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

Zaveshchaniye professora Douelya (1984)

... aka: Завещание профессора Доуэля

... aka: Завещанието на професор Доуел

... aka: Head of Professor Dowell, The

... aka: Il testamento del dottor Dowell (The Will of Doctor Dowell)

... aka: Professor Dowell's Testament

... aka: Professor Dowell's Will

... aka: Testament of Professor Dowell, The

Directed by:

Leonid Menaker

Renowned scientist Professor Dowell (Olgert Kroders) has passed away. He was getting so into his work, and staying up so many consecutive days and nights, that when he went out driving (an activity that relaxed him) he was in no state to control his car when it skidded during a rainstorm and then went into a canyon. At least that's the official story. Now his work has been left in the hands of his two assistants, Dr. Robert Korn (Igor Vasilev), who started out as a surgeon in a provincial clinic before impressing the esteemed professor, and loyal Dr. Marie Laurent (Valentina Titova), who's been by the professor's side for a long time and seems to have been in love with him.

Dowell was so obsessed with his work that he left behind some collateral damage though, most notably a wife who was driven to an early grave and a bitter, estranged adult son named Arthur (Aleksey Bobrov), who doesn't have many nice things to say about him. Though Dowell was trying to find ways to help humanity, his work was appropriated by the military in the development of atomic weapons which actually have done the opposite. That's steered Arthur into a career as a documentary filmmaker whose latest film highlights war atrocities. It's a way for him to come to terms with the damage his father inadvertently caused.

A gathering is held at the professor's seaside home / lab where a group of scientists and potential investors are shown just some of the results of Dowell and Korn's experiments with animals. Thus far they've created a cat with webbed feet, a still-living dog head hooked up to a machine and a chimpanzee named Lilly who has had her head grafted onto another chimp's body and has thus far survived for a solid month, though judging by the droopy mouth and drool, none-too-well. They've managed to accomplish all of this by combining electronics, surgery a special blue serum. Ingredients top secret, of course. Professor Richardson (Ernst Romanov) and Dr. Gould (Aleksandr Porokhovshchikov) from the chemical corporation Mercury Inc. are interested in an exchange of data. Dr. Korn is interested in their money to further fund these experiments.

After screening black-and-white home movies of the late professor, they head outside onto the terrace where a statue to the late professor is revealed. It's his head atop a large stone pillar with the inscription, "Both my life and my death belong to science." Arthur plans on leaving after the ceremony but is pulled aside by groundskeeper Willie (Boris Tsymba), who informs him that he suspects foul play. Arthur decides to look into the accusations, starting with an examination of the accident site which reveals that Dr. Korn was likely with the professor on the night of this death. Arthur is able to enlist some help from childhood friend Baxter (Nikolay Lavrov), who's now a policeman.

As you can probably tell from the various posters, Dr. Korn is actually keeping Dowell's still-living head hooked up to some electronic contraption. As per the professor's last will, he's given Korn the right to actually do this so he could continue his experiments into death but he's now having a change of heart. For starters, he has deep regrets about the life he'd lived prior to "dying." Second, now that he's incapacitated, he's basically the captive of Korn, who won't allow him to see his son or even speak to Marie. He can only be audible as long as a special wire is plugged in, which Marie doesn't even know about.

Time is quickly running out for Korn. The Mercury Inc. reps are blackmailing him. After he rejects their initial offer of unlimited credit and state-of-the-art equipment in exchange for his data to use for their own nefarious purposes, they're quick to inform him that they own his debt and will simply shut him down and take whatever they want, anyway. And these guys are such terrible corporate scum they take great pride in the fact their chemicals have polluted six out of the seven continents on Earth. Getting more desperate, Dr. Korn and Marie start acquiring fresh corpses for their experiments, with the ultimate goal being to give Dowell a healthy human body to place his head upon.

Meanwhile, Arthur gets reacquainted with Angelika Guy (Natalya Sayko), an old flame of his who's now a famous actress and is back in town to visit and hiding under the alias "Anne Smith" so the press doesn't bother her. The two happen to be at a sleazy nightclub when a shoot-out occurs between police and smugglers over drugs hidden inside a nude sex doll (!) Many are killed, including Angelika, whose skull is crushed, and a singer / burlesque performer named Monica Brown (also Sayko). Dr. Korn and Marie end up with both bodies and construct a new being out of her, with Monica's head on top of Angelika's body. They rename their Frankenstein creation Eve, fit her with a metal collar to cover her scars and then study how well she does doing physical activities. However, she's conflicted about who she is and has shuffled memories from both of her components. Further complications arise once Arthur starts snooping around the lab.

It's pretty easy to see why this has received a lukewarm response from so many horror and sci-fi fans online but I honestly think much of this boils down to expectations. For starters, you have fans of the source novel objecting to all of the changes made for this adaptation. And then you have viewers seeing the living head on the cover, probably expecting a film similar to THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE (1962) and then sitting down to watch this only to be disappointed that the effects are minimal, the action is virtually nonexistent, the pacing is slow, there's lots of dialogue and this never really strives to be overtly horrific or shocking. It's far too competently-made and serious to be good camp, yet not violent or exploitative enough to be good trash. Then what is it exactly? Well, to me, it's a mature and sometimes thoughtful rumination exploring medical ethics and the pitfalls of scientific discovery, most especially its abuse at the hands of the wealthy, greedy and / or powerful, with an aside about not letting one's own personal ambition destroy or harm others, including animals.

These same topics are tackled in countless other "mad scientist" films and, while the moral of the story is rather blatantly hammered out at the very end, I can't say I was horribly disappointed in how they handled this otherwise. On the contrary, I rather enjoyed how the genre tropes were placed front-and-center yet still utilized in a subtler and less obvious fashion than what is the norm. The fantastic is treated in such a sober, matter-of-fact way that this manages to take completely outlandish things and ground them firmly in reality.

On another note, the setting is rather unexpected for a Soviet film, as this is clearly shooting for a tropical atmosphere. There are lots of palm trees, beaches, monkeys, talks of the humidity and heat, men walking around with their shirts open like they're somewhere in the jungles of South America and a bunch of black actors cast in small roles and as background extras. This is all compromised by the fact much of the outdoor footage is overcast and looks gloomy. Signs are all written in English. I'm not even sure where this is supposed to be set.

This was (supposedly very loosely) based on Aleksandr Belyaev's popular 1925 novel Golova profesora Dovelja. An English version of that book was released in 1980 by Macmillan, uses the title Professor Dowell's Head and features an introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. A 2001 DVD release from Image Entertainment (under the title Professor Dowell's Testament) comes with English subtitles. An English dubbed version was also released.

★★1/2