Samson vs. The Vampire Women (1962)
Runtime: 89 minutes
Directed by: Alfonso Corona Blake
Starring: El Santo, Lorena Velazquez, Maria Duval, Jaime Fernandez
From: Filmadora Panamerica
I’ve talked about a horror film from Sweden and a drama from Japan on here. Now here’s a film from Mexico and it’s infamous for several reasons. It is a movie starring legendary luchador (Mexican wrestler) El Santo. It was dubbed into English and played in theatres in America and they called him Samson, for whatever reason. And, it gained fame in the 90’s when it was on the great Mystery Science Theater 3000. I haven’t seen that episode, but I figured it would make sense for my first-ever viewing of a Santo movie to be his most famous one, at least in the United States. Inspiration for this was flipping across the channels late one night earlier this month, and there was a Spanish channel which was playing a Santo movie from the early 70’s. I don’t remember which one it was, but I saw a few minutes of it and it was goofy fun.
He ended up starring in 50 movies, believe it or not, and from what I understand, they’re cheesy and they’re like older B-movies from the States; you can’t help but enjoy them, though. I’ve heard it said that Santo in Mexico was like Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan in the U.S. He was more popular than Hogan was , even at his most famous. Being the star of a long-time comic book and it being that particular country and time would contribute to his popularity.
Also, I have to note that I saw this movie in Spanish, even though I don’t speak it and don’t even remember too much of it from the classes I took in that language back in high school. Hey, why not? It’s not like dialogue is something to really worry about in this kind of film.
Anyhow, the plot, gained from watching the film and reading stuff online-this site is a very nice source-is that Satan (only seen in silhouette) awakens some vampire girls and their vampire henchmen (none of whom look like Edward Cullen, by the way) and one girl (I’ll call her The Straw That Stirs The Drink, or TSTSTD) is able to transform into a hot chick with nice cleavage after saying some syllables in front of the moonlight. She then awakens the henchmen and they morph into their younger selves. Their goal is to find a random woman and have her become the new vampire queen, as the current queen is slotted to become Satan’s queen in Hell! See what I mean about the plot and the dialogue not really mattering?
Anyway, Santo is contacted to save the day, but not before he wrestles a Lucha tag match; it wasn’t my cup of tea, but I’ll get to that later. Also, you get to see TSTSTD use a Judo chop to take out an adversary. They get blood and that revives the current Vampire queen, and yep she’s another attractive dame with nice cleavage. From there, stuff happens (the link I provided in the preceding block of text delivers a pretty nice breakdown of the plot in their page on this film) and while Santo wrestles in the ring more than anything else, I guess you can’t carp too loudly about it.
So, I am a wrestling fan who doesn’t really enjoy the pure Lucha style and its idiosyncrasies (nothing against the wrestlers, though), but I still managed to enjoy this motion picture. Sure, you have to turn off your brain (for example, a henchman does the switcheroo with a luchador and he puts on a mask to wrestle Santo in the ring, and the henchman that's been dead for a few hundred years knows how to wrestle the Lucha style with Santo) and sunlight being the downfall of the villains more than anything else; that said, the hero drives a pretty sweet Jaguar, and to give away the ending*, Santo takes a torch of fire and burns the vampire ladies, who try to hide from him in their coffins. That's pretty bad-ass!
* Hey, so what if I spoil it?
It's not for everyone, but if you enjoy cheeseball films and pro wrestling, then this should be satisfactory for your tastes. The Spanish version can be easily found online via YouTube, as can several other Santo movies, which I'll try to watch at least one more of one of these days. I'll be back by the weekend with a new review.
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