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

Las momias de Guanajuato (1972)

... aka: El santo contra las momias (Santo vs. the Mummies)

... aka: Guanajuato's Mummies

... aka: Mummies of Guanajuato, The

... aka: Santo contre les momies de Guanajuato (Santo vs. the Mummies of Guanajuato)

Directed by:

Federico Curiel

Because of a burial tax, the bodies of many deceased in Guanajuato, Mexico (ones which were either unclaimed or had relatives who couldn't pay to keep them buried) were dug up and then stored in a building. There, the bodies went through a natural mummification process. Due to the amount of tourists flocking to the area to get a look at the mummies, a museum (El Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato) was finally opened in 1969 to display the well-preserved corpses in. Now many of them stand around in well-lit glass cases. Well, except for the dead babies, which sit in their own case. Some are still dressed. Others aren't. Some still have hair while others are bald. Many have their arms crossed and a good number of them have hauntingly agonized looks on their faces (supposedly many had died of cholera). Among the mummies is a woman who appears to have been buried alive, a mummified fetus taken from a pregnant corpse's womb and corpses that have been taken out of their cases and posed on benches so visitors can take selfies with them (!!)

The museum is still open to this day and remains a popular tourist destination but I've gotta admit I'd never personally set foot in this place. While I'm not religious myself, the over eighty percent of Mexicans who identify as Roman Catholic are, so you'd think the concept of putting corpses on display and then charging money to see them would be considered a bit, I dunno, blasphemous, right? After all, these are bodies that should have never been taken out of the ground in the first place. They are not intentionally-preserved mummies like in Egypt but corpses that have only been disinterred because their families didn't have the money to pay an annual tax. It's on those grounds I have an issue with the museum. It seems like just another way; a very, very tasteless way, to exploit poor people even in death.

Speaking of exploitation, the museum had barely been open for a year when this film went into production. It starts out as an advertisement / endorsement for the place and presents it like any other spook show attraction. We follow a tour group on a bus as they travel through Guanajuato all the way to the museum. We get some nice looks at the city and it indeed appears like it would be a cool city to visit. An alcoholic dwarf tour guide named Penguin (Jorge Pinguino) leads the group through a cemetery (where the "mummies" should be!) to the museum while trying to scare them with stories about how some visitors have died of heart attacks while viewing the exhibit. He claims some may have been buried alive and explains how the cities dry climate mummified the corpses but leaves out that little detail about how the bodies ended up there in the first place. We get plenty of leering shots of the corpses as they pass through while spooky music plays.

The tour group then enter into another room where (fake) mummies line the walls. One of these is a 7'2" former wrestler named Satan (an uncredited Tinieblas) who is rumored to have made a pact with the devil to become a world champion wrestler back in 1871. He ended up being defeated by a wrestler named Santo but swore he'd return a century later for revenge. A squeamish woman (Mabel Luna) who sees Satan's body move passes out and then, after the tour group angrily leave, Penguin himself faints after witnessing the same. When he awakens, Satan's mummy has disappeared.

Taking a break from the mummy stuff, we visit a nightclub where singer Martha Angelica (playing herself) performs for three minutes. Penguin shows up, has a bunch of drinks and convinces singer Lina (Elsa Cárdenas) and cigarette girl Alicia (Patricia Ferrer) to accompany him to the museum so he can show them that Satan is gone. That's followed soon after by an eight-minute-long wrestling match with the undefeated tag team duo of Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras taking down their competitors. Afterward, Lina (who's the fiancée of Mil Máscaras) and Penguin try to warn them there's a mummy on the loose, but Blue Demon doesn't buy it. His skepticism doesn't last long however after he's knocked out by the mummy and finds the night watchman dead. A wino is then killed, which pulls the obligatory police inspector (Juan Gallardo) into the story.

Other mummies are resurrected and kill off some of the supporting cast in bloodless attacks (necks are broken). Satan gets his hands on Blue Demon's mask and outfit, lures cops to a location at night and then frame him for killing a bum. Next thing Blue knows, his name is all over the evening news as the killer and he's forced to go into hiding. Santo, who just happens to be passing through on his way to a match in San Luis with his agent Mr. Gonzalez (Carlos Suárez), stops in Guanajuato to get a hotel and ends up figuring in the finale, which includes lots of clunkily-choreographed fighting and flamethrower pistols. Despite his third billing, Santo is only seen one other time in the movie when the mummy has a flashback to losing his wrestling bout with Santo's ancestor.

Granted, someone returning from the dead for revenge because they lost a wrestling match 100 years earlier isn't the most compelling plot line in the world but this at least has a few fun elements. The mummy make-up and masks are pretty good (some even look pretty scary!), travelogue footage is decent and there's some amusing teasing about the wrestler's masks being removed, plus some truly amazing outfits, with Mil Máscaras' pink and yellow mask, red vest, animal print trunks and gold tights and cape ensemble being the "best" of the bunch. On the down side, this never generates much in the way of excitement, scenes involving the police are boring (numerous other scenes also drag) and they give Blue Demon an annoying adopted son named Julio (played by Julio César, the son of producer Rogelio Agrasánchez), who, along with not being able to act, does the usual dumb little kid things like trying to follow his dad around and getting himself kidnapped.

While most earlier Mexican wrestling movies were produced cheaply and turned a nice profit, the zenith of all that is right here. This is rumored to be the highest grossing film of them all and it's not too difficult to see why. While this is a pretty mediocre offering, the casting coup of the three most popular Lucha Libre legends in one film, plus capitalizing on the fame of the Guanajuato mummies / museum just as it opened, brought audiences in droves.

There were two follow-ups from the same producer: El robo de las momias de Guanajuato / "Robbery of the Mummies of Guanajuato" (1972) and El castillo de las momias de Guanajuato / "Castle of the Mummies of Guanajuato" (1973). Both of these were directed by Tito Novaro and filmed in Guatemala. Before all of that there was the telenovela Las momias de Guanajuato (1962) produced by Telesistema Mexicano, which eventually became Televisa; the largest mass media company in all of Latin America. And there was the comedy Capulina contra las momias (El terror de Guanajuato) / "Capulina vs. the Mummies: The Terror of Guanajuato" (1973) and the semi-recent animated kid's movie La Leyenda de las Momias de Guanajuato / "The Legend of the Mummies of Guanajuato" (2014).

There were actually two VHS releases for this one (1986 and a 1991 reissue) in the U.S., both on the Mexcinema Video Corp. label and both in Spanish with no subtitles. The Mexican DVD release from Distribuidora Virtual Digital de Mexico comes with both English and French subtitles.

★★