook-up with Emmanuelle.  Unfortunately, this one is more of a throw-back to the Eurospy films of the 60's, which means we get that plot I described in detail in my review of Operacion 67.  To recap: The villain commits a spectacular crime ' this time somehow involving both art forgery and the harvesting of organs from captive models ' then immediately embarks on a series of ill-advisedly preemptive and  brazen attempts to assassinate the secret agents who are assigned to solve that crime.  This results in the villain leaving a breadcrumb trail of botched murder attempts that leads his pursuers directly to him, making their job much easier than if he'd just adopted more of a wait-and-see attitude.  To be fair, Santo and his sidekick (an Interpol agent with more than a passing resemblance to Tony Orlando) do put in a lot of leg work here, and it pays off in us having to watch a lot of long scenes of them sitting in various offices and well appointed studies interviewing people in un-subtitled Spanish.  Strangely, once it finally comes time to spring into action, Santo and Paul turn the second half of the movie over to Mirta Miller as sexy female spy 'Susan'.  ('Susan's the name.  Susan' well, just Susan, actually.")  Susan's version of spying looks a lot like being the heroine in a Hammer horror film, as she spends most of her screen time wandering around the villain's castle in a negligee that threatens to fall off at any second.  After a good half hour of this, Santo and Paul return, refreshed from their well-earned hiatus from Santo contra el Doctor Muerte, and put the beat down on the heavies.  Though it's a lot better put together than a contemporaneous Mexican stab at the Santo/spy genre like Mision Suicida, Santo contra el Doctor Muerte isn't really anything special.   It does have one very brief and un-Santo like flash of female nudity, but I'm sad for you if that's what inspires you to watch it.  In fact, if you're going to watch Doctor Muerte for the nudity (and if merely implied nudity will do it for you), do it for the scene where Santo steps out of the shower with his mask on, because that's awesome.  It's almost as awesome as the thrilling Airport Urinal Brawl where Santo places his shoes on the floor of one of the stalls and makes his attackers think he's sitting on the can.

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Santo contra el Rey del Crimen (1961)
(Santo versus the King of Crime)
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The plot of Santo contra el Rey del Crimen concerns corruption in the sport of Jai Alai.  I had seen this sport depicted in an old episode of Miami Vice, which not only saved me some Wikipedia time, but also kept me from spending most of the movie scratching my head and saying, "What the hell?"  Like Santo contra el Cerebro Diabolico, which I had watched previously to this, El Rey del Crimen is one of three pictures that Santo did for Peliculas Rodriguez with stars Fernando Casanova and Ana Bertha Lepe.  As with Cerebro Diabolico, Casanova and Lepe are really the focus here, with the bits of Santo action rather awkwardly - almost inexplicably, in fact - integrated into the story.  Watching El Rey del Crimen gave me some insight into what gives these films that strange, disjointed feel.  The producers here were trying to present Santo as a traditional super hero, hampered by the fact that his alter ego couldn't be shown.  In your usual masked crime fighter yarn - such as those told in the old Republic serials that clearly had such an influence on these films - those scenes that here feature Casanova as police detective Fernando Lavalle would be those featuring the hero's alter ego.  It's as if Superman and Clark Kent really were separate people - and Superman really did just show up coincidentally whenever Clark and Lois were in trouble, just like Clark was always saying he did.  (In fact, in her role as Virginia, an ambitious and fearless "girl" reporter - and also Lavalle's girlfriend - Lepe fills the Lois Lane role in all but name.)  El Rey del Crimen even gives us an origin story for Santo, showing us Santo as a young boy being told by his ailing father of the legacy of the Silver Mask, and even introducing an Alfred-like manservant, Matias, who gives the young Santo his first look at the Batcave-like Santo lab.  (Interestingly - to judge by the cars, architecture and clothing - the scenes of Santo's boyhood take place in what was then the present day, which means that the film's later events take place, well, a couple of years ago, though the films' version of our very recent past looks a lot like the early 60s.)  There's a fascinating, monastic element to the Enmascarado de Plata role that young Santo's guardians lay out for him here; the mask isn't meant for concealing identity so much as it is a means of renouncing it altogether.  By becoming faceless, Santo is turning his back on the sin of pride and any potential for the desire to do good to be tainted by the desire for fame or worldly reward.  Unfortunately, the film kind of skirts over the whole issue of how this version of Santo jibes with him pursuing fame as a professional wrestler - and, needless to say, doesn't even touch upon the fact that his mask would just eventually become his (very famous) face.  In any case, by 1966, we had a version of Santo whose house featured a room containing a simulated tropical beach in which he made sweet love to bikini clad women whom he dismissed with a snap of his fingers (see Operacion 67), so I think it's pretty safe to say that the idea of Santo as an ascetic was ultimately pretty much abandoned.  Anyway, while I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Santo contra el Cerebro Diabolico, I found this film to be fairly entertaining.  And, it saddens me to say, it wouldn't be much less so without Santo.  I just find Casanova and Lepe to be tremendously appealing actors (and Lepe is adorable, even with the tremendous hairdo they've got her hoisting around). I'm looking forward to Santo en el Hotel de la Muerte, the last of the Rodriguez pictures that I have to see.  But, by this point, I know what to - and not to - expect.

