These Mexicans sure do like their movies bizarre, don't they? Okay, granted this coming from a resident of the country that brought you "Sex Lives of the Potato Men". But still, even to me this is pretty freakin' weird.

The daughter of a professor is kidnapped by a newly-resurrected vampiress, who is out to capture her essence (or something). So what does the professor do? He hires a pro wrestler to find her, of course. Wouldn't you? Anyway, it actually takes about half the movie just to get to that point. Kind of slow-moving, you could say. Apparently there's nothing that vampires fear more than Mexican wrestlers, so she calls her evil forces to her defense to destroy this no good canvas-pounding, tights-wearing fellow, using such tactics as sending a werewolf to face him in the ring and ensure he meets a grizzly end. Needless to say, Santo overcomes.

Though a bit racier, this movie generally draws very heavily upon the melodramatic style of Universal's horror films of the forties, and bears much more resemblance to these than it does to the Hammer-style movies that were more prominent at the time. This makes sense as it was sometimes the case that Universal would film back-to-back English and Spanish versions of their horror movies in order to get them out to the widest audience possible (it was often the case that the Spanish versions were actually better as they could observe and improve upon the work that the English-language crew had done before them). When this style is mixed with the presence of overweight mexican men wearing tights ... like I said, it's weird. These 'Santo' movies do have their cult following, of course, but mostly because of how cheesey they are. It does make them a lot of fun to watch.

Whether or not you'll like this depends on how you feel about dodgy B-movies. This is one of those ones that almost seems intentionally funny, thanks to the differing sensibilities of the audience back then. You'll probably want to check out the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version at least for some good laughs.

I really couln't say this is a werewolf more like a were-bat...

The MST3K version is funny as crap though.

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The Wolf This character seems to be one of those vampire/werewolf hybrids that are apparently fairly common in these movies. He sneaks his way into the ring in order to face and destroy Santo, at first gaining the upper hand before Santo removes his mask and reveals his opponent is in fact a werewolf! Eek! The crowd of course start screaming and a bunch of policemen open fire upon the creature, but their bullets are proven harmless. He then turns into a bat and flies away. Hmm.

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