First time seeing one of these? Check out my Rowan Reflects Disclaimer before venturing forward!
So, I listen to a lot of beats/lofi/vaporwave etc, and one of my favorite channels is ElFamosoDemon, who makes music videos for various songs. There’s a lot of old movie, game, and tv show footage in them, and I think they’re fun and well made.
Anyways, at some point relatively recently I stumbled upon this video, which introduced me to two things:
1) Quite possibly the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life: “If it really was a 50% chance of rain, would you only have to water half your lawn?” Seriously. This is one of those jokes that I’m totally fine being irrationally angry about. It infuriates me.
2) El Santo and Blue Demon movies. I’ve never really interacted with much luchadore stuff (outside of the cartoon ¡Mucha Lucha! that aired on some kids cartoon block that I watched as a kid/preteen, which as a side note was a pretty nifty little cartoon), and I loved how absolutely batshit the premise seemed. There was just something hilarious to me about the concept of James Bond type set pieces (helicopters, fast cars, secret villain laboratories etc) with masked wrestlers.
Of course, since I’ve been on something of a retro television/movies kick of late (I’ve also been enjoying the original Kamen Rider and Zorro shows, blogposts on those to come when I finish them), I decided to poke around and see if I could find any Santo movies on Youtube. Indeed, I managed to find some, but picked “Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters” to watch first because it was in color and several comments I’d found online suggested it was one of the better Santo films out there.
Having watched it, I have to say I’m not entirely sure it’s what I’d personally recommend as far as starting points go, but I plan to work my way through some other ones in the future so it wasn’t all bad.
A big reason I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point is that it appears to be the culmination of a storyline involving a recurring villain (Maybe? I’m honestly not sure, but there’s references to Santo having defeated the main villain/thwarted his evil plans multiple times in the past so I’m assuming that there were others that came before it with the same cast). So, not having any context or familiarity with the characters was kind of a downside for me.
Thankfully, it’s pretty simple to follow. Santo and Blue Demon are masked wrestling celebrities, but also crime fighters/super agents? (Again, I don’t know because I haven’t seen any other films, but that’s definitely the vibe I got). They’re rivals in the ring but friends and allies outside of it.
The whole setup is somewhat convoluted. There’s a lot of mad-scientist type stuff centered around reviving monsters from the dead and cloning/brainwashing. Blue Demon ends up getting clonewashed (that is, he’s turned into a clone and the clone goes out and does evil things while the main body sleeps inside the villain’s castle/secret lab combo) and serves as a villain for most of the movie.
Plotwise, it’s fairly lightweight. Santo drives around and fights monsters who pop up to kill either his girlfriend and her father (who are related to the main villain?) or himself, and there are a lot of wrestling-inspired chaotic melee brawls. Santo is far from invincible, but he always gets back up and gives better than he gets.
The monsters aren’t terribly frightening. They’re all common beasts (a vampire, a mummy, a wolfman, a monster from the black lagoon, a woman vampire, dudes with green face paint who are supposed to be Frankenstein’s Monster types) etc. I’m not entirely sure why they needed to be included, but so it goes.
There are also a decent number of purely observational sequences, with a long women’s wrestling match at the beginning and a fairly dense dance sequence in the last third of the film that serve little to no main story purpose and are just there to be looked at. That’s fine, but I’m super unused to that much “Fluff” in modern films that it was kind of jarring.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not), there’s also not much dialogue, and the dialogue that is there is fairly simplistic. Santo really doesn’t talk much (most of what he says is just responding to people affirmatively), and none of the characters get much in the way of development, but that’s fine too. I wasn’t terribly interested in Santo (Blue Demon seemed like a much more compelling character this time around), but I think I could see myself warming up to him as a hero if I watched more films. He gave me kind of “pseudo Paragon” vibes, which is fun.
Overall, I wouldn’t say that I particularly enjoyed the movie – it’s a popcorn film and more than a little rough around the edges by modern standards – but I bet it would have been a lot of fun to see at the time.
Like I said earlier, I’ll probably watch a few more and see how I feel about them.
Until next time, cheers!