Santo y Blue Demon vs Drácula y el Hombre Lobo (1973)

... aka: Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolf Man

... aka: Santo y Blue Demon Contra Drácula y el Hombre Lobo

Directed by:

Miguel M. Delgado

"Never trust a hideous monster from hell!"

Words to live by.

It's been seven sun eclipses and seven moon eclipses since monster hunter / alchemist Cristaldi put Count Dracula and the werewolf to rest and, since that whole eclipse business has now passed, the famed bloodsucker and his equally esteemed hairy pal are good for another resurrection and terror spree. Their scar-faced hunchback disciple Eric ([Alfredo] Wally Barrón) knows this and, using the Book of Kabbalah, pleads to Satan for their return. However, he first needs the blood of one of Cristaldi's descendants to complete the ritual. Soon after, the elderly Professor Luis Cristaldi (Jorge Mondragón) receives an anonymous letter threatening him with death and warning him that he and the rest of his family will soon have to pay back their debt. The letter brings to mind a passage in a 400-year-old book passed down from generation to generation in the professor's family. It tells of an unholy alliance between Dracula and the werewolf, who'd joined forces centuries earlier in order to "dominate humanity" along with their army of "beast men." Now, the professor, his daughter Laura (María Eugenia San Martín) and his nieces; teenager Lina (Nubia Martí) and the youngest, little Rosita (Lissy Fields), may all be in peril. The book also points out that the fiends won't be content with just killing them, but instead want to turn them all into zombie slaves.

You may be asking how Santo factors into all of this. Well, he just so happens to have dated into this family. No, silly, he's not dating the professor's daughter, Laura. Santo is a star after all, so he's instead hooked up with the teenage niece! Doing a little quick research, that pairs the 55 or 56-year-old "Saint" up with the 18 or 19-year-old Martí; a whopping age difference of 37 years! Santo also happens to be 18 years older than the actress playing the "middle-aged" daughter, who still looks just fine but is portrayed like some spinster who sits around knitting and bemoaning her lost youth and looks all the time.

Eric, who's descended from Transylvanians, chloroforms and kidnaps the professor, drags him back to his crypt hideout and then explains his plans. Already entrenched in the criminal underworld, Eric's basically hoping to get rich by having Dracula reveal the whereabouts of some gold. The professor warns there may be consequences to his actions but Eric proceeds with the ceremony, anyway. He hangs the professor upside down over the opened stone graves, cuts his throat and has him bleed all over the skeletal remains, which start smoking and regenerate. The debonair and well-dressed Dracula is played by Aldo Monti (who'd already played the count once before in SANTO IN THE TREASURE OF DRACULA), while the Werewolf, wearing a gold lamé pirate shirt and given the horrifying name Rufus Rex, is played by Agustín Martínez Solares of NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES fame.

The monsters quickly get to work kidnapping people and transforming them into vampires and werewolves. After all, if you plan on taking over the world, you're gonna need a little help, right? Due to the disappearance of the professor and others in the area, the police ask for Santo's help. He immediately gets into contact with Blue Demon, who's more than glad to assist his pal. Meanwhile, Rufus Rex transforms back into his handsome human form, gets cleaned up and buys some new duds in hopes of trying to seduce Laura. He makes a great first impression saving her during a (staged) attempted kidnapping using a couple of members of a bald mob bosses goon squad, but soon his true motives are revealed.

Colorful, breezy and (often intentionally!) humorous, this fun Santo horror adventures thankfully tosses out the wall-to-wall repetitive fight scene format of some of the other entries for a more straightforward Gothic horror story. With only small amounts of blood and no sexual content, this is something that can be enjoyed by kids of all ages. Well, granted the kids in question have a thing for schlock! We get lots of great turtlenecks, miniskirts, suits and over-sized sweaters in every color imaginable, rubber bats on strings, spear-wielding werewolves, giant telephones, vampire ladies in sheer red nightgowns, sacred daggers, secret passageways, precursors to Apple watches, zombies, flame-shooting golden bat heads and lots more. Our heroes have to fight a bunch of werewolves during the big finale, which is set around a giant spike-filled pit used to dispose of interlopers and traitors.

This is my tenth Santo film review so we're hitting a little milestone here at BPOH. Now just, er, eh, about 30 more to go until I finally have the legendary Mexican star's horror-ography under wraps! As per usual, there are several lengthy grappling matches squeezed in to please the wrestle-hungry Mexican public, with Santo (also one of the producers) squaring off against Angel Blanco, Blue facing Renato the Hippie (?) and Santo and Blue in a tag team match against Angel and Renato.

Unlike most other Santo offerings, this was given a U.S. VHS release by Million Dollar Video Corp. way back in 1987. A beautifully restored print with a brand new English dub is now being distributed by VCI Entertainment and Peter Hamilton Films.

