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mexcine · 5 months

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Swipe File #3: Drakula ve Kurt Adama Karşi (1990s Turkish release of Santo y Blue Demon contra Drácula y el Hombre Lobo)

Where to begin? First, “George Rivero” (aka Jorge Rivero) doesn’t appear in this film. Rivero did co-star with Santo in 2 movies, but not this one. Blue Demon (unbilled on this poster) did.

Now let’s get to the “swipes” part.

The main character image was taken from the original Mexican poster for Los Jaguares vs. el invasor misterioso (a 1973 Colombian-Mexican co-production) which starred masked wrestlers El Jaguar de Colombia, and Los Jaguares. The image of El Jaguar de Colombia on the poster is clearly Jack Kirby-inspired: I can’t find an exact match for the pose, so for the moment this will be “in the style of Jack Kirby,” rather than an actual swipe. This image was recreated by an unidentified artist for the Spanish release poster (which actually has better art than the Mexican one). When the Turkish distributor ordered up their poster, the artist lifted the character’s image from the Mexican original (never mind that El Jaguar de Colombia isn’t in the movie and looks nothing like El Santo). Not sure why they couldn’t find any suitable image of Santo, who was known in Turkey.

Christopher Lee as Dracula. I guess this makes sense.

Unidentified photo of a screaming woman.

The “wolfman” photo is from the 1982 Don Post mask catalog – Timberwolf (Grey).

The “3 scary monsters” image comes from pre-production marketing for Syngenor (1990), which was conceived as a semi-sequel to Scared to Death (1980) – actually the only connection is the monster, which was deliberately patterned after the one in the earlier movie. I was unable to find any indication that Syngenor (which appears to have gone direct to video) was actually released as Scared to Death II, and I was also unable to find this same “3 monster” image in other formats (video box, etc.), although that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. [The image shown here comes from The Bloody Pit of Horror: https://thebloodypitofhorror.blogspot.com/2014/02/syngenor-1990.html]

#swipe #movie posters #film poster #film marketing #Jack Kirby

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mst3kproject · 3 years

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Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters

When I started this blog way back in ancient times, before 'ad 1 of 2' was even a twinkle in YouTube's baleful eye, I really planned to watch more Luchador movies. When I look at my catalogue, however, I've only done three: Samson vs the Vampire Women, Curse of the Aztec Mummy, and Night of the Bloody Apes. Why is that, when I've managed to watch fourteen fucking fishman films? Honestly, I think it's because two out of three were so abysmally bad that I subconsciously wrote off the entire genre. Can't be having that. Time to give Mexico's favourite sport another chance.

Neurologist Dr. Bruno Hadler has died, leaving unfulfilled a promise of revenge on El Santo and Blue Demon, the wrestlers-slash-superheroes who destroyed his career. Shortly after the scientist's funeral, his body is stolen by four zombies and a bald hunchback midget named Waldo, and taken to a secluded castle, where they use equipment straight out of a Gamera film to bring him back to life! With his castle full of monsters and an evil clone of Blue Demon, Hadler sets out to kill not only the wrestlers, but his brother Otto and niece Gloria, who I guess their Mom always liked better or something.

If anybody wants to know, El Santo's name was Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, and he earned that cameo in Coco. Imagine if Dwayne Johnson only ever played himself, in over fifty movies that were called things like The Rock vs the Strangler's Ghost and The Rock vs the Invaders from Mars, and also had his own line of comic books and became a cultural symbol of justice. El Santo did all that without ever showing his face in public. As far as I can tell only two photographs of him without the mask actually exist, one of which is from his retirement announcement and the other his actor's union card. The guy is a legend. Too bad his movies suck.

Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters is basically just a series of ass-kickings, strung together with the barest possible minimum of plot. Before the story even starts, we get ten minutes of wrestling. First it's some women wrestlers we don't know anything about, then it's Blue Demon (Alejandro Muñoz Moreno, almost as much of a legend as El Santo) and three other guys tossing each other around while El Santo just stands in the audience watching. The wrestling looks like a playground fight, lacking any sort of choreography and is filmed like it's meant to be shown on the six o'clock news. The director doesn't even try to make it interesting to someone who doesn't already follow the sport... but then, since wrestling fans are the film's explicit target audience, maybe it never occurred to him to try.

We then move on to the two luchadors discussing the death of Dr. Hadler, in which we learn that they've encountered him previously and thwarted some evil plan, and that as well as hating Santo and Blue Demon, Hadler also hates his relatives. This is all the backstory we ever get. Gloria asks her father why Hadler hates them so much, but gets no answer – later the mad scientist tells Otto, “you said I was crazy!” but goes into no further detail. Whatever prior encounter Santo and Blue Demon had with Hadler, we never hear about it. Is this supposed to be a sequel to some previous El Santo movie I haven't seen? IMDB doesn't say and I am sure as hell not watching them all just to find out.