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Santo contra Hombres Infernales (1958)
(Santo versus the Infernal Men)
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You know, I honestly try to come to each of these films fresh, ideally judging them on their own merits without making a lot of generalizations based on the fact that they may be, oh, the twentieth lucha film I've seen this month.  Still, once you've watched thirty or so Santo films, it's inevitable that certain patterns will emerge.  For instance, it's become clear to me that any studio that had Santo under contract would go to considerable lengths to make the most of their investment, with the prevailing attitude being, "Why make just one Santo movie, when, by recycling elements, you can, for very little extra money, make two, or three, or four?"  As a result, there are few Santo films that can stand alone without there being at least one other production, made with many of the same resources, piggy-backed on top of it.  And this was true from the very beginning.  In fact, Santo contra Hombres Infernales, the follow-up to Santo's first screen effort, Cerebro del Mal, may just be the most egregious example of this practice.  By today's standards, it might even be considered a remix of Cerebro del Mal rather than an actual free standing film, as it recycles entire scenes from that film while adding very little new of substance.  Joaquin Cordero returns for this one, this time playing the hero, and he does the best he can with what he's given, but since that's virtually nothing, he can't give anything close to the bravura performance he gave as the conflicted villain in Cerebro del Mal.  And, as for Santo, his presence in the movie is so minimal, and his role so entirely superfluous to what there is of a story, that it doesn't even serve it's intended purpose of justifying his name in the title (despite that titular presence, his name actually appears pretty far down in the credits).  The few scenes that he does appear in, which mostly consist of him inexplicably popping in and out of the ocean like Aqua-Santo, look like they probably took up no more than an afternoon of filming, and they're inserted pretty randomly, like a casually sprinkled garnish on a hastily prepared footage salad.  All in all, I could only recommend watching Santo contra Hombres Infernales if you wanted to see a standout example of filmmaking at it's most mercenary.  It does have some great location footage of Havana, but I'm pretty sure that all of that also appears in Cerebro del Mal, which has the added benefit of being a movie that's actually enjoyable to watch.  One thing I did like about the film, though, is the opening credits, which run over an extended sequence of an ambulance making it's way through the twilit urban streets, with the siren's persistent moan as the only sound accompaniment.  It's sad, because, watching that sequence at the time, I thought it was an artful touch, but now, having seen the film that followed it, I can only conclude that it was the result of some kind of cost cutting measure.

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Santo contra la Hija de Frankenstein (1971)
(Santo versus Frankenstein's Daughter)
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For some reason I thought that Blue Demon was in this movie, and I was surprised by how disappointed I was when I realized that he wasn't.  I think I need to come to terms with the fact that I may like Blue Demon even more than I like Santo.  What is it about Blue Demon?  Is it his colorful costume?  His sensuous lips?  Anyway, I don't mean to imply that this isn't a plenty entertaining and stupid film even without Blue Demon.  Frankenstein's daughter wears a huge Dolly Parton wig, a mini skirt and go go boots and uses a youth serum to change a bunch of decrepit old men into a gang of strapping 52 year old henchmen (Yes, the 70s truly were an age of diminished expectations).  There's also some serious Santo bondage and a poignant moment where Santo shows compassion toward the mortally wounded monster.  Oh, that Santo...  How could he not be my favorite?

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Santo contra la Invasion de los Marcianos (1966) !
(Santo versus the Martian Invasion)
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This was the first Santo film that I watched as an adult.  Of course, as a kid, I had seen all of the dubbed versions, and even caught an un-subtitled Atacan Las Brujas on the local Spanish language channel, but when I happened across La Invasion de los Marcianos while channel surfing one day a few years back (again on a local Spanish language channel, this time in L.A.), it had been decades since I last encountered El Santo.  The film had a strangely hypnotic effect on me.  I think the reason it's possible to become obsessed with something like Santo movies is that their very existence somehow defies comprehension.  The fact that human beings would endeavor to create something so awesome, yet so seemingly unnecessary, is something that the brain is incapable of completely grasping, and so we must continually revisit the evidence.  Before my recent lucha jag, La Invasion de los Marcianos was the only Santo movie that I actually owned.  At the time of purchasing it I felt that it could stand alone in my DVD collection as a representative of the series, because it contained everything that a Santo movie should.  And it does, I suppose, except it doesn't contain Santo beating a Cyclops in the face with a club, or any outrageously inept human-to-bat transformations, or evil midgets, or Blue Demon, or Santo hanging out by the pool surrounded by fawning bikini babes, or underwater Santo.  Still, if you were only going to watch one Santo movie, you could do a lot worse than this one.  And you should watch at least one Santo movie, because your life will be changed by it, even if only in a very insignificant, totally imperceptible and stupid way.  It will be changed because you will have seen something you never saw before.  And that something is the unique brand of straight-faced absurdity that only a top notch Santo film like this can offer. 

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Santo contra la Mafia del Vicio (1970)
(Santo versus the Vice Mafia)
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When I sat down to watch Santo contra la Mafia del Vicio, I never would have guessed that I was about to see an epic crime saga with an operatic tone and an unforgettable cast of vivid, richly realized characters.  And that's a good thing, because Santo contra la Mafia del Vicio couldn't be farther from what I just described if it was filmed in space with a cast of weightless mice in tiny gangster outfits.  But why focus on what Santo contra la Mafia del Vicio is not?  After all, you can find tens of millions of films on the Internet Movie Database that have all of the elements that Mafia del Vicio lacks.  In place of such humdrum elements, Mafia del Vicio possesses that certain quality that is the very thing that keeps me coming back again and again to the films of El Santo.  And that is mystery!  Not the type of mystery that derives from plot, but the deeper, ultimately unsolvable type of mystery that enlivens all of our most enduring relationships.  For the motives of the creative forces behind Santo's movies are mysterious in the same irresistibly compelling way that all those people, places and things that most cling to our memories and haunt our dreams are.  I'm not talking about the type of muddled confusion that leads you to exasperatedly wonder what on Earth someone was thinking, either.  Because, to me, the inscrutable trappings of Santo's movies imply, not mere cluelesness, but rather the existence of a secret, internal logic that I am simply not privy to and, maddeningly, probably never will be.  For instance, why does Mafia del Vicio famously begin with a sequence (often compared to a music video, but more on the technical level of one of the old Scopitone films from the 60s) in which Peruvian pop star Jimmy Santy shimmies on the beach while lip-synching a cloying bubblegum number to a group of bikini clad women and an obvious double wearing Santo's mask?  I could venture a guess, but the true answer is ultimately... a mystery!  And what are we to make of the scene where Santo watches Elsa Cardenas undress while hidden behind a partition in her bedroom, then makes a show of sneaking out once she's turned out the light, even though she made it very clear to him that she knew that he was there while continuing to undress anyway?  It might seem that the intention was for this scene to serve as a relatively chaste substitute for an actual sex scene, with the misfired result being that it ended up a lot kinkier and creepier than if we'd just been shown Santo and Cardenas getting it on.  But was that kinkiness and creepiness perhaps intentional?  And, if so, what is that meant to say about Santo?  Again... a mystery!   And why exactly does the crime boss in the film kidnap his own niece?   Did I fall asleep?   Perhaps.  But perhaps not.  And why do two adult women have a child's squeaky toy lying around on the floor of their apartment?  Is it -- Okay, to be honest, I don't care about the why of  that one, because the dramatic use that squeaky toy is put to made me laugh really hard.  And I don't think it was supposed to be funny.  Or was it?

