Santo vs. Frankenstein's Daughter (1971) is a well-produced color Santo film that is an enjoyable pastiche mixing horror, drug addiction, glamour, and fisticuffs. It also surprisingly displays perhaps the most overt depiction of a Santo love interest, Norma, a Jill St. John-like female lead (Lucy Gallardo). This is emphasized quite forcefully at the outset, as she spasmodically writhes on the edge of her bed two feet from her TV screen, incessantly blurting exclamations of love and adoration as she watches Santo beat some poor slob to a fleshy pulp. But how is a babe like this going to connect with a guy who speaks about seven sentences all day? The story is an exercise in female obsession; Freda Frankenstein is a maniacal scientist with an evil crew and a secluded cavernous hideaway. She injects herself with a special red serum to keep her looking pretty fabulous, especially if you like Nancy Sinatra in knee-high red boots. She dispatches her henchmen to kidnap Santo's girlfriend to lure him to the hideaway. Why? She needs his unusual blood to supplement the serum, which is quickly losing its effectiveness. The last half is total pandemonium with chases a-plenty. Freda's monster and a Dr. Moreau-like beast-man duke it out with Santo and, in a nice twist, the Frankenstein monster remains faithful to the Mary Shelley original and turns on its creator, despite a bleeding hole in his stomach and one of Santo's nice silver turtlenecks wrapped around him like a big band-aid. The film is notable for its modest budget (you can hear an echo in the threadbare laboratory scenes) and a superior villain, played by one great Gina Romand, who leaves the scenery chewed, tattered and smeared with pink lipstick. She's often orphaned with lines such as "Bring Me Santo!" or "I've transfused the blood of a gorilla into a human being," but she steals the show with her tortured serum-junkie interpretations - including one scene of painful withdrawal in which she screams in agony, crawls on the floor, and whelps in such fractured sadness you can't help but silently applaud. Another wonderful moment in this film comes when she captures Santo, chains him up, comes on to him, barks violently at his rebuke, and removes his mask (only to be immediately seduced again). It's one of the rare moments in which Santo's identity is slightly revealed, and her expression is a sort of lusty shock; it's a beautifully vicarious movie moment that captures what almost any female fan might feel at confronting the real man behind the Silver Mask. In fact, it also explains what Norma sees in Santo. Earlier in the film she had confessed to her sister Elsa, "If you saw him without it [the mask], you would also be crazy for him." Another thing to watch for is the wild match-cut (the Santo series is just full of 'em) which takes you to Santo's closing wrestling match - it's the kind that jumps out from your TV and smacks you upside the head. The print quality of Santo vs. Frankenstein's Daughter is quite good, with a minimum of specks and scratches. And the audio is something else, a non-stop cacophony of agonized screams, moans, grunts and bodies being assaulted.
"Fear is a Bitch Santo..." exclaims a bewildered safari porter to our hero, the Man in the Silver Mask. This is especially true if Fear is a 7 foot dead mummified corpse wielding a deadly bow and arrow and belonging to Nonoc - one pissed-off dead Aztec prince. Possibly the most atypical entry in the boxed set, Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy (1971), plays like a jungle adventure crossed with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians; one critic recently described it as a remake of Death Curse of Tartu (1966) which is a fairly accurate summation as well since the plot charts the slow decimation of an expedition after they disturb a sacred crypt and unleash its curse. This movie opens, like most of the Santo films, with a high-energy wrestling match but this one is highlighted by some rather surprising hand-held camera shots that capture our masked hero using the flying lock, the scissors, the double combination and other sure-fire offensive moves on the Italian tag team of Gory Casanova and Angelo. Once the match is over though, we get right down to business with Santo accompanying a team of explorers into Opalche Indian territory. Providing comic relief is the practically blind anthropology professor Jimeniz (he mistakes a cow for a horse, etc.). Also along for the journey is Sergio (an engineer), Rosa (the professor's secretary - to take notes?), Agapito (a precocious kid), a bunch of disposable equipment carriers and Susana (a photographer), who begins a flirtation with Santo rather late in the film. As the expedition plows ahead through the lush jungle, Santo wields his mighty machete to chop down two-foot-tall garden shrubs in what looks like prime resort property. He's also briefly sidetracked by a black panther, catapulted at him by stagehands like a sack of potatoes. And then, there's the top-billed killer mummy (good mask!) who starts picking off the safari members, one by one - and when he has to, he can gingerly hop away unlike the slow moving mummies we've seen in the Universal horror pictures. Several sequences stand out here: a flashback to the 'Feast of Sinam' looks like a reenactment of some strange Aztec ceremony and is quite different from the Egyptian iconography used in the Hammer studio mummy series. There's also an unexpected bonding scene between the orphaned Agapito and Santo who comforts the tearful boy with these macho sentiments: "You can cry now and when you're done, don't cry anymore, no matter what happens, men don't cry and you are a man." Obviously Susana falls hard for the masked man because she tells him, "Any woman would be happy if a man as manly as you would love her a little." And a little is all she gets, barely a kiss on the lips, but from the ecstatic gleam in her eye, it's apparently enough. By the way, the real mummy makes a comic entrance at the finale, plopping down from a tree like a dime store Halloween display. You half-expect Santo to stuff him in a mule sack and trudge off. And yes, there's also another wrestling match after the survivors return to civilization where Santo triumphs over El Bufalo, all 244 pounds of him. Of course, Santo isn't exactly petite himself but shouldn't all superheroes be big and beefy? In terms of picture quality, the print, despite the rather battered-looking opening credits, looks very good, with rich saturated colors and a relatively clean audio mix. The music score (by Gustavo C. Carrion) is particularly effective, going from eerie organ riffs to a spaghetti Western guitar sound.
