In Praise of MMA, Part Two: Masked Mexican Athletes vs. the Monsters

Back in August, I conducted a poll on X.com to gauge interest in themes for my October blog posts. The options were:

• Monster rallies
• Sinister healthcare
• Terrifying Travel
• Mexican horrors

In a spirited race, Mexican horrors started out strong, and managed to win with 38.2% of the vote despite a surge for Monster rallies. I decided to indulge myself with a post on Universal’s monster rallies in September, but now, with the advent of October and the official Halloween season, a promise is a promise, so now I turn to Mexican Monster Action.

In a brilliant move, I thought I would have my cake and eat it too by following up my last post with one about Mexican Monster Rallies -- and there are a surprising number of them to choose from (please, no thanks are necessary!).

In 1957, at the very height of American B movie makers' infatuation with all things science fiction, a Mexican movie producer, Abel Salazar, swam against the tide, releasing a high Gothic horror film, El Vampiro (The Vampire), starring Germán Robles. The film, heavily influenced by the Universal horrors of the ‘30s and ‘40s, itself may have sparked the worldwide resurgence of Gothic horror in the late ‘50s. According to film scholar Doyle Greene,

“El Vampiro’s commercial and critical success in Mexico not only provided the impetus for the increased production of Mexican horror films throughout the next two decades, but Christopher Lee reportedly stated that El Vampiro, a popular and critical success in Europe as well as Mexico at the time of its original release, was a major source of inspiration for Hammer Studios’ glossier Horror of Dracula (1958, made one year after El Vampiro) -- a film instrumental in launching the Hammer dynasty of horror films.” [Doyle Green, Mexploitation Cinema: A Critical History of Mexican Vampire, Wrestler, Ape-Man and Similar Films, 1957-1977, McFarland, 2005, p. 8]

Corresponding to the flood of Hammer horror films, El Vampiro spawned a mini-universe of Mexican monsters, including vampires, werewolves, man-made monsters and mummies that would have felt right at home on Universal’s backlot. Salazar, knowing a good thing when he saw it, went on to produce (and even act in) some of the better, surreally frightening Mexican horrors, all of which have earned passionately loyal fans: The Vampire’s Coffin (El ataúd del vampiro, 1957), The World of Vampires (El mundo de las vampiros, 1961), The Witch’s Mirror (El espejo de la bruja, 1962; which I will be reviewing later this month), The Brainiac (El barón del terror, 1962, with one of the craziest monsters of them all), and Curse of the Crying Woman (La maldición de la Llorona, 1963), among others.

Around the same time that Salazar was creating his monster mini-universe, the enormously popular masked luchador and folk hero El Santo (born Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta in 1917) was lured into making films by a fellow wrestler. After playing the hero’s sidekick in his first two films, Santo’s movie career took off when he became the main hero and star of Santo vs. the Zombies (Santo contra los zombies) in 1961. Santo would eventually complete 53 movies before hanging up his distinctive silver mask. [Wikipedia]

In the course of his film career, Santo went up against every type of monster, as well as more conventional adversaries like crime bosses and spies. And he wasn’t always alone. His fellow luchador (and rival in the wrestling ring) Blue Demon (Alejandro Moreno) -- who would branch out into his own solo movie career -- joined Santo to fight evil in a number of films. Crime bosses are one thing, but a gang of monsters calls for teamwork.

Bless their heroic hearts, in the early ‘70s, at a time when Hammer had just about exhausted its reinterpretations of the classic monsters, the masked luchadores were just getting started battling bargain basement versions of Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man and the Mummy -- and sometimes all of them at once.

To those fun-loving fans who enjoy rummaging around in bargain basements, here are a couple of Santo-Blue Demon collaborations that maximize the monster mayhem, and are fine examples of Mexican monster rallies:

Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters (Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos; 1970)

In “real” life (meaning Mexican wrestling life), Santo and Blue Demon were bitter rivals. This carried over into the wrestler team-up movies, where Blue Demon was “particularly unhappy about being reduced to Santo’s sidekick in their film pairings.” [Greene, p. 86]

The tension between the two is perfectly reflected in this monster rally, via the plot device of the villainous mad scientist (Bruno Halder, played by Carlos Ancira) kidnapping Blue Demon and making a perfect duplicate of the wrestler, which obeys Halder’s every command.