Of course, I don't want to focus on Santo contra la Mafia del Vicio's mysteries to the exclusion of it's more unambiguous selling points.  For one, the film gives Santo an opportunity to put an interesting spin on Blue Demon's usual shtick by having him spend most of his screen time impersonating a hood who is supposed to be impersonating him.  In addition, it proves to be quite an ambitious film by setting itself the monumental goal of stripping Superzan el Invencible of its title as reigning length-padding champ.  It makes quite an impressive showing in that respect, too, bringing to the competition a formidable three full musical numbers, then upping the ante with an extended water skiing sequence, and then going for the knock-out punch by including an unnecessary scene of expositional dialog in order to prominently plug the restaurant in which the scene takes place (In return for... what?  Catering?  The use of the location?  Another mystery!).  Still, Supezan el Invencible easily retains the belt, seeing as it would gladly, if it could, cram all of Mafia del Vicio's contents into it's own running time and still greedily engorge itself further on a recycled plot from an old Superman episode, pilfered effects footage from a 50s sci fi film, and a ponderous beauty pageant sequence.  (Good effort, though, Mafia del Vicio.)  Lastly, Mafia del Vicio shows an unwavering commitment to the notion that every woman that appears on screen, no matter how advanced their age or unsuitable their body type, should be wearing a revealing swimsuit.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, of course.  But, for myself, these are instances where a little more mystery would have gone a long way.

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Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro (1962) !
(Santo versus the Vampire Women)
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Santo doesn't show up until about halfway through Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro.  For Mexican audiences, I imagine this served to build anticipation, making the moment when the legendary Enmascarado de Plata finally made his appearance all the more impactful.   For the rest of the world, it meant that a pretty engaging and spooky little B horror movie was suddenly interrupted at midpoint by a long, statically shot wrestling match.  Don't get me wrong; I love Mujeres Vampiro as much as the next guy.  It's just that the film is otherwise so stylish and atmospheric that the flatness of the ring match scenes sticks out even more than usual (though it's true that very flatness sets us up for one of the movie's biggest shocks).  In any case, it's a little surprising that it takes so long to call Santo in on the job, because in the scenes where we first meet Doctor Orlof and his soon-to-be-imperiled daughter Diana, we can clearly see that the doctor has all of the necessary Santo contacting gear ' the Santo flat screen, the knobby box with the weird, square antenna ' right there in his study.  (By the way, who gets to have this stuff, anyway?  Do you have to pay for it, like Cable ' and, if you do, does Santo come to your house and install it for you?)  Anyway, Orlof must first let some hapless police detectives bungle the case before he makes the fateful call - and is forced to leave a message on Santo's big reel-to-reel answering machine, because the masked one isn't home (that's what you get for waiting.)  When Santo does show up, Orlof basically asks him to work security for the costume party he's throwing for Diana the next night, as it's abundantly clear by now that the vampire women have evil designs on her - and will probably take full advantage of the doctor's brilliant idea to throw the type of party where people can easily disguise themselves.  Santo, in not so few words, indicates that the Doctor's party sounds lame and he has other things to do, but he'll be on the case.  I assumed this meant that Santo would show up at the party in disguise, only to reveal himself at a key moment, but what it really meant was that Santo would count on his usual luck and arrive at a completely random time, hopefully at the moment when he was most needed.  Which he does, of course. 

Now, I realize I got dangerously close to writing a summary there, but that's just an indication of how much I like this movie.  You may have noticed that, when I don't like a movie, I'm so overcome by inertia that I can barely bring myself to discuss its most basic elements.  Not the case here.  Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro is a great movie ' even when viewed in the poorly dubbed K. Gordon Murray version on a public domain dvd with a picture that looks like it was projected out of a dog's anus.  And that's saying something.*  Not the least of its charms is the fact that it stars the lovely Lorena Velazquez, who I've seen in a number of movies now, and who I've become convinced is an actual vampire. Where ever she appears, be it in this film, or in 1973's Leyendas Macabras de la Colonia, or in 1959's La Nave de los Monstruos, she looks equally great.  This film also features one of the most famous scenes in lucha cinema, where Santo's opponent in the ring is unmasked as a crazed werewolf.  There is a very similar scene in Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos, which some people might see as a faint echo of the series' former greatness, but which I see as greatness revisited.

* Since writing this review, I've been lucky enough to get my hands on a subtitled dvd of the original Spanish languange version of Las Mujeres Vampiro (cheers, Mexicine DVD!), and I'm both happy and surprised to report that K. Gordon Murray,aside from the crappy dubbing, made very few - if any - alterations to the original.  Still, for all of Samson vs. the Vampire Women's camp and nostalgia appeal, it goes without saying that watching the actors speak in their own voices, rather than those of the affect-challenged clock watchers in Murray's employ, provides an entirely different - and infinitely more pleasurable - experience.

