SANTO VS. THE KING OF CRIME (1962)

  I generally love Santo movies and while I don't hate this early one it's probably down there around the bottom on my list of favorites. The main problem with this is the long drawn-out Jai Alai matches that serve to pad the film out. I know these movies always have long wrasslin' matches thrown in, this one has a couple of those also, but they really focus on the Jai Alai more in this entry. It's also kind of a weird origin story of Santo being a role, and a mask, that a father hands down to his son. There is a very fat criminal kingpin with a humpbacked midget helper so it's not a total loss but I think if I'm looking to re-watch a Santo flick I'll stick with his 70s monster mashes. 

               Santo using the immense power of Jai Alai!: 

THE VAMPIRE AND SEX (1969)

 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.

THE FIST OF DEATH (1982)

  Somehow I managed to miss this Mexican Santo flick until just recently. I guess that's not hard to do since he has something like 52 films he starred in. This one is towards the top of the heap though. Coming later in his career you can tell he's becoming a bit old by '82 but that doesn't stop our masked hero from getting in the ring and jumping around like a younger nut. This film might be the weirdest Santo movie I've seen. It involves a jungle cult that's headed by two identical twin sisters with massive bosoms(these are both played by the same actress, Grace Renat, tahnks to a charmingly crappy split-screen effect) that use an illuminated meteorite to see the future. One sister is unfortunately evil(we know this because she wears the black outfit) and with her accomplice, pro-wrestler Tinieblas(who I'm pretty sure plays a good guy in earlier lucha-libre films) they form their own bad-guy cult that worships a C3PO Halloween mask. There's also kung fu vs. wrasslin' and a jungle gal and her wolf(really just a big dog) brother that never do anything all that wild but the thought was nice. The highlight is Santo throing a guy into a rotating plane's propeller that neatly slices him into 2 halves. Good trash cinema!

ANONIMO MORTAL (1972)

 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.

For all the Spanish-speaking Santo fans!:




                                                   Sadly mundane(and swastika-free) VHS cover:

SANTO AND BLUE DEMON VS. DRACULA AND THE WOLF MAN (1973)

 Very similar to the earlier SANTO AND BLUE DEMON VS. THE MONSTERS, this Mexican wrestlers vs. monsters flick pairs down the creatures to two big main villains. Of course there is the hump-backed Igor-like assistant that sets everything into motion, Dracula's vampire slaves and, what I found to be one of the coolest elements, a whole gang of werewolves led by main Wolf Man, Mr, Rufus Rex. Rufus not only has one of the best names for a werewolf person but he also sports some snazzy outfits including a golden shirt and very massive 70s sideburns. As a bonus he also looks a lot like Paul Naschy's Hombre Lobo which is pretty sweet. There's also a surprising amount of bloodletting, most notably when Dracula is revived by having someone's neck slit like a slaughtered pig above him, in a film that I assume was viewed by many young Mexican children at the time. While I would rank ...VS. THE MONSTERS as the king of these kooky wrassler movies this one is a close second. This does get a little bogged down in the long grappling scenes which look as though they were filmed in an empty arena in outer-space, besides this though it's good kitschy times.

Hazing is tough for wolfmen:

SANTO AND BLUE DEMON VS. THE MONSTERS (1970)