In addition to duplicating people, Halder has perfected the art of reviving the dead, which he puts to good use, creating his own gang of burly, green-faced zombies. In an ambitious move, Halder next resuscitates a monstrous A-team of a top-hatted vampire, an overweight werewolf (hombre lobo), a Frankenstein monster knock-off (bewilderingly named Franquestain, complete with a mangy beatnik-style mustache and beard!), an anemic, emaciated mummy, and a Cyclops creature that can live underwater (bargain basement Creature from the Black Lagoon anyone?).

For all this effort, Halder’s primary goal seems to be nothing more than to destroy his brother Otto (Ivan J. Rado), an academic who works for good instead of evil, and his beautiful niece Gloria (Hedi Blue), who just happens to be Santo’s girlfriend. But before he dispatches them, Halder wants his family members to witness his awesome powers in assembling a monster army (Bwwwahhhahahahaha!).

If you’re going to do a monster rally, then gosh darnit, the monsters should rally! And rally they do, not once but several times (with Blue Demon’s evil twin leading the way) -- in the woods where they ambush Santo, in the wrestling arena where they interrupt a match, in a fancy nightclub, and finally at Halder’s castle for the final confrontation between Good and Evil.

The kitchen staff at Halder's castle wondered what happened to their salad bowls.

This being a low-budget affair with a limited runtime, the script skips any background on how Halder assembled his gang of classic (sort of) monsters -- it’s enough that they’ve reported for duty and are subject to his every command. Writer/producer Jesus Sotomayor Martinez’ heart was definitely in the right place in this homage to the Universal monsters, but for purists it’s a sort of backhanded compliment.

Dracula’s stand-in (David Alvizu) is never without his hat, even in flight (or in his coffin), which provides for some unintentional (?) laughs -- it seems to be affixed to his head with some form of supernatural superglue. Franquestain (Tinieblas) is highly reminiscent of Universal’s monster, so I imagine the stringy facial hair and idiosyncratic name were intended to provide some meager cover for a copyright infringement claim.

Franquestain is confident his disguise will fool Universal's lawyers.

Even more disappointing are the Wolf Man and Mummy stand-ins.These characters look like they were cast by randomly tapping passersby on the street. The portly Hombre Lobo (Vincente Lara), sporting a few tufts of hair glued to his face and plastic fangs, looks like he would be hard-pressed to take on the ring girls at a wrestling match, much less the muscle-bound luchadores. And his skinny compadre La Mumia (Fernando Rosales) definitely could use a hot meal and a place to crash (but at least this mummy got to party with his fellow monsters, which Kharis never got to do in the Universal rallies).

The Cyclops (Gerardo Zepeda) is a fish out of water, looking like a sad reject from Jim Henson’s workshop. A quick scene in which he’s shown hanging out underwater doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the plot, except to perhaps suggest that he’s a weird one-eyed cousin of Universal’s Gillman. During several fight scenes, the Cyclops is privileged with intermittent close-ups in which he stares skyward with his one red eye, his mouth opening and closing as if he were intently following every move of a lucha libre match. He is weirdly cuddly.

The Cyclops is starstruck at being in the same film with Santo and Blue Demon.

Also strangely endearing are the breaks from monster mayhem to shoehorn in wrestling footage and a dance number or two. The film opens with a lengthy sequence featuring real (or real-looking) footage of a women’s tag team match, with a breathless announcer doing play-by-play, and punctuated by shots of Santo watching the match. Later, Santo, his girlfriend and her father take a break from monster hunting by watching a couple of elaborately staged dance numbers at a nightclub.

This is Old School with a capital O and S, reminiscent of the American movie-going experience of the ‘30s and ‘40s, in which an attendee could expect a newsreel (often covering sporting events), and at least one extended song or dance number inserted into a feature, regardless of genre (the lucha libre films saved time and effort by simply embedding the “newsreels” into the films themselves).

As Doyle Greene explains, heavy-handed government censorship at the time prompted the filmmakers to insert extended footage of wrestling matches (the dance numbers were just icing on the cake):

“This stratagem [insterting match footage] not only capitalized on the widespread popularity of lucha libre in Mexico, but, by placing the wrestling matches in the context of a horror or other film, it allowed movie producers to circumvent the television ban on lucha libre broadcasts enacted by the Mexican government in the mid-1950s and provide the Mexican public an opportunity to see Santo and other famous wrestlers in a mass media setting (film rather than television).” [Greene, p. 11]

Santo, Gloria and Otto enjoy dinner and a show between monster attacks.