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Santo contra los Cazadores de Cabezas (1969) #
(Santo versus the Head Hunters)
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Yes, this is a mind numbing film, but, paradoxically, it's also a thought provoking one.  For me, it provoked this thought:  Just how much trekking through the jungle does one need to show in order to communicate to an audience that a trek through the jungle is being undertaken?  By presenting Santo's Amazon journey in real time, veteran Santo-grapher Rene Cardona seems here to be targeting an imaginary audience that would actually demand such verisimilitude from a luchadore movie.  The fact that I watched this movie in its entirety, despite not being able to understand a word of it,  is the best example I could hope for of my personal Santo Rule.  No matter how boring a film may be, if you plop a masked Mexican wrestler down in the middle of it, I will find it strangely transfixing.  It doesn't have to be Santo, either; it even works with Superzan, and he's pretty lame.  (It does, however, have to be a Mexican wrestler; as proven by my one, unhappy encounter with Superargo.)  This movie gets kicked around a lot (it deserves it), so I won't belabor its badness.  One thing that doesn't seem to get said about it, though, is that it has one of the best openings of any Santo movie.  The first shot you see is a full-screen close-up of Santo's face contorting as he's being strangled by an off-screen assailant.  It's strikingly similar to the opening of Hitchcock's Rope, and it sucks you in immediately.  If only the sucking had stopped there, we might have had a much more interesting film than the one we got with Santo contra los Cazadores de Cabezas.

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Santo contra los Secuestradores (1972)
(Santo vs. the Kidnappers)
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Ah, comedy.  Ernesto Alban, aka "Evaristo", has everything one needs to be a comic relief character in a Mexican wrestling movie:  A funny hat, exaggerated hands gestures and a goofy musical theme to sound the warning whenever he's about to engage in some allegedly amusing antics.  He will deploy every weapon in this awesome comic arsenal to its fullest throughout Santo contra los Secuestradores.  And, oh look, here's Santo's manager, Carlos Suarez - and, while he doesn't have his own whimsical theme music, he does have a funny hat and exaggerated hand gestures, and he's not afraid to use them.  It looks like Santo contra los Secuestradores is shaping up to be a veritable comedy relief battle royal, though one that's very light on actual comedy and with little - if any - relief.  In other words, Santo contra los Secuestradores has a lot to make up for.  What can we ask of Santo contra los Secuestradores that would go towards compensating us for all the damage and heartache the combined onslaught of Evaristo and Suarez is going to inflict upon us?  Well, for starters, how about a lot of near nudity from its foxy leading lady, Rossy Mendoza?  Done, you say?  Well, thank you very much.  Now, how about a nice change of scenery - say, Ecuador?  Got that, too, eh?  Moving on, then: why not a wrestling sequence where Santo just completely kicks a guys ass?  I mean, not just the usual, technically proficient playing out of the standard moves, but a really brutal and merciless stomping of the kind we've never seen Santo deliver before?  Wow, we can have that, too?  How about a Mil Mascaras cameo?  Yeah?  How about Santo hugging a black man?  Excellent!  Okay, now I'm just fucking with you, but it would be awesome if Santo could wear a really gaudy pink pinstriped sport coat throughout most of the movie.  Sweet!  In short, Santo contra los Secuestradores pulls a neat trick by coming very close to mitigating its heavy Evaristo/Suarez content by the inclusion of all of these elements.  The only problem is that, while it's distracting us with copious T&A, colorful travelogues, bone-crunching fights and feeble attempts at humor (not to mention a really stupid dream sequence), it's actual plot seems to be taking place largely off-screen.  As a result, it's little more than a catalogue of gratuitousness, an ideal training film for the film padders' academy (that exists, right?).  As such, it's still very entertaining, but even more pointless than a standard Santo entry.  So, in other words, check it out, since no one in his or her right mind would worry over what the point of a Santo movie was, anyway.  Just don't expect an engaging story and you'll be just fine.  Watch it for the empty spectacle, the eye candy, and the amusements provided by its incongruous casting.  On that last count, I'm referring to Elizabeth Sartore, who plays Santo's assistant, Rosita.  I think she's supposed to be an Interpol agent, but when we meet her, she looks wasted and a little, um, disheveled, like she just stumbled out of Robert Plant's dressing room.  She looks like she should've been hanging out in the parking lot of my high school with some oily older guy in a Trans Am.

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Santo contra los Zombies (1961) !
(Santo versus the Zombies)
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'A legend.  A chimera.
He embodies the greatest things.
Justice and goodness, that is Santo!'

I love me some people standing around talking about how great Santo is!  This is the third Santo movie, and it's one I'm comfortably familiar with, because I watched it on TV when I was a kid - when it was in English and called Invasion of the Zombies.  This is an example of one of those earlier Santo films in which Santo is kind of peripheral to the action, acting more as muscle for the traditional square-jawed hero who hogs most of the screen time.  He doesn't get to participate in any of the actual crime detection, nor does he even get to participate in the social lives of the other characters.  When he's not wrestling, he just tools around alone in his secret lab until it's time to step out of the shadows and wail on some zombies.    In fact, the film's heroine is at first noticeably put off by the idea that this weird masked figure is her best hope for justice.  In a way, it's almost as if Santo himself is a type of monster here.  A decisive break with this version of Santo came with 1966's Operacion 67, in which we got a Santo who hung out by the pool wooing bikini babes.  I can't imagine that Santo saw that as anything other than a positive development.  Anyway, the happy news is that, with or without Santo, Santo contra los Zombies is a very entertaining film.  The inclusion of Santo just provides that certain 'x factor' that pushes it into the ranks of the greatest films of all time.  One thing I remembered from watching this film as a kid is the ridiculous tunic and tights outfit that the villain has the zombies wearing.  You might say, 'Sure, the zombies can't be expected to dress themselves, but couldn't they at least be afforded a little dignity?'  But, as any woman who's ever been a bride's maid ' or anyone raised as a twin ' knows, the most ominous of all the powers that can be invested in one human being is the power to dress others.  Like the Stanford Prison Experiment, it tends to bring out the worst in them.    Also worth noting are the subtitles on the DVD, which try to give the dialog a contemporary edge.   I don't think that people in 1961 said 'Say what?' - and I don't think that the literal translation of Idiota is 'asshole'.

