Santo vs. The Daughter of Frankenstein

If you had to ask me one of my own pet peeves about horror movies, I'd probably have to say that I rarely if ever enjoy the main protagonist.  Assuming we aren't classifying Jason or Freddy as the good guy, of course.  Most notably in slasher movies, your main character is usually bland and interchangeable if not downright obnoxious.  Don't worry though, Mexico has your remedy.  What if, instead of some pimply faced teen, you had a masked luchador staring down your maniacal killer?  This is the basis of Santo vs. The Daughter of Frankenstein.  

El Santo is maybe the most famous guy in Mexico ever.  Think like, George Clooney and Barack Obama, except with more high-flying offense.  In these Santo vs. movies he is sort of a Pro Wrestler by day Super Secret Agent by night.  And of course, lover of women.  Chances are if you're reading this blog, you probably know the story of Dr. Frankenstein.  Well, his daughter does too and she sticks with it for the most part.  She has an army of red-sweater-ed henchmen who drag dead bodies into her underground lair to stitch together a monster.  Also, everybody is hundreds of years old.  Yeah, in addition to wanting to create new life in untraditional ways, she also wants to live forever.  So, she distributes this serum to all her centuries-old minions in exchange for their loyalty.  This is a lady with a lot going on!  And honestly, who wouldn't want to live forever in an underground lair with a maniacal woman who forces her bidding upon you?

In the meantime, we see Santo having a 2/3 falls match for the number one contendership for the World Middleweight title.  Now, ladies and gentlemen, we're in the middle of a semi-horror movie.  How long would you say we should show footage from this match?  Maybe one or two minutes?  How about 15?  It's possible it just felt like that.  Such is the magic of Santo.  His girlfriend is pretty excited anyway, and is certainly in no danger whatsoever. 

Dr. Frankenstein is no thousand year old fool, she knows you can't just do crazy headscissors and not have super blood.  She tested some blood from Santo she got at a wrestling match and it turns out he's got some serious diesel coursing through his veins.  Enough to make her life-extending serum potent possibly forever.  Luckily, apparently underground in their lair the girlfriend of Santo and her whereabouts are pretty common knowledge.    The red shirt brigade kidnap her with little trouble and leave a note for the Saint.

 

Santa never got his letter.

Santo and his girlfriend's Mom find the note and Santo agrees that taking an old woman on a kidnapping rescue seems like an ok idea.  Meanwhile, Dr. Frankenstein is dishing out life-serum to some new recruits.  We get to enjoy a montage of pained old Mexican men!  If you care much for the acting process this is a good scene to watch, since this is where it dies.  Soon after, we get our first victim as she refuses to give the serum to some guy for leaving his dishes in the sink or something.  

Of course, this wouldn't be a Frankenstein movie if there wasn't a monster.  This one is apparently a human with ape blood, that old classic.  He breaks his bonds so he can wander this luxurious palace, making sure to recoil in terror at a torch in the hall.  He decides to break down the door that holds Santo's girlfriend captive.  She escapes while a red shirt holds the monster at bay with the torch.  Meanwhile, Santo is hitting on her mom in the woods.

The Doctor and her pals give chase,  Santo is waiting on a tree stump which he promptly leaps onto them from.  Santo beats up around 12 men before finally the Doctor turns a gun on his girlfriend, forcing his capture.  Once he's set up in chains, the doc wants to test out her new toy.  That means, Frankenstein Fight!  In the end, Santo beats him to death with his own shackles!  A metaphor for life, we all have to beat Frankenstein's monster, in spite of the bonds that leave us shackled daily...or something.  The doctor says "Screw it" and hypnotizes Santo's girlfriend to gouge out his eyes.  Why not?

They send her into a room where Santo is tied down and the guards wisely step outside and shut the door behind them.  Moments later, Santo breaks in to the laboratory where the Doc is at work and we get a second Frankenstein Fight!  Two in 10 minutes?  This movie spoils me.  Anyway, Santo hits him with a chair to the face and they escape.

In what I would consider a smooth move, Santo decides to leave his girlfriend in a graveyard while he looks for help.  This graveyard, coincidentally, houses a false grave leading to Doc's lab.  The monster stealthily sneaks up on the girlfriend, no small feat considering that before this time he couldn't go a second without groaning.  Santo kicks Frankie backwards where he's impaled on a really sharp grave marker.  Santo sends his girlfriend and her mother off with a stranger as he goes back to put a stop to the Doctor.

A flying crossbody off of a grave onto Frankenstein's Monster?  Yes please.

 When he goes back to the graveyard, Frankie is bleeding profusely but still alive.  Santo takes off his fine cashmere shirt and wraps his wound.  What a gentlemen.  Santo falls victim to some booby-trapped corpses that spout gas from their eyes.  That old trick!  Anyway, the injured monster returns to make the save!  So we've been swerved and now we've got a Santo/Monster tag team!  

...also, I'm gonna need that back.  Dry-cleaned.

