This feels like the American version of one of those Mexican wrasslin' women movies, but since it came out a decade before those I guess this actually set the blueprint. Of course it's really a mobster movie with a whole bunch of wrestling scenes thrown in. Not exactly the sexiest spectacle but this was way before the days that porn became widespread so I guess you took whatever thrills you could get back then. This has a few aliases including THE BLONDE PICK-UP, PIN-DOWN GIRL and WRESTLING RACKET GIRLS. Another MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 watch and it's undoubtedly better that way.
There are 2 different versions of this movie starring Santo the silver-masked wrestling legend(who also plays a scientist here for some inexplicable reason). The one I viewed recently is the sexier nudity-filled cut. In this Dracula likes to pull down gals tops and inspect their large breasts before biting them on the neck. There are a bunch of sexy vampire women, super fake bats, time travel and gratuitous wrasslin' scenes to go along with the nekkidness. This is the 20th film(out of 52!) in the Santo filmography and certainly the sexiest!
The original tamer version is titled SANTO IN THE TREASURE OF DRACULA and has been used on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER before.
I had seen the clips of Henry Winkler(aka The Fonz) as a bad guy Nazi wrestler before but was never actually able to view this whole film until recently. As someone who grew up in the 70s watching HAPPY DAYS, and worshipping Fonzie and everything he stood for, it was a bit jarring to see him in such a nerdy role as this but I guess that's why they call it acting. Most of the film is a dreaded romantic comedy and it takes a while before we get to any of the wrasslin' bits so be prepared. In addition to being a Nazi, Winkler also portrays a fighting hypnotist character and a Gorgeous George-type of flamboyant gay-stereotype grappler that you can see on the poster. Herve Villechaize is his little manager and we get a couple of real life wrestlers thrown in including Chavo Guerrero Sr. playing an Indian in full headdress and the great Hard Boiled Haggerty. If you can get through the schmaltzy romance stuff and The Fonz being quite annoying and obnoxious throughout most of the movie it is certainly a 70s-era curiosity that's worth a one time watch.
Documentary about 70's pro wrestling. Not just women's wrasslin' either, even though Vivian Vachon is the main focus, they do interview a bunch of old time big names from the era. Blackjack Mulligan, Killer Kowalski and a bunch more give their thoughts on the manliest of sports. There's also some footage of Andre The Giant back when he was called Jean "The Giant" Ferre. There's not a lot of footage of pro wrestling from the 70's so if that interests you give this a look. As far as being a very in-depth expose on the pseudo-sport it really isn't. Probably the most entertaining thing is how violently angry the fans, who at this time consisted of a lot of old people, get while booing the bad guys.
The only movie starring legendary pro-wrestler Gorgeous George. It's mostly just a story about mobsters trying to infiltrate the wrasslin' business though and focuses on a detective(Robert Rockwell) trying to stop this and solve a wrassler's murder. This might have been due to George not being the greatest actor in the world(outside of the ring anyway). A few other real life wrestler's show up including Sammy Menacker and the great Tor Johnson, under his Super Swedish Angel moniker. Sadly Tor is only in one big brawling scene but he would go on to meet Ed Wood and the rest is crap-movie history. The film overall is pretty simple but it breezes by in just 1 hour so check it out for some old-timey grapplin' action.
I can't help but believe that this was an influence on those later Mexican Santo films since it basically follows the same blueprint without the comic-book super-heroics and monsters that they would throw in to help spice things up.
The DVD I have of this uses the way cooler title of SANTO VS. THE NAZIS and that pretty much sums up the plot here. This Santo flick, the 42nd out of a whopping 52 films, plays more like a detective story than an action film for the most part and it is filled with a lot of talky-talk scenes which may lead to drowsiness. Still when we finally get some lucha-libre action(with terribly generic wrestler names like The Nazi and The Pollack) and the big showdown between Santo and these evil Nazis it does make for a campy worthwhile watch. Maybe if the Nazis had built some kinda killer robot or monster it woulda been a bit better.
