Santo y el águila real

Santo meets La Tigresa. That says it all. The strangest Santo movie, not because it features over the top genre elements like some others, but out of the sheer insanity of the story, yet its one the most "mexican" ones as well with the hacienda and the cock fights and all that.

A mostly forgotten film in Santo's career but its an enjoyable ranchera movie with enough action and comedy to make it entertaining. Not particulary great but far from bad and with a ludicrous twist ending.

"Santo y La Tigresa" is hilariously bad as only a Santo wrestling movie from the 70s can be. This one, however, doesn't have the added interest of monsters with horribly amateur makeup. "Tigresa" is more like an episode of "Big Valley" mixed with some "Starsky and Hutch." It's actually pretty darn funny, with loads of 70s hair, clothes, and music adding to the camp value of a big fatass eating, sleeping, loving, and carrying on serious conversations in a silver wrestler's mask as though that were normal. Oh yeah, and he occasionally kicks some ass. But "Tigresa" has a few moments that animal lovers might find offensive. There is an extended cockfight and a cat is deliberately poisoned (though the scene was obviously faked, since the cat is still moving once everyone in the scene insists it is dead).

The transfer on the DVD currently available from Vanguard Cinema is very, very poor, however--much more like that of a $3.99 budget disc than a $15 to $20 one. The sound is passable, but the picture is annoyingly soft and washed out, with background characters' faces disappearing almost entirely into mush in the longshots.

I had read about Santo movies before, so I had to try out one. The print I saw (Vanguard) is in bad shape, and the movie is subtitled (at least partially), but the sound is okay. Still, once past the opening the movie becomes a fascinating culture study of a sort of country living in Mexico. For entertainment at one point they see a cock fight (yes it's real and violent) and it is fascinating to see what kind of manners people use with each other, even in a fictional movie. Santo is always the gentleman -- speaking very correctly both to friends and enemies! The basic plot begins with Santo going to the aid of a woman, the owner of a ranch, who is being threatened by unknown persons. The way the plot unfolds is not as entertaining as seeing the characters interact. It does appear there is animal abuse in the film, since most of the filming seems to be in a one-take mode, but one can never be sure about that. After all, the fights look real enough but were faked no doubt in terms of blows connecting, so maybe they did something similar with the filming of the animal scenes. All in all I have to give this film for both entertainment and amusement value, though perhaps I was just in the right mood. I'm going to check out more Santo movies after this.

The other review was correct, there was tons of animal abuse in this film. While I am far from an animal rights advocate, I was horrified at the Mexican film industry and its cavalier attitude about animal abuse. Some of the many abusive portions included filming a cock fight (yes, I know this is cultural and may not be seen as abusive in Mexico), a horse being tossed off a cliff (and it's a real horse and it bounces many times and at the very least it broke a few legs--necessitating it being put down), drugging a cat and abusing a bird of prey (I think it was a Golden Eagle).

In addition, the film is tough to watch simply because the English captioning is so bad. Most of the time you can understand what they were saying, but occasionally the captions were so mangled, I was left scratching my head. A lot of the mistakes were just the result of the translator only having a passable knowledge of English. Occasionally, too, I noticed that what the people were saying in Spanish and English weren't exactly the same. On a scale from 1 to 10, the captioning was a 2.

Now there is one final problem with the film. The DVD was of very dubious quality. It looked bad even for an old and highly degraded VHS tape! The picture was generally very fuzzy and the sound also, naturally, pretty bad as well.

As for the film itself, it is an amazingly dull film. I've seen a couple other Santo films and this one has such a pedestrian plot, I was surprised. No Dracula, no Frankenstein, no apocalypse...just Santo staying with a rich lady and occasionally trying (very unsuccessfully) to come to her rescue. In fact, I was surprised just how poor this great Mexican wrestler looked in the film--getting a beat down several times. I could try to explain the plot, but frankly it isn't worth it. It's just too uninteresting to get into it--suffice to say, it's about a not terribly good Luchador (Mexican wrestler) who always runs around wearing his silver mask. Heck, he even keeps it on when he's eating (though amazingly, he never gets any food on it despite the tiny mouth hole). I wish the film would have had a nude scene. Usually I don't like this in films and think it hurts the movie, I would have loved to see him having sex while wearing the mask--it would have been pretty funny.

While I have enjoyed the zany weirdness of several Luchador movies, this one has nothing to offer. No odd characters, no bizarre plot twists and nothing to like. It's like eating an entire meal of melba toast--no particularly exciting or filling. Plus, they killed the horse!

The animal abuse was not shocking to me (I've lived in Mexico); it was simply part of the culture. Animals are abused in Spain as well (bull abuse). One can either accept it, or not. Typical Santo film; beautiful women, fast cars, and corny characters. The first generation Corvette was nice to see. As predictable as Santo films are, they still fun to watch. La Tigresa fights in this picture as well as El Santo. At least El Santo gets dirt on his white shirt during one of the later fights. La Tigresa wears a 1960s bra during her parts, "it hold, it molds;" at least her makeup was not overly done, it could have been worse. Now, on to the next Santo movie......