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Santo el Enmascarado de Plata vs. los Villanos del Ring (1966)
(Santo the Silver Mask versus the Villains of the Ring)
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This isn't a good Santo movie, but I kind of like it anyway.  I just like the look of these older Santo films, regardless of their content.  The rich black & white photography and night-for-night location shooting give them a great noir-ish feel.  I especially love the closing shots of Santo racing his sports car through the empty city streets at night.  Still, this is one of those movies that would, if the protagonist were to simply act with a modicum of common sense, be over in 15 minutes (well, maybe 30 minutes, allowing for the wrestling sequences).  And the villains, by Santo standards, are uninteresting.  However, I found it something of a novelty to see Santo's featured opponents be just regular wrestlers, albeit evil ones, rather than vampires, Martians or midgets.   And I liked how Santo seemed reluctant to get the police involved, driven, I presumed, by some unspoken wrestlers' code to want to settle the matter within the community.  You know, I even liked the whole phony spiritualist angle.  It just seems like such an old fashioned plot device, especially considering this was the last film of the series shot in black & white, and the last before it swung into swinging 60s mode with Operacion 67.

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Santo en el Hotel de la Muerte (1961)
(Santo in the Hotel of Death)
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Santo en el Hotel de la Muerte is the second film in a trio of romantic mystery/adventures starring Fernando Casanova and Ana Bertha Lepe as "Fernando" and Virginia, a no nonsense big city police detective and his uppity reporter girlfriend.  Oh, and Santo's in there somewhere, too, but don't blink.  In comparison to the two films that bracketed it, Santo contra el Rey del Crimen and Santo contra el Cerebro Diabolico, Hotel de la Muerte easily comes out the weakest, managing the mean feat of being at once the most lurid and the most boring of the series.  This time Casanova and Lepe are called to a resort hotel in Mexico's pyramid zone to investigate a series of murders of young women.  This plot makes Hotel de la Muerte something of a proto-slasher film, and there's definitely something sleazy about the way the film presents the scantily clad bodies of the murder victims as cheesecake.  Santo doesn't make an appearance until the 40 minute mark, and then only briefly, after which he doesn't actually take part in any of the film's action until the final third.  This means that, as usual, the film is carried by Casanova and Lepe - not to mention Casanova's comedy relief sidekick, who, with this film, suddenly became really annoying to me.  Now, I've mentioned in the reviews of the other two films that I found both Casanova and Lepe appealing (and she's cute, too), but I found here that, when the film that's hung around them is little more than a thin excuse to show women, both living and dead, in baby doll nighties, they begin to grate a little.  Especially because their shtick is all about constant bickering.  You see, Fernando, being a total cromag, wants Virginia to quit her job as a crusading reporter in order to make him a proper wife, and Virginia, being uppity, refuses to do so.  Sometimes her refusal can be pretty strident, too, as on the two occasions in this film when she serves Fernando up with a resounding bitch slap (but don't worry, cavemen, male hegemony is reestablished at the end of the trilogy's last film, el Cerebro Diabolico, when Casanova - I shit u not - takes Lepe over his knee and spanks her).  Admittedly, the shtick occasionally pays off in comic gold, but when a woman with big hair slapping a guy is the most cherished image you take away from a film, it's time to turn the page.

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Santo en el Museo de Cera (1963) !
(Santo in the Wax Museum)
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Santo en el Museo de Cera, like a number of the earlier Santo films, is at the level of the best B horror films of its era.  It has a handsome look, capable performances, lots of satisfyingly spooky atmosphere, and a brisk, energetic pace.   While I've mostly enjoyed reviewing these films, it's been a little wearying to go back and forth between these more carefully crafted earlier entries in Santo's filmography and some of the slapped-together train wrecks that speckle his later years.  For instance, it gives me no joy that, after musing over El Museo de Cera, I must go on to consider either Mission Suicida or Asesinos de Otros Mundos.  Museo de Cera is one of those films that could almost stand on its own without Santo, but through its inclusion of Santo achieves an imposing cinematic stature that no level of placement on the AFI Top 100 could accurately convey.  We're still in those dark days here when Santo wasn't allowed to get the girl, hang out by the pool, or even have any real friends.  He just wrestles and hangs out in his laboratory, waiting for the cops to cock up they're investigation of whatever weird series of crimes they're investigating and give him a holler.  I'm glad that Santo eventually got to mambo with showgirls and kiss Maura Monti, but there's a pathos to this version of Santo that I'm beginning to dig.  You get the sense that - unlike Batman, who can just change back into Bruce Wayne and go to some society function with a hot socialite on his arm ' this Santo is always Santo.  And being Santo is just an endless cycle of wrestling, hanging out in the secret lab and beating up monsters.  Which actually doesn't sound so bad when I think about what my average day consists of.  Anyway, the fact that this film is shot in a wax museum affords Santo the rare opportunity to share the screen with Stalin, Gandhi and other of his peers ' and there's beast-men for him to fight, too.  Highly recommended.