Just like its title, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolf Man (1973) takes the tag team approach to an age-old conflict - the battle between good and evil. We've got our two masked heroes squaring off against a sickly looking European count and Rufus Rex, a guy carrying the full moon curse. The plot this time revolves around the dagger of Boidros, a magical weapon that has the power to destroy supernatural evil. Dracula wants to make sure it's removed from Professor Cristaldi's household so he can avenge a 4,000 year old grudge (Cristaldi's forefather had Dracula and Rufus killed and permanently sealed in coffins for eternity). Of course, there wouldn't be a movie without their revival so we have Eric, an inept treasure hunter, resurrecting the monsters with the blood of the murdered Professor. This sequence is very similar to a sacrificial killing performed in the Hammer horror film, Dracula - Prince of Darkness (1966) - the victim is strung upside-down, and his throat slashed, with the blood draining down on Dracula's corpse. It's fairly gruesome for a Santo flick. But there are other creepy scenes as well such as the weird camera pan along a cave wall where we see numerous chained male and female victims, waiting to be drained of blood. In terms of monster screen time, the vampires dominate here and that includes scenes with a tacky rubber bat on a string. Rufus a.k.a. the wolf man and his hairy cronies don't get nearly as much screen time though there's a huge brawl at the climax beside a deep pit filled with sharp spikes. Guess who falls in? Overall, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolf Man is quite atmospheric and there are occasional shots that mirror the work of Mario Bava (a nighttime garden sequence recalls the opening of Blood and Black Lace, 1964) and the various Hammer Dracula films. The English subtitles are particularly fun here and will crack you up at the most unexpected moments. One of the funniest occurs when Blue Demon, imprisoned by Dracula, gives his whereabouts to Santo via his nifty wrist transmitter: "I am chained in a cave under the big house in the woods. You can get in through a fake cupboard in one of the rooms." Uh, can you be a little more specific, Blue Demon? Other favorite moments? As the little girl, Rosita, is being escorted to her doom through a skeleton filled cavern, she remarks rather dryly, "This is a very ugly place. Let's go home." And Santo, after almost being strangled by the undead Cristaldi, makes the brilliant deduction that the professor is "some kind of corpse behaving like a robot." In terms of action, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolf Man doesn't disappoint and there's a hilarious scene where our masked heroes are rescued from being unmasked (a situation that almost occurs in every Santo movie) by a gorgeous woman driving a forklift. Still, it's the quieter scenes that are often the nuttiest. What's more bizarre than seeing Santo and Blue Demon in their full regalia enjoying a quiet, relaxing game of chess at home? In terms of visual quality, the DVD of Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolf Man is rough in spots (print scratches, sprocket damage, bad splices) but the color is still striking at times and, quite frankly, it's rare to see an obscure title like this look as good as it does.
Opening with a brain transplant gives just about any film significant chops. Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dr. Frankenstein (1974) never quite lives up to this opening volley, but you can't shake off the feeling that when Dr. Frankenstein silently strolls into the opening scene wearing a bright surgical mask (he's just emerged from his vast luminescent polished steel bunker) that, well, the Man in the Silver Mask has got some serious competition in the shiny silver obsession category. The storyline is total mishmash. Dr. Frankenstein, running a lair of thieves and henchmen, requires fresh lady victims to feed his maniacal obsession - building the perfect human robot, one controlled by his evil wishes. As he dispassionately experiments on beautiful females, tossing the corpses aside when finished, Santo and Blue Demon are engaged by the police to stop him. The featured monster is a seven-foot-tall man named "Golem," (a lame reference to the title monster of Paul Wegener's 1920 German silent) who stumbles around killing at the doctor's commands. The doctor also hopes to revive his hermetically sealed bride - she needs a new brain - but this delicious storyline is an unfortunate throwaway. Lots of great possibilities here but they all take a back seat to the dating rituals of Santo and Blue Demon and who can argue with that? But first, we have to endure them being paired up with two "detectives" whose only demonstration in deductive logic is their rigorous decision to wear bright pastel corduroy skirts vs. red hot pants. Santo and Blue Demon eventually get girlfriends, though dating guys who wear masks (and never remove them) can't be easy. The scene where Santo, Blue Demon and their respective dates have dinner at a high-class restaurant is an instant classic. In the background, the other diners appear to be oblivious to the FREAKS at table 5 who may as well be burn victims at a posh charity dinner. Suddenly the whole brain transplant subplot seems unimportant when you can actually see Santo and Blue Demon eat. It all ends up in the ring of course - as Dr. Frankenstein straps a mask on Golem and shoves him into the ring to fight Santo. The climax is disappointing, given that Dr. Frankenstein (played by Jorge Russek, with sneering conviction) ends up being a poor strategist with his high-tech lair, expensive work force, and numerous technical trinkets. Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dr. Frankenstein, like many of the Santo films, was produced by Cinematografica Calderon (a prolific Mexican film studio which, unfortunately, is currently on the auction block; they provided us with The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, 1957). And like all of the Rise Above DVDs in the Santo Collection, this is a must have for any fan of cult cinema and the print quality is way above average for an exploitation film of this vintage.
For more information about The Santo Collection, visit Rise Above Entertainment. To order The Santo Collection, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jeff Stafford and Richard Steiner