Because all the time that could have been spent setting up the story was wasted on guys in speedos grappling, we never get a sense of El Santo and Blue Demon being rivals in the ring but best friends outside it. We're told about it, but that's not enough when the whole movie is supposed to revolve around this relationship. Hadler decides to send a clone of Blue Demon to assassinate El Santo because he thinks doing so will destroy Santo emotionally as well as physically, and there is a brief discussion of Blue Demon's 'betrayal', but none of this has any impact because we have never been shown their friendship. I suppose this is another thing that wrestling fans would already know coming into the theatre, so the film-makers figured they needn't bother.

The other reason Hadler needs a clone of Blue Demon is because the titular monsters of the film are a truly pathetic lot. There's a mouth-breathing mummy with a visible zipper in the back of his costume. There's a wolfman and a Frankenstein monster (amusingly, the Spanish spelling of this is apparently 'Franquestain'), both of which look like they bought costume kits at Party City. There's the same terrible cyclops costume from The Ship of Monsters, which looks very much as if it had simply been sitting in a prop warehouse for ten years before these people dragged it out and gave it a quick coat of paint. Hadler has an army of zombie slaves represented by guys in green makeup that doesn't even reach their hairlines. It comes off over the course of fight scenes and sometimes the makeup people didn't bother to do the actors' arms and hands. There's a creature with an exposed brain that hangs around the evil lab and never does anything. And then there are the vampires.

There are three of these – the main dracula-esque guy and two women in lingerie that he attacked and vampirized on the streets. One of these attempts a seduce-and-destroy on El Santo, which he almost falls for despite the movie having established that he's dating Otto's daughter Gloria. The male vampire is a skinny little dude in the traditional tux and cape, who astonishingly manages to turn into an even faker fake bat than the one in The Devil Bat. The fact that the vampire is easily the least threatening out of this entire monster mash makes it downright hilarious that he's the one who tries to take on El Santo in the wrestling ring. Once he puts on his own mask, it's painfully obvious that it's a completely different actor, and the wrestling itself is once again interesting only to those who like wrestling – the rest of us are too distracted by the guy in the crowd who looks strikingly like OJ Simpson.

At least, unlike Samson vs the Vampire Women, Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters keeps its creatures straight, and doesn't have the vampire wrestler transform into a werewolf when he gets unmasked.

The rest of the fight scenes are actually even worse. At least the Santo-vs-Vampire fight had some focus. In other parts of the movie, the monsters and the Blue Demon clone just rush into a room and start brawling. The only evidence of fight choreography is the fact that the goons are considerate enough to take turns rather than dogpiling El Santo all at once. The camerawork is no more interesting than in the ring scenes and there's never a sense of a 'story' to the fights. At any one moment we have no idea who's winning or why.

In between the fight scenes, a lot of what we see is just killing time. The monsters wander around and kill a few random extras for no particular reason – doing so doesn't seem to further any part of Halder's diabolical plan, they just do it because they're monsters. El Santo and Gloria go for a drive and make out a little, which is just barely entertaining because Santo is of course still wearing his mask. In Samson vs the Vampire Women we never saw the title character outside of the context of wresting and/or superheroing... in Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters we get to see the luchadors being people, but they have to maintain the mystery of their identities. Thus we get ridiculous scenes of Blue Demon hanging out backstage in a t-shirt and slacks with his mask still on. I think we're meant to believe that even El Santo's girlfriend doesn't know his real name.

Nobody in the movie acts like this is weird, by the way, even when El Santo dines at a restaurant with his mask on. Is this something that goes on in Mexico, Luchadors just wandering around in their masks when they don't feel like going incognito, like the exact opposite of Dolly Parton?

There appear to be two different types of Luchador movies – there are the kind like Night of the Bloody Apes that have Luchador characters, and there are the type like this that have actual Luchadors playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Neither actually have to be bad, but I'm guessing that the ones with real Luchadors are far more likely to be, because of the flaws I've discussed above. The fact that these characters come with lore that their fans will be familiar with is a gateway wide open to lazy writing. The need to maintain the mystique makes it difficult to present the characters as people the audience can connect with. Luchador films are for wrestling fans, and wrestling fans only.

Honestly I would much rather have had the prequel to this movie – the one in which El Santo and Blue Demon ruin Hadler's previous evil plan, and which would explain why Hadler hates his family and how El Santo and Gloria ended up dating without him revealing his identity to her. But if I have to have this film, I wish we'd seen more of Hadler's midget hunchback assistant, Waldo. He's not just the Igor to Hadler's Frankenstein, he has mad science ambitions of his own. Waldo wants to experiment on the captive Blue Demon, but Hadler won't let him, which I hoped would eventually lead to Waldo turning against his master and possibly even out-evilling him to become the Big Bad. Sadly, it was not to be, and we barely even see him again. I haven't spent this much time wondering where Waldo is since... well, Where's Waldo.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #el santo and blue demon vs the monsters #70s #royally lame crummy mummies #you is a warwelf

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