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Santo Frente a la Muerte (1969) ?
(Santo Faces Death)
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Part of me thinks that the best way to review Santo Frente a la Muerte would be to transcribe a long, low moan, the kind of sound one might make as they lay expiring in a rain filled ditch after being tossed from a moving car.  You hear this sort of language of victimization a lot coming from trash film aficionados.  But, despite the claims of suffering, there's an obvious, deep pleasure taken in the description of violence done that reveals the true masochistic nature of the experience.  For how can I claim to be Santo Frente a la Muerte's victim when I so clearly knew what was coming?  David Wilt described it as "one of the five worst Santo films".  I read those words not as a warning, but as a sentence, knowing that, given my nature, there was no way I was not going to watch it.  And while I outwardly cringed at the prospect, something deep within the darkest part of me purred with contentment.  Given that, it should come as no surprise that I ended up enjoying Frente a la Muerte immensely.  Make no mistake, however.  As bad movies go, Santo Frente a la Muerte is the hard stuff - boring, tawdry, lackluster and incoherent.  But it so brazenly crosses boundaries of just-not-giving-a-shit that it simply demands respect.  It's a humbling experience for the viewer, one that makes you question whether you actually deserve to be entertained in the first place.  Probably what's most indicative of the level of apathy that powers Frente a la Muerte is the fact that Santo himself deemed it unnecessary to show up for the most part.  The film was shot mostly in Bogot', and it appears that el enmascarado de plata didn't see fit to make the trip, since, other than in the ring matches and a few set-bound scenes which appear to feature the real deal, it's obvious - in the location scenes especially - that we're dealing with a faux Santo.  The filmmakers try to confuse the issue by introducing an evil Santo imposter at one point, but no amount of subterfuge can hide the fact that the relatively tall, slim and long-necked individual wearing the silver mask in most scenes is not the genuine article.  (For absolute confirmation of this, one need only look at his fighting style, which includes none of Santo's signature moves and mainly consists of creeping up behind people and bonking their heads together Three Stooges style.)  In addition to this, the producers demonstrate their total indifference to our suspension of disbelief by failing to hire either professional extras or crowd control for the location shooting, giving us street scenes where passers by continuously stop to gawk at the camera and crowd around the stars as they try to go about their business.  Adding a mottled glaze of half-heartedness to these proceedings, the film's music supervisors prove that they could teach the Agrasanchez crew a thing or two - mainly that, if you're going to use an inappropriate musical score, you might as well shoot for the moon.  Because, from the plucky 1950s "kitchen of tomorrow" music that accompanies Santo's arrival at the airport to the ice rink instrumental version of "Sunny" that keeps popping up in various action scenes (not to mention the enervated big band theme that accompanies the opening and end credits), the soundtrack to Frente a la Muerte is absolutely fucking hilarious.  Not that all of the picture's entertainment value derives from incompetence and neglect, mind you, as there are also some low-rent Z movie thrills to be had, such as a ridiculous cat fight between Elsa Cardenas and Celia Roldan, and "Santo" parachuting from a plane in army duds and jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding boat.  Still, it really sums up Santo Frente a la Muerte for me that the other Santo (or "Santo") film it most resembles is 3 Dev Adam.  Seeing as that film was made in Turkey without the participation of Santo by people with an obviously tenuous grasp of what a Santo movie should contain, that's more than a little bit sad.  Nonetheless, as much as I feel the moral pressure to warn people away from this movie, I can't do it.  Because I just can't believe that there aren't other people out there who would find its sublime agonies as perversely appealing as I did.  If you're out there, you know who you are' and you're welcome.

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Santo vs. Las Lobas (1972) !
(Santo vs. the She Wolves)
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As much as I sincerely love Santo movies, I have to admit that, when I sit down to write about them, I  take for granted that I'm usually going to spend part of my review ticking off the various ways in which a particular film fulfills certain formula requirements.  So, when a Santo film surprises me as much as Santo vs. las Lobas did, I really have to take my hat off and bow down.  Unlike Santo's other monster movies from the seventies, which were mostly throwbacks to Universal's monster movies from the forties, Las Lobas is clearly a product of its time.  It's unremittingly bleak and oppressive in the way that only a horror film from the seventies can be, and it likewise makes a virtue of it's grainy and murky photography as many such films of that era did. (There's actually one scene that reminded me in particular of the original version of The Hills Have Eyes, though Las Lobas predates that by a few years.)  It's not these stylistic touches, however, that really made me sit up and take notice of Las Lobas, as much as it was the way in which the film puts Santo in some situations I really hadn't seen him in before.  Las Lobas starts with Santo being asked to come to the aid of a rural village besieged by a clan of werewolves.  Having once again had his memory of countless previous encounters with wolfmen and other monsters somehow erased, Santo somewhat callously demurs, scoffing at the very notion of lycanthropy.  His feelings begin to change, however, when, later that night, his efforts to escape from a pack of vicious demon dogs (I know they should be wolves, but they're even referred to as dogs in the dialog) leave him literally hanging from the rafters of a deserted arena, screaming for help.  Santo is really terrorized and rendered helpless - pathetically so - in this scene, and I actually found it kind of shocking to see;  I've really got to give Las Lobas props for, for the first time, leaving me unsure of exactly where a Santo movie was going.  Later, when Santo goes to the village and tries to question the villagers about what's going on, they're so crazed with fear that they threaten him and tell him to butt out - then pummel him with fruit and vegetables!  The final surprise comes when we learn that, having been bitten by one of the demon dogs, Santo himself will turn into a werewolf at the next full moon if he doesn't defeat the king of the werewolves.  Putting added pressure on Santo is the fact that the rise of the werewolf king will bring about the end of mankind and herald an age of werewolf dominion on Earth.  You know, the whole apocalypse thing.  Now, I'm so immersed in all things Santo at the moment that it's hard for me to determine if the degree to which I love Santo vs. las Lobas can be separated from the context of Santo films as a whole.  It's certainly far from a perfect film.  The she wolves actually look pretty terrible when seen under direct light (which the filmmakers wisely avoid as much as possible) and the fact that it manages to be so consistent in tone makes those moments when it breaks with that tone (some cheesy action music in one later scene, for instance) especially glaring.  For this reason, while I enthusiastically recommend Santo vs. las Lobas, I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's introduction to Santo.  I think it would be ideal to first watch something like Santo contra la Invasion de los Marcianos and then this one, thus treating yourself to two very opposite extremes of quality Santo.