The stranger that Santo sent the girls off with promptly turns them over to the red shirt brigade.  Now Doc is ready to harvest their eyes for a new monster.  Tonight in the laboratory!  Santo/Monster vs. Doctor Frankenstein/Her assistant.  Santo handily dispatches the assistant, and the Monster locks on his deadly choke hold, but receives a vial of horrible burning acid to his face.   

He stumbles backwards and hits the self-destruct button for the lair and all I can think is that it's a shame this palatial suite will be gone forever.  Santo, nice guy that he is, yells for Frankie to follow him.  That's right, he yells for a monster brought to life from nothing who has a horrible wound where he was impaled on a stake and who just seconds ago had acid poured over his face, to follow.  Frankie is, unfortunately, too busy holding his burned face and assuredly now non-functional eyes to follow and he's killed in the explosion.

With no real segue, we go straight to the arena where Santo captures the Middleweight Title and they all live happily ever after, except for all the dead people.  In the end, it turns out that mankind is the real monster.  

Just kidding, it's this guy!

Santo vs. Las Lobas

What's the number one problem plaguing Mexico today?  Mexican Drug Cartels.  You know what is NOT the number one problems?   

Yup

Werewolves.  Much like Frankenstein monsters (in my first review) they were on the wrong side of a vs. with El Santo!  While he has a son, El Hijo Del Santo, unfortunately he has not had as many high profile run-ins with monsters.

Let's not preface too much though, let me tell you how Santo got rid of the werewolves.  It seems that the Queen of the Wolves is in trouble.  She's come to end of her life and frankly it's looking a little bleak.  So she convinces a leggy blonde girl to stab her and I guess forcibly reincarnate her into the woman.  The lady seemed ok with it, so who am I to judge?  Then what do we get?  Further information on the wolves?  Maybe some background on how the lineage works; something to orientate ourselves?

Wrestling!  Santo and a guy who is of no consequence vs. a couple of other guys.  I say the guy is of no consequence because Santo beats the shit out of both the guys by himself.  When he finally tags out, the nameless tag partner proceeds to get beat up before Santo submits everyone.  In the back, the aforementioned new Queen of the Wolves comes to visit Santo and hits on him, but he breaks out the flying cockblock and shuts her down.  After she leaves he gets another visitor, this time it's a representative from a small village.   

I say werewolf, you say lycanthrope...

Santos isn't buying this werewolf jive and sends him off as well.  Queen Wolf wasn't happy with the results of our visit and we get our second match!  Santo vs. a pack of dogs!  Thankfully, they follow the rules of Professional Wrestling and only one dog comes in the ring at a time.  Meanwhile, Queen Wolf convinces the rep that she was attacked by...something.  So he does what any gentleman would do.  Takes her to her hotel room, tells her she was imagining things and starts to seduce her.  Meanwhile....

Surprise Dog!

Santo tries to call that weirdo, but he's busy getting killed by Queen Wolf.  Santo shows up at the location the representative gave him and meets...a werewolf hunter.  This man briefly explains that since Santo has been bitten by one of the dogs, he's a victim of the curse of the werewolf and has to stop them before the 'accession of the red moon'.  We get a quick cut to a girl in the nearby pool calling out for help and before we can quick cut back, this nameless man is already running.  Guess what?!  It's a werewolf!  She tries to drown him, but Santo intervenes and she escapes.  In a hotel room he further explains that his family is immune to the curse and now they're trying to kill him 'in original ways' to make it look accidental.  They then show him at a golf course and I'm not at all sure what they're insinuating here...I think the werewolves were hitting golf balls at his head?  Is that a natural cause of death?  I'm surprised we didn't get a montage of werewolves placing strategic banana peels on sidewalks.  Why not just do Werewolf Home Alone?

Mere moments later our mysterious stranger is jumped in a barn by a she-wolf!  His, apparently, minions seem to think he's in trouble though are in no great hurry to help.  They do know exactly which wolf did it though and track her down where she dies of...natural causes?  She just sort of lays down.  Apparently that was Queen Wolf, too.  So they're fucked.  Unless...

There's always time for some fruit juice.

Santo arrives at the airport and meets an old train station hand who points out an eerie package from Transylvania!  We learn that that guy who died a few scenes ago was named Cesar Harker.  A good name for a good man.  Santo instead is put in contact with his identical twin brother who was nice enough to lay his dead brother out on the coffee room table. 

Guess who's dying!?  It's the train station hand.  He actually gets the goriest death I've seen in a Santo movie thus far.  The box from Transylvania is open and IT'S THE KING WEREWOLF!  Is my lore wrong?  Are all iconic monsters from there?  I thought it was just vampires.  Well, he's here to take things over and pick a new Queen.  How can a man choose just one of these lovely, hairy ladies?  But no!  It's a random girl in a room somewhere!

