Review
SANTO VS THE VAMPIRE WOMEN
January 23 to 25
Building J2 Currie Barracks
OK: you’re in Mexico sometime in the early ’60s, and supernatural assailants with uncanny hypnotic powers are repeatedly menacing your daughter. Meanwhile, bodies are starting to turn up completely drained of blood, with two tiny puncture marks in the neck. Naturally, the police are baffled. What do you do? Who can you turn to in the face of such a crisis?
How about a professional wrestler?
You send out a distress signal, using an enormous cardboard television set in your study. Within moments, a sporty little white roadster roars up, and out steps El Santo, your saviour. You’re about to entrust your daughter’s safety to a grown man who walks around shirtless in broad daylight, wearing kneepads, tights, a silver-colored mask and a sequined robe. He won’t tell you his real name, and nobody’s ever seen his face.
Don’t worry. In the world of Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962), you’ve made a perfectly wise decision. The situation couldn’t possibly be in better hands.
El Santo (real name: Rodolfo Guzman Huerta) wasn’t just a wrestler in a silver mask – he was a folk hero whose legend now encircles the globe. Over the course of about 50 films, he played a superhero version of his wrestling persona. In these films, he fought crime and injustice in all its forms, often by performing a belly-to-belly suplex before pinning said evil to the mat. Robots, werewolves, vampires, giant alien blobs – you name it, he’d wrestle it. The local police had a giant two-way video transmitter that could reach Santo anywhere, even if he was driving in his car. (However, if he were in the ring defending his title, they’d just get his answering machine.)
Cult movie fanatics have clued in to the unique straight-faced wackiness of Santo films in recent years, even though these movies can be maddeningly hard to find. Only a handful of them have ever been dubbed into English, and even they can be tough to track down. Rejoice then, at the news that the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF) will be screening the masked one’s most famous outing, Santo vs. the Vampire Women as a fundraiser for their $100 Film Festival. A short animated film, Shadowy Encounters (inspired by the dream-like works of the Brothers Quay) is also included in the program.
There’s a lot here for fans of ridiculous cinema to savour. Stilted dialogue, bad dubbing, rubber bats on visible strings, sexy vampire babes and the Devil himself, making shadow puppets. (I’m not kidding – he does a bunny and a bird. See for yourself.) The vampire women’s sinister plot involves kidnapping an innocent woman on her 21st birthday, and making her their Queen (wha?), so that the current Queen can go back to Hell and be with her hubby, Beelzebub. Boy, that looked weird when I was typing it just now. Anyway, the vamps resurrect a bunch of muscle-bound dudes in tank tops to deal with Santo, whose ancestor defeated them the last time they tried this plan, 200 years previously. (They had masked wrestlers in the 1760s?) One of these henchmen takes the place of Santo’s opponent in a big wrestling match, only to turn into a werewolf when his mask gets ripped off. Yow!
Santo vs. the Vampire Woman is part of the CSIF’s Sofa Cinema Series. |
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