★★1/2

Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos (1970)

... aka: Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters

... aka: Santo y Blue Demon contra los monstruos

Directed by:

Gilberto Martínez Solares

You know you're in good hands when the opening credits not only proudly introduce our wrestling heroes and their co-stars, but also treat all of the monsters just like they're other cast members. We're then off to Arenamex for a battle royale featuring burly female wrestlers as the announcer informs us that "No one would dare face these dangerous representatives of the weaker sex!" That's followed by a tag team match between Blue Demon and his partner Juan Garza, who are facing off against "El gigante de ébano" ("The Ebony Giant") and "El Arabe" ("The Arab"). The crowd only seem to really care about Blue Demon and chant "Blue Demon! Blue Demon! Blue Demon!" over and over again regardless of who's fighting at any given time. Poor Juan Garza may as well not even be there. Needless to say, Blue pummels his black and middle eastern opponents and wins the match. So where is Santo, you ask? Well, he is strangely standing on the sidelines watching the matches and does not participate. I guess it was his day off.

At a cemetery, Otto Halder (Ivan J. Rado) and his daughter Gloria (Hedi Blue) show up for the funeral of Otto's estranged brother, Bruno (Carlos Ancira). A descendant of Transylvanians, Bruno was a brilliant though evil scientist who became world famous for bringing the dead back to life through brain transplant operations and he's passed along his secrets to his faithful hunchback dwarf assistant, Waldo (Santanón). Waldo and a bunch of obedient green-faced zombie henchmen (all former criminals brought back to life), steal Bruno's corpse, take him back to their desert castle home / lab and revive him by putting a metal cap on his head and sticking him in some kind of glass chamber called a "brainwave re-transmitter." Now back to life, Bruno is out for revenge. For what? Well, uh, basically a couple of people made fun of him and called him crazy.

Suspecting something is afoot at the castle, Blue Demon sneaks in to investigate. He's knocked out when one of the zombies beats him with a stick, is tied to a table and then stuck in a tanning bed-like "duplication chamber." A flick of a switch later and Bruno creates an evil duplicate of the wrestler that's "programmed to kill" and will blindly obey Bruno's every order. He hopes to use the clone against Blue Demon's best friend, who happens to be Santo, as well as his brother Otto (who previously mocked his experiments) and niece Gloria, who also happens to be Santo's girlfriend. Small world, eh?

The Blue Demon duplicate and zombies attack Santo and Gloria. The botched kidnapping ends with a car chase and the bad guys getting blow up after their car goes over a cliff and explodes. Still, they all manage to survive and are then sent out by Bruno to round up a bunch of famous monsters to help them in their schemes. They go to a cave and get their hands on bat-eared El Vampiro (David Alvizu), hit up a museum and snatch the geriatric La Momia (Fernando Rosales) and also acquire wolfman El hombre lobo (Vicente Lara), one-eyed plantigrade swamp monster Ciclope (Gerardo Zepeda) and hulking, bolt-necked. copyright-friendly Franquestain (Manuel Leal aka Tinieblas). There's also another strange monster hanging around the lab that looks like a dwarf wearing an oversized, mud-caked alien mask and with a giant exposed brain (!), though it is never named and does absolutely nothing other than just stand there.

A lot of movies make you wait forever to see the monster. This one is having none of that and throws all of its ten cent creations at you right away and gives them all their own little rampage. The wolfman goes to a hut, shreds a couple of villagers (Carlos Suárez, Margarita Delgado) and kills a little boy off-screen. The cyclops (who has a glowing orange eye) kills a fisherman, the vampire sinks his fangs into a couple of dancers (Elsa María Tako, Yolanda Ponce) and transforms them into lingerie-clad vampire brides and the Frankenstein monster attacks a couple necking in the woods, strangles the girl and smashes the guy's head with its foot! Santo is coerced into a wrestling match against El Vampiro, which hilariously ends with the vampire seeing a crucifix, turning into a bat, all the rest of the monsters miraculously materializing in the ring and everyone fighting while spectators flee in terror.

To relieve some tension, Santo, his girl and future father-in-law go to a dinner theater, where we're "treated" to three or four minutes of Adalberto Martínez and a bunch of dancers performing in scenes that seem like they were taken from another movie entirely. That's followed by another (mercifully shorter) musical number performed by three guys on a stage set. Most of the time, however, is spent on horribly-choreographed fight scenes. There's one after another and they usually end with the loser knocked out or presumed dead, springing back and then running off to fight the same cats all over again. Considering the fact this is wrestlers fighting a bunch of rubber-masked monsters we're talking about here, and these scenes are often sped-up Benny Hill style, they always generate more hilarity than excitement.

I actually enjoyed some of the previous Santo adventures non-ironically, especially the b/w Gothic ones. Of course they're all goofy and silly just by their very nature, but some of better ones aren't poorly made and are quite atmospheric. This one, on the other hand, is prime SBIG material all the way! There are a whole lotta adjectives one could use to describe this mess of a movie. Dumb, cheap, childish, plotless, poorly-made, horribly-edited, technically inept... Yet also fast-moving, charmingly daft, hilarious, busy and, best of all, extremely entertaining from start to finish. I enjoyed nearly every ridiculous second.

This was first made available on VHS by Something Weird, who only released a Spanish-language version. The DVD releases from Alter Films out of Mexico and Hannover House out of the U. S. both come with English subtitles.

SBIG