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Santo y Blue Demon contra Dracula y el Hombre Lobo (1972) !
(Santo and Blue Demon versus Dracula and the Wolf Man)
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Santo has a hot new girlfriend named Lina.  She's quite a handful - and she's also one of the last remaining members of a family that's been marked for death by Dracula!  Now that Drac and his pal Rufus, the Sauv' and sexy wolf man, have been resurrected from the dead, it's time for Santo to call in his number one hench, Blue Demon, for some tag team action.  Yay!  This is a standout among Santo's 1970s monster mash-ups.  Despite featuring three full wrestling matches - at the beginning, middle, and end of the film - it's well paced (and, hell, even I won't complain about a wrestling sequence featuring an opponent called Renato the Hippie, in which the announcer says things like "Blue Demon gives the hippie a good smack!" and "Get out, hippie!").  The production values are respectable (no pilfered or stock footage in sight!) and the film has a set-bound, gothic look that shows equally the welcome influence of both the Hammer horror pictures and the work of Mario Bava. Best of all, this entry in the series features Santo and Blue in a wide variety of cozy domestic tableaus, playing cards, drinking tea and even enjoying a friendly game of masked chess while wearing an assortment of comfy looking sweaters.  That's what I like to see.  I also like to see Demon getting in on the action to the extent that he does here.   Although he does get captured briefly, he never becomes a hypno-pawn of the villains or an evil duplicate of himself, and there are a good number of brawls where he and Santo fight side by side.  Despite all the luchadore power on hand, however, the secret weapon here seems to be Lina, as Santo would not have made it through the movie alive without her.  He just keeps telling her to stay behind, and she just keeps ignoring him and showing up to save his sorry can at the last minute - most memorably by driving a forklift into a bunch of thugs Dracula has employed to take care of Santo and Blue.  On that point, I found it interesting that, despite the fact that Dracula and Rufus have created a small army of wolf men and vampires to carry out their evil plans, Dracula still felt it necessary to hire some shark-suited hoodlums straight out of Guys and Dolls to take the wrestlers out.  Okay, maybe I didn't so much find it "interesting".  I meant "stupid", but in the best way possible - because a world where everything in a Santo movie makes sense is a world I just don't want to live in.

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Santo y Blue Demon contra Dr. Frankenstein (1973) !
(Santo and Blue Demon versus Dr. Frankenstein)
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At this stage in the game, my preferences are pretty set.  If I'm going to be getting solo Santo (Santo a la carte, if you will), I want him in black and white, played straight, and with lots of spooky B movie atmosphere.  If I have to deal with one of these cartoony 50s throwback monster fests from the 70s, I need to have Blue Demon along for the ride in order to sell it.  Otherwise I get disappointed (like with Santo contra la Hija de Frankenstien, which I was fully expecting to feature Blue, though it totally didn't).  It's not just Blue's colorful get-up, but also the way he enthusiastically throws himself into the physical action that so compliments the comic book silliness of a movie like Contra Dr. Frankenstien.  And there is indeed a lot of silliness to be had here.  So much so that it's tempting to catalog every bit of nonsensical pseudo-scientific dialog, every jaw dropping "oh so seventies" costuming choice, and every goofy piece of story business.  But I won't.  I'll just say that I'm sure the makers of Santo y Blue Demon contra Dr. Frankenstein would have made it even more ridiculous if they could have, but they'd already filled it with as many risible elements as it could possibly contain.  In addition to being appealingly absurd, the movie proves to be a great showcase for the Demon for once.  He never becomes evil or hypnotized or gets cloned, and he actually comes to Santo's rescue a couple of time - most memorably disguised in a surgeons' scrubs and mask, with his wrestling mask clearly visible underneath!  Plot-wise, if you wanted to be uncharitable, you could say that it recycles the plot of Las Luchadoras contra el Medico Asesino.  Or you could say that it's an homage.  I prefer to call it an homage, because it recreates certain scenes from Las Luchadoras in their entirety in a way that shows, if not affection for, at least a great deal of attention to the original.  Here, rather than being called Gomar, the fearsome beast-man of super human strength that the mad doctor commands is named Golem, and he is a large black man (something I have to assume is more than an instance of color blind casting based on the reference to him as having the brain of "a South African giant".  Hmm.)  Golem doesn't get that awesome indestructible metal mask - with the weirdly feminine features etched onto it - that Doctor Ruiz made for Gomar; he just gets a bullet proof vest, so the cops avoid shooting at his face, which is what they always do in these movies anyway.  To carbon copy scenes from Las Luchadoras that centered around the Luchadoras themselves, a couple of sexy police women are introduced - and then given nothing to do, since it's Santo and Blue who are meant to do all of the monster bashing this time.  This is not to say that all of the elements of Contra Dr. Frankenstein are rehashed from Luchadoras.  Other elements are rehashed from Santo contra la Hija de Frankenstien, the most welcome of those elements being the "lowered expectations youth serum" that makes a 70 year old man look, oh, 55 or so.  Though it's everything and anything but unique in the genre, because Santo y Blue Demon contra Dr. Frankenstein is so agreeably stupid - and because it distributes the action between Blue and Santo more equally than any of their co-starring movies I've yet seen - I have no choice but to flag it ! highly recommended.

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Santo y Blue Demon contra Los Monstruos (1969) !?
(Santo and Blue Demon versus the Monsters)
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Despite all of its flaws, it is my sincere belief that you'd have to be some kind of soulless meat puppet not to love Santo y Blue Demon contra los Montruos.  Granted, if you took away its flaws, there would be very little left of Santo y Blue Demon contra los Montruos to consider.  Yes, the renderings of the classic movie monsters are on the technical level of a charity haunted house, and, yes, there is that long scene where Santo and his girlfriend sit in a tiny restaurant set staring at inserted footage of a nightclub act from a movie made at least ten years previous.  Still, unlike certain underachieving entries in the lucha cinema canon (stand up and be counted, Blue Demon contra Las Invasoras), the filmmakers here knew they didn't have the resources to realize their grand vision, and they went for it anyway.  And what a grand vision it was, pitting the two greatest legends in wrestling against Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, vampires of both the male and female variety, and a Cyclops (plus, for added measure, a mad scientist, his hunchbacked dwarf assistant and zombie henchmen, and an evil duplicate of Blue Demon!).  Of course, as I've already indicated, the classic monsters aren't too expertly realized.  In fact, they're all so awful, it's difficult to single one out as the worst.  However, the one oddball entry in the line up, the Cyclops, is actually pretty handsome looking.  That's because his costume wasn't made for this movie, but rather for the 1959 film La Nave de los Monstruos (and if there's one hard to find film that's worth the effort, that one is it, believe me).   It's a great looking costume, though it could have used a little maintenance; you can see the stuffing coming out of it in almost every scene where it appears.  (This costume might have been purchased as part of a package deal, because there's another costume from La Nave de los Monstruos on display in contra los Monstruos, kind of a bonus monster in the form of a troll-like creature with a giant, exposed brain.  This monster just hangs out on the periphery of the laboratory scenes without anyone ever reacting or referring to him.  I kept waiting for someone to notice him and have that 'I didn't invite him ' I though you invited him' conversation.)  Anyway, say what you want about this movie, you can't deny that it's an ambitious concept, given what they had to work with, and the filmmakers and cast tackle it with a lot of enthusiasm.  The action comes fast and furious, the fights are brutal, and there are even some cut-rate gore effects (it's the first time our old friend the severed head has made an appearance in any Santo film that I've seen).  My favorite scene is the one in which the vampire disguises himself as a masked wrestler to take Santo on in the ring.  When the match starts to turn against the vampire, all of the monsters suddenly appear in the ring as the crowd erupts into pandemonium.  It's a classic Santo moment.  So I say way to go, Santo y Blue Demon contra los Montruos!  Good effort!  And to those who think that this movie is overrated, I'm sorry.  It's a definite favorite for me.

Read my super-deluxe review of Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos at Teleport City!

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Superzan el Invencible (1971) #
(Superzan the Invincible)
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Wow.  I feel bad for Superzan.  Based on the  movie appearances of his I'd seen previous to this - in which he'd spent most of his screen time staring at the back of either Blue Demon's or Mil Mascaras' head ' I would have thought that a starring vehicle like this would have really afforded him his day in the sun. But this is really terrible - and I don't mean that in the good way that I usually do.  It's like a one film compendium of movie badness.  For starters, it exhausts itself with the effort of padding out its length.   It opens with an exceedingly long wrestling sequence (and I'm not new to lucha cinema, so I mean exceedingly long even by those very relaxed standards).  This is followed by two complete musical numbers (one of which features a singer in a wrestling mask, which I have to admit is moderately cool).  Wrapped around the musical numbers is a scene in which Superzan appears to be judging a beauty contest.  Frequent recycling of footage adds a perfume of monotony to the tedium and, to compound the shoddiness, all of the special effects footage is lifted from an older black & white film, and no effort is made to match that footage with the new color footage. What plot there is appears to be lifted from that episode of the old Superman TV show with the little mole men in it, except here the peaceful-but-woefully-misunderstood midgets are extraterrestrial rather than subterranean.  And, like Superman - and unlike Superzan in other movies I've seen - Superzan has super powers, like the ability to fly and stop a freight train with his bare hands.  This doesn't stop him from getting into the ring with apparently normally abled wrestlers and, as I indicated earlier, taking an extremely long time to defeat them.  (The original title card actually reads "Superzam el Invencible", so perhaps, rather than playing himself here, he's playing a fictional super hero with a very similar name and an identical costume, which would be kind of brilliant.)   The scenes in Superzan's headquarters look like they were shot in a high school computer lab.  He does, of course, have a sweet muscle car (a sweet muscle car for the hero being the first budget item in every one of these masked wrestler movies, even if it sometimes meant that there was only enough money left over for film stock).  I did like that the flying scenes were apparently accomplished by dragging a dummy behind a helicopter; I'd never seen that before.

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Superzan y el Nino del Espacio (1973)
(Superzan and the Space Boy)
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Okay, I don't feel so bad for Superzan anymore.  This is a vast improvement over Superzan el Invencible.  Still, it's amazing how something can be a vast improvement and still be so shoddy.  But, to be fair, unlike its predecessor, Superzan y el nino del Espacio manages to tell a coherent story while keeping the padding to a minimum, and the special effects sequences, though modest, are original to the film rather than stolen from others.  The sets are passable, and they even built a full-size ' though cramped looking ' mock-up of the alien space ship.  The film's story concerns Superzan's efforts to rescue a benevolent alien who has been captured by an evil human scientist.  The scientist wants to use the alien's technology for nefarious purposes, and by far the most nefarious piece of technology on display is a machine that outfits whoever stands under it with a sparkly cape and giant Ming the Merciless collar.  (It also turns a simple farm girl into Kelly Osbourne, so I guess it's good we have Superzan around to put a stop to such things.)  Superzan still has super powers in this one, and the flying effects this time are simply achieved by rigging him to the back of a truck.  As a result, we never see him flying more than four feet off the ground.  These films have a different feel to them than other lucha films I've seen, which I think is due to them skewing slightly younger than other wrestler movies (and before you Santo fans start feeling like you're all sophisticated, I mean that they target 6-8 year olds rather than 10-12 year olds).   They could be compared to Power Rangers, if you could stand the thought of comparing Power Rangers to something that would make it seem relatively tolerable and interesting.  Like I said, this is better than Superzan's first solo effort, but I'm really glad they didn't make any more of them.

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