Whatever its merits (or lack of them), S&BD vs. the Monsters was made by people who clearly loved the Universal monsters. In a lengthy opening titles sequence wherein each of the major cast members are introduced one-by-one, the monsters are introduced first, with the rest of the cast trailing behind, almost as an afterthought. Sure, we can quibble with the execution while still lauding the intent (let’s face it, the meager budget was stretched pretty thin with all those creatures). Much of it is goofy, but it’s also a lot of fun.

It's monster mayhem in the wrestling ring!

Bonus rally: Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man (Santo y Blue Demon contra Dracula y el Hombre Lobo; 1973)

Released just a couple of years after S&BD vs. the Monsters, Dracula and the Wolf Man, while retaining the grand goofiness of luchadores going up against Gothic monsters, at the same time has elements that make it seem like a movie from a different era.

Dracula/Wolf Man echoes its predecessor with the villain (the evil Count in this one) fixated on exacting horrific revenge on a family… and then possibly taking over the world if they have any time or energy left. It seems that centuries ago, a wise old alchemist by the name of Cristaldi created a holy dagger with which he killed Dracula (Aldo Monti) and his protege Rufus Rex (el hombre lobo, played by Agustín Martínez Solares) before they could carry out their evil plans.

In present day Mexico, a hunchbacked henchman, Eric (Alfredo Wally Barrón), who is apparently the latest in a long line of acolytes dedicated to serving the Count, sends a letter to Prof. Cristaldi (Jorge Mondragón), a direct descendent of the alchemist, threatening impending doom for his entire family. The professor has a lot to lose, including his widowed daughter Laura (María Eugenia San Martín), a granddaughter, and a niece, Lina (Nubia Martí), who happens to be Santo’s girlfriend. Fearing the worst, he asks Santo for help.

In an unguarded moment, Eric kidnaps the professor and takes him back to a cavernous lair where the bodies of Dracula and Rufus are interred. In a horrifying scene which pays homage to Hammer films and ups the bloody ante considerably, Eric strings up Cristaldi by his feet over the Count’s coffin and slits his throat to allow the blood to drip onto Dracula’s corpse, thereby reviving him. He rinses and repeats over the Wolf Man’s coffin, and voila, the terrible two are alive again to wreak havoc against the Cristaldi clan. (Hammer fans will immediately recognize this as the device that resurrects Christopher Lee’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness. For memories about seeing that scene and others like it for the first time, see my post, “I Can’t Believe My Parents Let Me Watch That, Part 2.”)

Suzi, realizing she was about to be sacrificed, was at least
grateful that the dungeon had forced air heating.

Dracula enlists Rufus, who is quite the ladies’ man when he isn’t growing wolf hair out of every orifice, to seduce unsuspecting Laura, with the ultimate aim of turning mother and daughter into slavish zombies. Meanwhile, Santo enlists Blue Demon in the search for the missing professor. They find him, but too late -- after being drained of blood, the professor suffers the final indignity of being zombified.

For all their legendary folk status, Santo and Blue Demon are particularly clueless in this one. Even when they’re supposedly on guard at the Cristaldi casa, evildoers come and go at will, stealing the magical dagger, menacing the granddaughter, putting the bite on the housekeeper, and generally traipsing through the place like they owned it. Where is that Ring doorbell when you need it? In one particularly egregious case, the wrestlers are preoccupied with a game of chess while Dracula hypnotizes Lina right under their masked noses.

And when they’re not letting their guard down at Cristaldis’ place, they’re blundering into traps. At one point Eric lures the pair to a warehouse where they’re ambushed by henchmen, Adam West Batman-style (only the Pow!, Thunk! And Zap! cartoon balloons are absent). Lina, disobeying Santo’s order to stay home, follows the pair, and saves their bacon by hopping on a forklift and plowing boxes onto the henchmen. (Score one for independent women!)

- "I forgot, whose move is it?"
-"Hey, where's Lina going?"

The final showdown takes place appropriately enough at Dracula’s lair, where Santo and Blue Demon encounter not only the Count and Rufus Rex, but gangs of wolf men and vampire women (make of that particular gender alignment what you will). The surreal fun is enhanced with a couple of rousing games of walk-the-plank over a pit of sharpened stakes. Ouch!

While the wrestlers of course prevail, the mood is much darker than the goofy 1970 monster bash, the heroes more flawed, and the final casualty count among the Cristaldi's is sobering. It's as if the outside world’s political and social upheavals had finally come home to roost in the minds of the filmmakers.

On the plus side, Lina is a scrappy, refreshing change from the typical helpless damsel in distress, saving Santo not once but twice! And in keeping with the darker tone, the look of Dracula and the Wolf Man are much more in line with their Universal counterparts (although Rufus in full make-up gets far too little screen time).

"Just wanted to let you know before we fight these guys, this shirt is dry-clean only."

If you only have the time or patience to see one Santo monster mash, Dracula/Wolf Man's fidelity to the spirit of the classic monsters (not to mention some surprisingly dark and bloody sequences) makes it a strong candidate.

Dracula and the Wolf Man play walk the plank with Blue Demon!

Abject apology: Since this post on Santo and Blue Demon took on a life of its own, look for Waldemar Daninsky in a new post, coming soon!

In praise of MMA: Mixed Monster Adversaries (Part One)

You can’t convince a kid that less is more. Try telling an eight-year-old that instead of getting into that awesome [fill in the blank] costume and driving to the neighborhood where they give out full-size candy bars, the family will be going over to grandma’s for Halloween, where she keeps a bowl of dusty, 20-year-old Werther’s candies for all her visitors. See how that goes over.

Monsters are like candy bars. One is nice, but there’s nothing like emptying out a full bag of candy at the end of a great night of trick or treating. Sure, you can parcel out your monster enjoyment one solitary vampire, werewolf or man-made abomination at a time. But throw them all together in a single film, and you’ve got a party like no other, the monster equivalent of Friday Night Smackdown.

I was a greedy little kid as far as my monsters were concerned. The local Saturday night horror show, Gravesend Manor, introduced me to the Universal monsters (and appropriately enough, it featured not one horror host, but a whole cast of macabre zanies). Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Mummy were revelations to the 10-year-old me. But my little heart really got racing when I realized that there were films out there featuring not one, but two or even more of the beloved classic monsters.

Watching the monster combos on TV -- Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein -- inspired me to round up neighborhood friends and put on short plays in the garage featuring my favorite fiends. By the time I was in high school, I’d seen each monster rally multiple times.

Of course, much has been written, especially in the snobbier critic and fan circles, of the exploitative cheapness of the rallies, especially in comparison to the Golden Age films of the 20s and ‘30s that started everything. (I think we forget that the original classics were considered cheap and exploitative when they first debuted.) They aren’t great movies, but they are a lot of fun when you’re in that “more is more” frame of mind.

Let's be honest, Bela Lugosi as the monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) is anything but frightening. So much footage of Lugosi ended up on the cutting room floor that the film is disjointed in places (all of the excised scenes were of Franken-Lugosi speaking in his inimitable Hungarian accent, which had the production execs nearly “convulsed with laughter” when they ran the dailies.) [ Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946, Second Edition, McFarland, 2007, p. 327]

But Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) has never been more angsty, and the old gypsy woman (Maria Ouspenskaya) from the original Wolf Man is there to provide gravitas. And you just know that Larry’s doctor, mild-mannered Dr. Mannering (Patric Knowles) -- full of good intentions at the beginning -- is going to be seduced into dabbling with things better left alone, like revving up Frankenstein’s monster and seeing what he can do.

Next, the monsters went house hunting. House of Frankenstein (1944) is also disjointed, playing much like a series of vignettes organized by the wraparound story of mad Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his loyal hunchback assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish). And John Carradine’s suave Dracula is ridiculously easy to defeat, hardly sticking around long enough to make an impression.

But Daniel’s unrequited love for the gypsy girl Ilanka (Elena Verdugo), and Ilanka’s dangerous love for Larry Talbot, is truly heart-rending. Plus, there’s something satisfying about Boris Karloff coming round full circle to play the umpteenth doctor to revive the monster that he immortalized.

Did you know? The success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man got Universal execs thinking that if two monsters in a film was good for the box office, three (or even more) would be that much better: “On June 7, 1943, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Universal was developing a new shocker entitled Chamber of Horrors with an all-star cast of goons including the Invisible Man, the Mad Ghoul, the Mummy and ‘other assorted monsters.’ George Waggner was named as the ringleader of this three-ring circus of horrors. The cast read like a Who’s Who of cinemacabre: Karloff, Chaney Jr., Lugosi, Lorre, Rains, Zucco, Hull and … James Barton (!).” [Weaver, Brunas & Brunas, p. 448]

Chamber of Horrors never saw the light of day (or the full moon for that matter), but the monster rally concept was soon realized by House of Frankenstein. See my post, “What Might Have Been: The Universal Monster Rally You Never Saw,” which lays out an imaginary Chamber of Horrors film with the original slate of monsters.

And then there’s House of Dracula (1945). Universal was in no mood to mess with a winning formula, so the unholy trinity of Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s monster are back (I guess including the Mummy would have been too much of a good thing). To complete the deja vu feeling, there’s a reprise of the kindly, serious doctor who turns mad midway through (Onslow Stevens as Dr. Edelmann), and yes, there’s another hunchback, this time in the form of a female nurse/assistant (Jane Adams as Nina).

When I first saw House of Dracula, I was turned off by Edelmann’s prosaic, scientific explanations of the “curses” inflicted upon the Count and the Wolf Man: the former supposedly suffering from a parasite in his blood, the latter from pressure on the brain (!?). Supernatural monsters should be just that -- super - natural, beyond conventional scientific reasoning. When you explain away the mystery, it just becomes a sort of dull, pedantic science fiction.

So House of Dracula became my least favorite monster rally. But subsequent viewings have given me a new appreciation of the film. John Carradine’s Dracula is much more of a malignant presence in this one.

In a great, understated scene, the Count seduces Edelmann’s beautiful assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), who is playing a haunting, elegiac piece on the piano:

Miliza: "You like it?"
Count Dracula: "It breathes the spirit of the night. They played it the evening we met at the concert."
Miliza: "I'd forgotten... until I saw you again."
Count Dracula: "Perhaps I wanted you to remember."  [IMDb]

As an added bonus, Onslow Stevens gives it his all playing perhaps the maddest of all doctors in the Universal canon -- the result of an attempt to cure Dracula with a blood transfusion, but which instead infects Edelmann’s blood when the conniving Count reverses the transfusion machinery.

1948 saw the release of the greatest monster rally of them all, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I know a lot of people don’t appreciate mixing comedy with horror, but I find that A&CMF threads the needle masterfully, not overdoing the duo’s routines that in other movies overstayed their welcome, while juxtaposing clever sight gags with effective chills.

If memory serves, I first saw A&CMF sometime after the original Draculas, Frankensteins and Wolf Man, but somehow, the 1948 film seemed entirely fresh, even though it repeated the monster combo from the two "House of" films. And it certainly didn’t hurt that Bela Lugosi was there, resplendent in cape and formal wear, reprising his signature role.

I remember being just as creeped out by Larry Talbot’s transformation into the Wolf Man in this outing, and alternately bemused and on the edge of the couch as Wilbur (Lou Costello) blundered his way around the screen, narrowly missing falling into the clutches of the various monsters.

One of the great laugh out loud moments is when Wilbur, exploring the dark dungeons underneath the castle, stops to rest for a moment in a large chair and ends up in the Frankenstein monster's lap -- only realizing his situation when he looks down at his own hand and sees two there.

The addition of Vincent Price’s voice as the Invisible Man at the very end of the movie was an inspired comic version of a “shock” ending.

Did you know? “The original working title of the film was The Brain of Frankenstein. Aside from Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man, the Mummy was also to be worked into the script, but was eventually eliminated. [Editor’s note: the Mummy could not catch a break!] The script evolved into the Wolf Man (in his sane moments) trying to prevent Dracula’s attempt to transfer Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein creation. … To keep the actors happy, the studio hired comic Bobby Barber (who also played a role in the film) to act as court jester, thus speeding up the shooting schedule. Practical jokes occurred all the time, including the comedians throwing pies at each other during dull stretches between scenes.” [Richard Bojarski, The Complete Films of Bela Lugosi, Citadel, 1980, p. 223]

In Part Two, the classic monsters go up against masked Mexican wrestlers, and meet a guy by the name of Waldemar Daninsky. Don't miss it!