Santo heads to the border town he was told about originally where they give him the traditional Mexican greeting of beating him with pitchforks and throwing rocks.  His buddy Rob Halford from Judas Priest shows up and they're friends now walking through a cornfield to escape the scorn of this little village.  I know it sounds like I didn't watch this movie carefully enough and that's why I keep using phrases like 'I guess that...' and 'Apparently...' but in fact I've watched this movie three times now and I'm still not entirely sure what's going on.  For instance, men surround them in the corn field with guns!  I'm assuming these aren't werewolves...were they paid by werewolves?  Where do werewolves get money?  Are they villagers?  If so, that escalated pretty quickly.  Well, Gipsy (aka Rob Halford) and Santo split up in the corn field.  How will they escape this?!  Well, they don't really have to because the worst sniper in history proceeds to shoot all of his friends.  His one alive friend tells him to stop shooting and runs away.  Meanwhile, Gipsy is laughing in a tree eating bamboo, apparently impervious to conventional weapons through years of waxing himself?

I might be too if this came through my quiet town.

Poor Cesar's funeral is today, Santo wears his finest suit and mask, Gipsy his best vest with no shirt. 

We're introduced to the mysterious...actually mysterious implies a kind of calculated suspense; this is more like they didn't feel like having any continuity so they threw him out there.  Anyway, here's Dr. Marcus...wonder who this guy who just showed up could be?  He invites everyone to his mansion for a party.  Probably best to forget about all this werewolf stuff and the impending doom that assumedly will accompany the red moon.  This begins the climactic ending!  The lights are turned out and werewolves descend upon Santo, Gipsy and the girl who was the supposed new Wolf Queen maybe...after about 2 minutes they realize "hey, maybe we should turn the lights back on so people can see the fight."  Anyway, Santos body slams some werewolves (for any faults this movie has, and there are plenty, I'll watch them all for that) and they get away after incapacitating the Wolf King.  

Good night, Sweet Prince

It turns out the reason Santo is so important is because of his silver mask.  You see, because the bane of Werewolves is silver.  He's the silver symbol they were told about!  Just in case, though, he hands out silver bullet-shooting rifles to a bunch of villagers as they prepare for the REAL final battle. Hey guys, remember about a paragraph ago, I mentioned how the poor lighting was ruining the fight scene but then they came to their senses?  Well, sense is for people who do not make these movies.  Yes, as you'll recall it's the night of the RED MOON.  And the moon is SO FREAKING RED that everyone looks like a bland, detail-less blob.   

If you stare hard you can see forever.

I tried adjusting the picture using brightness and contrast, tried adjusting the colour to no avail.  On third viewing, it actually is starting to slowly become apparent...I guess my eyes now suck as much as the editing.  Santo chases down the Wolf King.  Santo doesn't take offense from anybody!  He basically beats the crud out of the Wolfman, and throws him off a cliff.  Fin.

Seriously, the poor guy hits the bottom of the valley and that's it.  I'd be disappointed but aside from maybe a killer rendition of "Breaking the Law" I can't say I'd really care for anything else this movie might have offered in the way of an epilogue.

You may ask, what have we learned?  That werewolves are cunning?  That Santo doesn't job to any movie monsters?  That life itself is fleeting and we must fly at it with the fury of a 70's luchador and ride that momentum until you finally crash? 

Or just, werewolf bodyslams.

Hallowicked vs. Mike Quackenbush - 12 Large Summit - Anniversario and His Amazing Friends - 5/21/11

This may be my pick for most fun match of the year so far, and it's actually my favorite match I've seen this year. The entire first 6-8 minutes are devoted to matwork. And not just switching headlocks and hammerlocks, they actually are intuitive and reactive with it. When Mike puts Hallowicked in the Indian Deathlock, he first tries to go for Mike's leg, before squeezing out the back and into a headlock of his own. Of course, the hallmark of a CHIKARA match isn't just great wrestling, it's also a sense of humour, as displayed when Quack tries to escape a headscissors by using a kip up, only to kick out right into the ropes. "What are these doing here?"




They trade a couple of dives on the outside, including Hallowicked nearly taking out a kid, followed by a Quack Asai Moonsault which he was pretty proud of.
When they return to the ring Quack uses a unique armbreaker using his feet. This starts the bulk of the match, which is Quack taking one of his first students to task with every arm wrench variation he knows.



Wrestling has always had a different set of physics from the rest of the world. I think this match is one of the best examples of wrestling physics. In reality, a move like a full nelson would only be moderately effective and it would vary depending on your own strength. But in wrestling, it's raw fury and break neckitude is off the charts.



All holds have counters, and that is where we dabble into the British Catch as Catch Can style, wherein they have the tricky escapes like, bringing your knee up to your arms, grabbing it and kicking down to break out of the nelson. It's stylish enough that it's pro wrestling, but it's just real enough that it's viable. Even if it's not recommended should you be attacked in a bar with a Full Nelson. I don't think the Warlord goes to bars anymore anyway.



Attack and escape are of the utmost importance in this match, and they make it all viable enough that you're really intrigued with how they'll counter one another. And when they break into the highspots to close out the match, it's just as fluid. And when they finally hit the 3 count, it's a counter that does Quack in. Really awesome match, and you should go out of your way to check it out.