Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film begins and ends extremely well, but in between becomes a draggy police procedural in which the vampire women remain largely in the background confined to their lair while only their High Priestess Tundra goes out into the field to suck blood and stalk heroine Diana Orloff. Tundra's appearance at Diana's window sufficiently spooks her father Prof. Orloff to get on to his video link to Santo rather as Commissioner Gordon used to contact Batman on the batphone; with Santo himself resembling a sort of blue collar Caped Crusader who wears only the trunks and cape and nips about in a nifty little sports car.In the hands of cameraman Jose Ortiz Ramos and production designer Roberto Silva it all looks good, especially Ofelia Montesco as pouting High Priestess Tundra - easily the hottest chick in a film full of them - and María Duval as the virtuous young heroine Diana, who gets disappointingly little screen time. Unfortunately there's far more screen time given to Santo - who we twice have to watch in the ring taking ages to floor his opponents - than to the vampire women; who Santo only takes on at the film's very conclusion. For the rest of the time Tundra is flanked by three beefy henchmen (one of whom turns out to be a werewolf!) who handle all the rough stuff instead of the vampire women themselves until Santo finally sees them off in their lair in a climactic vampire holocaust that justifies sitting through the talky preliminaries. (If Tundra and her girls had thought to put blackouts on the window of the crypt and kept track of the time as dawn approached Santo would have perished on the slab to which he'd been chained, Diana would now be leading the vampire women; and I for one would have been well satisfied at that outcome.)One puzzling question remains. Was that a pair of spectacles the blonde vampire woman seated at Zorina's feet when she's giving Tundra a dressing down was wearing?

The Santo films, indeed the wrestling superhero genre as a whole, is unique to Mexico (I recently tried to sit through an Italian variant, Superargo, and wasn't impressed), and on that basis alone deserves more respect than it is usually accorded. Which is not to say they are good films, only that for Mexicans, most of whom do not have a lot of money to spend on frivolities, these films were important enough for them to keep the genre buoyant well into the '80s.For a a US viewer, however, the films are oddities, no denying that. I find them fascinating in small doses, but eventually their cultural reasoning eludes me. They are most entertaining when they are at their most gratuitously irrational, so long as the pacing is kept reasonably swift (and the films often lag). For my money, the best of the Santo films I have seen is Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos, which is wildly exploitative and inane, but the clips I have seen of Misterio en las Bermudas, together with what I have read of it, suggest that it is truly an epic of its variety.In any event, here we have a fairly early representative of the genre, and I write this because I was able to see an English dub version, that appearing in the Mystery Theater 3000 series. I'm not a big fan of MT3K, the performers of which frequently think they are funnier than they actually are, but I admit they added some laughs to the experience (although I didn't need that song to a vanished continuing character at all). But it is the Santo film that really makes the viewing worth it.It should be noted that for some reason best known to Santo's management and audience, a large chunk of his filmography has him battling vampires - he even battles Count Dracula himself on at least three occasions. Perhaps that's just as well - when he battles simple gangsters, as in his first film Santo contra cerebro del mal, the going gets pretty slow."Vampire Women" is an odd film and a silly film. It is odd because the first half is pure vampire movie - it is full of atmosphere, weird rituals and menace, and the usual blood sucking, etc. Suddenly, literally out of nowhere, Santo appears, and the film becomes an excuse for the masked one to thrash some vampire - and werewolf - butt, in and out of the ring.It is silly because there is no coherence to how the myth of the vampire is used throughout the movie; one moment they can be seen in a mirror, then later not, the vampire becomes a werewolf then soon disappears in a fire-bolt at simply the sight of a cross on a church-steeple - The whole narrative seems terribly ad hoc - as if the script were written on the fly (and I suspect it was - although the first half has some money showing in its atmospherics, which are quite impressive, the second half looks pretty cheap).Fortunately, this is a fairly short movie, and the pacing is pretty good. It is also representative of both the wrestling superhero genre and the Mexican horror genre, so may be a good beginning point for those interested in either. Great movie making this is not - but even without the MT3K commentary, it's actually kind of fun.

Wow, this is seriously one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life, I've seen some bad movies, but Samson vs. the Vampire Women is in a class of it's own. Now from what I understand Sampson is sort of like the Superman of Mexico, he's their hero, I always honestly thought it was a joke with the Mexican wrestlers, thanks to this movie, I'll be having nightmares for weeks, seeing that ridicules costume, no offense to fans of Samson, just God, that was such an outfit! I did see this through Mystery Science Theater 3000, thank goodness for Mike and the bots because I don't think there was any other entertaining way to get through this movie. But the only thing I can say about this movie, is that it's so bad that it turns around once again into the good/bad zone that makes it so laughable and you actually find yourself enjoying it, it's the vampire version of Goodfellas.A vampire woman has awakened and discovers that it is time to find the reincarnation of the queen of the vampires. She awakens other vampires to find the girl and their group will grow strong again. But the girl that they are after is being protected by her family and friends... and SAMSON, a Mexican wrestler who for some odd reason sometimes runs away from the bad guys and just flips them on their backs. But with Samson protecting her... well, I'm sure that she has an average chance of getting out of this bloody situation.Samson vs. the Vampire Women is pretty stupid, I mean we go from a vampire story to a wrestling match that has nothing to do with the story, it's like watching a movie with Paris Hilton and then in the middle of it cut to her sex tape just because that's mainly what she is famous for. If you are going to watch this, unless for some odd reason you are a fan of Samson, I would recommend watching it with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang, they make this movie much better, I just cannot believe some movies get the green light, this is definitely one of those movies, but at least it made for a great episode that will have you dying of laughter.1/10

I remember watching this one when I was a kid, and covering my eyes whenever things got a little too spooky (only to peek at it from between my fingers, of course). Then there was Mil Mascaras, wrestling on American television, in the mid-70's. Professional wrestlers- in particular, those wearing masks- were the next best thing to superheroes: they displayed the physical prowess of a superhero and, in a series of movies lensed in Mexico, fought every type of monster known (and unknown) to Man. The combination of masked pro wrestlers and monsters was a natural. (And, in fact, childhood memories of El Santo and Mil Mascaras inspired me to create my own pro wrestling superhero, THE AVENGER. I wrote and drew a series of black and white comics featuring The Avenger several years ago, and he even appears on The Homepage Of The Dead website, in my story THE ISLAND OF DR. ROMERO.)SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRES is as entertaining as they come. Beautiful sets and sustained suspense, solid performances, underrated direction- it's all here for anyone interested in being genuinely entertained. Much has been made of the "cheesiness" of this movie. Is STAR WARS any less "cheesy"? Or the vastly overrated LORD OF THE RINGS? (Or the much-talked-about upcoming HELLBOY movie?) If you like superheroes slugging it out with vampires, this one's for you.