Way before that overly-melodramatic Hollywood movie starring Mickey Rourke, came this 70s wrasslin' flick about a promoter(Ed Asner) trying dealing with the mob and the everyday turmoil of the "king of sports". Produced by and featuring world champion wrestler Verne Gagne, who was, in reality, the owner of the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association, which was one of the big 3 promotions at the time, this, of course, features a bunch of stars from that area including Dusty Rhodes, Nick Bockwinkel, Larry "The Ax" Hennig, Ray "The Crippler" Stevens(who blatantly kills a guy right in the ring!), The Crusher and a bunch more. If you look really closely you can even see a young fat Ric Flair. Also Vince McMahon's dad Vince Sr. shows up for a meeting of America's top promoters for a super-bowl of champions, which we never actually get to see.
Having been raised in the Northeast on the WWF I always viewed the AWA back then as the weakest promotion and having an old bald-man as your champion was probably the main reason. Well in this movie they sorta deal with that with Mr. Gagne(for some reason under the pseudonym of Mike Bullard) being forced out of the top spot by Ed"Lou Grant" Asner and up and coming grappler Billy Robinson( called Billy Taylor for no discernable reason) . Sadly in real life Gagne would hang on for another 7 years or so as champ. The overall plot in this thing is pretty weak and they shoehorn in a love story with Asner and his secretary, who acts enough like Mary Tyler Moore that it made me feel uncomfortable to watch, that goes nowhere and the mobster angle is also never realized by the time the credits role. Hard to recommend this to anyone who's not an old-school wrestling fan and wants to see whose face will pop up next. Anyone else would probably be totally disinterested.
This is the 6th movie starring Mexican masked wrestler Santo(dubbed Samson here) and also one of the two movies imported into America(along with SAMSON IN THE WAX MUSEUM) by the great K. Gordon Murray. This one gives us a coven of lady vampires as well as three buff male vamps(who conveniently also wrestle) for Santo to battle in and out of the ring. One confusing bit has a vampire fella disguise himself as a masked wrestler but then get unmasked to reveal that he now has a werewolf face? How did that happen? Do vampires turn into werewolf-faces when they get angry enough?? But besides that this is a goofy flick for people who don't take themselves too seriously. Also I think it's the only Mexican wrestling movie they featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, so that's something to check out. AKA SAMSON AND THE VAMPIRE WOMEN and SANTO VERSUS THE VAMPIRE WOMEN.
This is probably only really entertaining if you're already a fan of Andy Kaufman's bizarre comedy/performance art stylings. As far as being any sort of actual documentary it fails miserably since it gives no real facts about the former TV star and never strays from the imaginary world that he created. It would also help if you're a pro-wrestling fan since most of the footage deals with Andy's time down in Memphis feuding with Jerry "The King" Lawler as the inter-gender wrasslin' champion. Unfortunately this program, which was released by Rhino video(at least the version I have), only seems to have a limited amount of footage and some of the stuff they reference isn't even shown. This must be why it's only around 60 minutes long, but if you are a hardcore fan of Kaufman's it's a fun show to check out plus the DVD-release of this comes with the equally confounding but amazing short MY BREAKFAST WITH BLASSIE which co-stars my favorite 70's/80's wrestling manager "Classy" Freddie Blassie.
Andy giving the people of Memphis some helpful hints:
I think this one might be my favorite out of the Sonny Chiba 'Oyama Trilogy'. It definitely seems like the most outrageous of the three even though Mr. Chiba doesn't fight any animals. Instead he ends up in a wrestling ring involved in some ridiculous battles with masked grapplers and also takes on the mobsters who control the fight racket in Okinawa. Apparently in this version of pro wrestling it's perfectly OK to rip your opponent's eyeballs out, cripple them and generally do whatever the hell you want to win the match. Crazy stuff! There's also a rip-off/homage to that mirror fight scene in ENTER THE DRAGON. In fact the whole movie is kind of a take-off on that Bruce Lee classic. You also get a suicidal alcoholic hooker with a heart of gold and a gang of homeless street kids. I love movies with roving gangs of criminal children!
