I’ve always been (excitedly) aware that there are a plethora of Mexican movies where the hero character is just a popular real luchador from the era. I specifically remember learning Blue Demon even has a soap opera with hundreds and hundreds of episodes. I learned it the same day I learned my media hyper-fixations sadly do have limits.
These movies appear to be similar to the type of movies the U.S. produced featuring Hulk Hogan in the 1980s or John Cena circa 2005, except in the Mexican films, the luchadores plays themselves, masks, cape, tights and all. These movies seem to exist in a world where wrestlers are super-powered and ready to jump in whenever the police, government, or a beautiful damsel needs help. There are dozens of these films, and they all have posters like this:
Here’s another one. There is really nothing I’m going to write here that’s as good as these.
What if I told you I had one more with Frankenstein?
The difference between 500 episodes of a telenovela about Blue Demon and every single movie to ever feature El Santo is that I’m not going to watch the Blue Demon Show.
In October, I decided to finally take the plunge and check out one of these movies. Specifically, I watched the horror themed Santo vs. the Vampire Women, and let me tell ya, it did not disappoint. In fact, I had comically low expectations so it easily impressed!
I had assumed that all of these movies are boring, generic detective movies where the lead sleuth just happens to be shirtless and wearing a wrestling mask. As I typed that, it hit me how awesome that is and I have no idea why that was always putting me off when it is objectively cool as hell. Lucky for dumbass past me, that isn’t the case with this one.
Santo is a sort of vigilante superhero type who is only brought in deep in the movie when the police chief has found himself fully unable to stop a group of vampires. This is where the movie fully wins me over. See, Santo takes on one of the vampires in… a professional wrestling match. Once again, as I typed this part, I realized how obvious this may seem to anyone else, but this truly shocked me.
As a wrestling fan, I was pumped to see pro wrestling actually be integral to the action-horror story and not just a throwaway scene or character introduction. Santo faces off against another luchadore, who we know is secretly a monster. The stakes of the match aren’t simply to beat the villain, but to unmask him, revealing the monster’s true visage to the public. It’s a genuinely clever play on the tradition of lucha unmasking.
The match itself is short but impressive. They are clearly wrestling the match, filmed mostly in wides that resemble the way wrestling is still aired today. This sequence also provides the biggest reveal of Santo’s true power, as the monster he wrestles shrugs off a flurry of gunfire both right before and right after this mask, but is fully rocked by Santo’s punches. This means that Santo’s punch is much stronger than a point blank revolver shot. This makes me question why he is bothering with a machine gun on that other poster, but I haven’t seen that movie yet so I am almost certainly lacking vital context that makes it all make sense.
After winning the match and revealing the existence of supernatural beasts to the general public, Santo wraps up the film’s climax by putting all the vampire women in a big cage and burning them all alive with a torch. This is much less like pro wrestling, but not fully dissimilar.
I’m sold. This thing is a certified platinum 3/5. The kind of 3/5 that makes me smile and add forty-five more movies to my watchlist.