Las mujeres vampiro

You haven't seen fun camp and delightful cheese until you've seen an El Santo movie, and his match with a bunch of beautiful vampire ladies is probably his best.

Since Lucha Libre (Wrestling) is very popular south of the border, El Santo (or Samson, or The Silver Masked Wrestler etc) was the master of caped comic book heroes in Mexico back in the 60's. This movie boasts not only the typical Santo plot: a wrestling match at the beginning, a pretty girl being menaced by bad guys, a professor who knows how to stop the bad guys, a second wrestling match with a concealed bad guy masquerading as a wrestler trying to kill Santo in the ring etc., but it also has some cool old-school Gothic style undead evil mistresses. And some beauties they are too: Lorena Velasquez (a look-alike to a young Liz Taylor, except prettier) is the effectively sinister vampire queen who is looking for a successor.

It's a lot of late night horror movie fun, the kind the "live monster" hosts like Elvira and Vampira used to show. You can't help but love the stilted, translated dialog done in laughably out-of-synch dubbing, endless fighting scenes (the kind where people fall down even when a punch misses them by ten feet), a slowly unravelling master plot, and cheap special effects. This is a "must see" for fans of campy horror films.

Back when the wrestlers wrestled for real, back when vampires were scary and erotic, back when women were REALLY SEXY, there was "Santo contra las mujeres vampiro". With a popular superhero, a very, very, very sexy vampire queen (I'd let be myself bitten by her)and an hour plus of really good entertainment this is easily the best mexican film ever made. The childish special effects and poor performances of the actors just make it a jewel of surrealism. If you are looking for a masterpiece of nonsense, search no more, this one is for you.

This is one of the funniest movies and the greatest Santo movie, perhaps only challenged by "Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon vs. los monstruos." It should be enjoyed with friends, as then you could discuss the progressive social critique this movie lays down. Not really.

I mean the above as a good thing. Used for the last season six episode of MST3K, this Mexican wrestler film has good cinematography, an interesting plot, cool vampires... okay, so the girl's father has a goofy, dubbed voice and the wrestling scenes (one with a buff vampire!) might be tedious for some (like me). This movie has turned me on to Mexican horror of the 50's and 60's -- is that wrong?

In the late 50's and early 60's Mexican wrestling was flowing with renewed popularity. El Santo, The Man in the Silver Mask, was the most popular wrestler at the time, a true idol of the masses.

So somebody at some point decided to make "wrestling movies" transforming popular wrestlers into superheros (after all, they are masked and caped, aren't they?) and pitted them against criminal mobsters, evil scientists and in one occasion, a martian invasion.

Of course these movies are on par with the best (and worst) of B movies of the time, but this particular movie is considered an icon, receiving awards in Europe and Asia.

Today this movie would only inspire chuckles and outright laughs, but its a nice history lesson of the time when caped and masked men were in the imaginations of millions of Mexican kids.