New movies suck! New shot-on-video zombie movies really suck! Strange as it may seem this movie actually ended up playing at a local theater for a few days. How that happened I have no idea. A friend of mine dragged me to this and, not surprisingly, we were the only two people in the theater. It occurred to me while watching this that pro wrestlers should theoretically be better actors. I mean they spend their whole lives playing the part of a "good guy" or "bad guy" but I suppose that's mostly improv because, judging by this movie, when it comes to reading already written lines they're not so good at it. There's not really much good to say about this. The main wrestlers(Roddy Piper & Shane Douglas) are past their prime, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan, in particular, looks like he might require a walker to get around. There's way too much horrible nu-metal music playing through almost every scene! Whoever this shitty band is that did this soundtrack I now feel like I've heard their entire discography and it hurt me. The gore is really badly done. They do use practical effects as far as I could tell but they're just really awful ones and the whole thing comes off as a super amateurish home video that really has no business playing anywhere someone would have to pay for it. I wonder if they could have possibly sold more than 2 tickets?
For a less gory but far better-made wrestler battling zombies flick go watch SANTO VS. THE ZOMBIES.
I first saw this film at 2 a.m. on a TV airing back when TV stations actually played strange things in the wee hours. It's the classic superhero story of a masked wrestler/secret-agent/superman who takes on an army of robot-men. He also has an Indian mystic for a sidekick who teaches him all kinds of neat tricks like levitation and breaking shit with his mind like CARRIE. This is basically an Italian take on the Mexican lucha-libre film with a few sprinkles of James Bond-like antics thrown in for added excitement and it's way more enjoyable than any of those shitty computer-game graphics superhero movies being shit out these days.
The alternate title for this is SUPERARGO AND THE FACELESS GIANTS and it's actually a sequel to SUPERARGO AGAINST DIABOLICUS which is an equally strange yet goofy fun flick that I would totally recommend to fans of the 60's BATMAN series or just anyone into weird world cinema.
Some lady Mexican wrestlers, or Luchadoras if you're the international type, take on a mad scientist who enjoys dressing like an evil masked Mexican wrestler. He throws a gorilla brain into a guy to make a gorilla-man named Gomar and also hypnotizes a masked lady wrestler named Vendetta to do his evil bidding. Even with all this wackiness going on this movie is pretty dull and sleep-inducing. There's lots of female wrasslin' matches and a head-scratching finale that uses the classic KING KONG ending. Director Rene Cardona went on to remake this in 1972 as the way better and way gorier NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES which I would highly recommend checking out. This earlier version is only for real lovers of Mexi-crap cinema. There's also a re-edited version of this film with a redone soundtrack called ROCK 'N' ROLL WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC APE(done by the great Johnny Legend) which at least throws in some amusing music bits to liven things up. There's also a version titled SEX MONSTER and I have no idea what they added to that one but it sounds interesting. A sequel appeared the following year where our ladies take on the Aztec Mummy which is pretty much the same film but with a long-haired mummy and there's another one where they fight a robot of some sort and probably a few others that I haven't seen yet. I usually find myself watching these movies at around 3 a.m. when insomnia is plaguing me and they usually cure that very quickly.
Shot back in the 70's and not released until '85 on video this film features lots of wrestling footage from back before the 1980's came along and wrestling became an embarrassing thing for anyone over 7 years old to admit to watching. Coming out of the Detroit area this mainly focuses on local bad guy The Sheik as he takes on a bunch of big stars from back in the day including Dusty Rhodes, Bobo Brazil, Ox Baker, Terry Funk and others. Also appearing are Andre The Giant, Abdullah The Butcher, some midgets and a fat lady who wrestles a man. They were nice enough to set all these matches to some rocking tunes which makes it extra cool. While there's no actual story here and it's not really much of a documentary since we don't really learn much of anything, besides some silly wrestling storylines and stupid skits abound, it is a cool collection of vintage clips if you dig that sort of thing and it's all edited well enough that it moves along quickly. Check it out if you're any kind of fan of wrestling or just general violence and bloodshed set to a beat.