 I was raised up, as a young man, on a steady diet of Pro Wrestling and monster movies. So when I picked up an issue of Fangoria magazine back in the early 80's and first read about these Mexican lucha libre monster movies it blew my fragile eggshell mind. This one here specifically seemed like one of the wackiest things ever put on film and is clearly the highlight of this weird genre for me just for it's sizable monsterrific value. You get a mad scientist, his evil hunchbacked dwarf assistant and a whole gang of unruly monsters including a mummy(La Momia!), a wolf man(El Hombre Lobo!), a Frankenstein monster(or Franquestain!), a vampire(El Vampiro!) and a couple of his ladies. There's also a weird-ass cyclops thing who's basically a stand in for The Creature From The Black Lagoon. He even gets a scene where he hangs out at the bottom of a lagoon even though he doesn't appear to have much of a swimmer's body or do much there besides leer on with his goofy flashlight eyeball. The weirdest monster though is this big-brained fellow who also appeared in the earlier Mexi-horror flick SHIP OF MONSTERS(which also had a very similar Cyclops monster now that I think about it). In this movie he just stands around, does nothing and is never even referred to! It seems very odd to me that a giant-brained Martian could just carouse about in the background going unnoticed but that's just what happens! Another awesome thing is that even though this film seems to have been made for kids there's a few moments of bright red blood being spewed and also a scene of a little boy whose parents are murdered by The Wolf Man right in front of his eyes! The soundtrack is pretty sweet and the wrestling scenes never drag as they sometimes do in these Santo flicks. In fact one of the wrasslin' bouts turns into a pretty sweet monsters vs. wrasslers battle royal! The only two bad points I will mention are the horrible confusingly shot day-for-night scenes and the old-timey musical numbers that look like they were pulled out of an older movie when Santo hangs out at a nightclub. Besides this though this one is a great kitschy ride!

Weird-ass speeded up Benny Hill-esque intro!:

SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN (1962)

 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.

MASKED MAN STRIKES AGAIN: SANTO VS. THE DR. DEATH(1973)

 This was a fun tale of Mexican masked wrestling hero Santo(called Saint in the dubbed print that I watched). In this one he takes on a doctor(actually a doctor of art, whatever the hell that is?) who keeps models locked up in his basement that he gets sick so he can experiment on them. I wasn't exactly sure what the end result was for these experiments but the doc seemed to be really into his work so it must have been important enough. He also keeps an acid pool in the sub-basement accessible by a fun slide where he throws away dead ladies bodies.   Santo gets an unmasked partner here, a fellow named Paul, who has a sweet 70's moustache and some keen fighting skills. Together they get into some James Bond-esque adventures. Santo gets into a fight in a public toilet wearing socks with no shoes on which I find very humorous and slightly disgusting.  While there's no monsters or supernatural elements in this film I think it works fine in it's slightly more realistic super secret agent approach.  AKA SANTO STRIKES AGAIN

SAMSON IN THE WAX MUSEUM (1963)

                                                    
 Producer K. Gordon Murray brought over two of these Santo movies in the 60's and re-dubbed our Mexican masked wrestler's name as Samson(there's also SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN). I imagine this may have been done because the Italian Samson and Hercules peplum movies were a big deal at the time. Our Samson here ain't no Greek god though, he's more like a Batman type of hero who helps the police solve some murders happening around a wax museum. One of the odd things about this dubbed version is that it's never explained why every once in a while Samson stops the investigation to go have a wrestling match. It's just something he enjoys doing I suppose. It's also weird that they didn't bother to dub over all the wrasslin' fans loudly shouting SANTO! SANTO!.
 As a fan of mexi-lucha cinema I found this flick fun and amusing if in the right state of mind. Getting to this state may require a bit of alcohol and/or at least a sense of humor which obviously is lacking in most "serious" movie-viewing jackoffs. But for those looking for a good example of Santo's 1960's exploits this movie works as well as any. I'll take this over most Hollywood "action" shitfests anyday. As for the plot it's about Santo's quest to rid Mexico of an anti-social Hitleresque type(who was ironically a survivor of a concentration camp during World War II) that wants to spread murder and chaos throughout the world and also set up a sweet wax museum(of course a bit of HOUSE OF WAX is ripped off here). There's monsters(real & wax), wacky henchmen(one that looks like Vincent Price strangely enough and the other that looks like "Batboy"), a caveman/wrestler and many scenes of old-school pro-wrassling. If you dig this movie look for Santo's 70's adventures for a more colorful example of monster-bashing goodness.