I LIKE TO HURT PEOPLE was originally supposed to be a horror/wrestling film called RINGSIDE IN HELL then it was switched to an actual documentary titled just RINGSIDE until they ran out of money and shelved the whole thing. Eventually New World Pictures took all that old footage, filmed some crappy new wraparound bits and released it on video as the fake pseudo-doc that we have here. The credited director, Donald G. Jackson, would go on to become best known for HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN.
By the time I started watching pro wrestling, as a little fellow, Bruno Sammartino was just an announcer who would occasionally get back in the ring when someone pissed him off enough but I knew from all the magazines that he was the former world champ and a big deal throughout most of the 70's. This documentary, which was an episode of a TV sports series called THE WINNERS, is a pretty cool look at the old days of wrasslin' before it was just a silly TV show and it at least pretended to be a real sporting event and a look at the guy who represented that mentality of staying true to the act no matter what. Besides being a neat look at old school WWWF it's also interesting that this was directed by George Romero and I've never noticed it listed anywhere in any of his biographies before. I guess everyone just lumps it in with all the stuff he shot for TV in the early part of his career. Also interviewed here is Bill Cardille who was the news reporter in Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Neat time capsule deal here.
There was a magical day I recall from when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when, thanks to my dad, I first saw a Professional Wrestling match on TV. Already being a huge fan of comic book superheroes and monster movies this seemed like the most amazing sport in the world to my young mind. Some of these wrestlers seemed like true monsters to me back then. Guys like George "The Animal" Steele, "King Kong" Mosca, Andre The Giant and Killer Khan sure didn't look like any actual human beings I ever encountered in real life. Growing up in the New York City area in the 70's and 80's I was really only able to see the WWF programs and didn't get to watch stuff from other areas until we got cable later on. I did know about Memphis and the other promotions from all the magazines that were around back then but never got to see much of them. It was a different world before the internet made almost every obscure little thing accessible. As the 80's went on wrestling became more of a cartoon and it lost whatever credibility it had for me from those early days but sometimes it's fun to look back and remember how awesome it all seemed at the time. It's funny how the 80's were also the decade that horror films became excessively cartoonish. I guess it was something in the air.
This documentary is a really well done look at a local promotion that was more popular in that area than anything else at the time and I think even if someone doesn't know much about wrestling they would enjoy it for some of the insane stories that are told. Going from the 40's up until modern times it hits on such disparate things as the carnival days, race relations back in the old days, insane wrestling fans, greedy promoters, midget-wrestling, Andy Kaufman and tons of other wacky stuff all told by the people who went through it. If you are, or ever were, a wrestling fan this is something you will want to check out.
"Maybe that stupid mummy has fits and undresses. Who knows what he has beneath his clothes?"
The sixties were a decade chock full of silly superhero comic book movies. I woulda thought it was all Batman's fault but that goofy show hadn't started yet and Mexico was already pumping out these wrestler/superhero flicks. They were mostly masked wrestlers but also, like in this one, a few lady wrestlers starred. I guess it kind of goes along with the women's lib movement starting up at the time since you get scenes of ladies throwing men around and generally kicking their asses. In addition to this we get an evil Asian bad guy(who looks way more Mexican) named The Black Dragon in the dubbed version, judo girls, a goofy comic relief guy and best of all a mummy(who doesn't really show up until the last third of the movie). The mummy's origin is all told with stock-footage from 1957's THE AZTEC MUMMY which would be used a few more times over the years. This mummy character seems to also be half vampire since he can turn into a bat and a spider and is afraid of the sun. Why this is I'm not sure. Maybe if you take a vampire and mummify him this is what happens but I don't recall that ever being clarified. Overall this is a fun goofy flick but only for lovers of really bottom-of-the-barrel silly Mexisploitation. There was a re-edited(with 60's pop music) version of this titled ROCK 'N ROLL WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY but I recall that being really awful. The wrestling women here had appeared together prior to this in DOCTOR OF DOOM where they fight a guy in a KKK hood and his gorilla henchman.
Apparently there was a shortage of Asians in 1960's Mexico since our judo chicks also look suspiciously Mexican:
