‘Dear Colleagues, I’ve invited you to this, my house, to let you know, distinguished members in Metaphysical Studies, about the work of a dear friend of mine, well-known for his scientific work, who has hidden his identity all his life in order to fight crime.’
A famous wrestler has invented a machine that allows someone to travel back in time and relive a past life. When his girlfriend volunteers as a test subject, he reluctantly agrees, only to find that her ancestor was targetted by the most infamous vampire of all time…
More Mexican horror antics starring legendary wrestler Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask in his twentieth picture. René Cardona directs the action and cast, which includes Aldo Monti, Carlos Agosti, and Noelia Noel.
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Eminent scientist Dr César Sepúlveda (Agosti) has been allowing his prospective son-in-law, the famous wrestler Santo, to use his laboratory for a series of revolutionary experiments. He’s so impressed with the fighter’s scientific theories on past-life regression and time travel that he invites his distinguished scientific colleagues, led by Dr Kur (Roberto G Rivera), to hear them and view the test equipment that he has built. Unfortunately, without experimental data, they refuse to take his work seriously. To help him get the proof he needs, the professor’s daughter, Luisa (Noel), volunteers to use the machine. He reluctantly agrees and, with the help of his nervous assistant, Perico (Alberto Rojas), sends her back to the turn of the century. There, she the body of her ancestor, Lisa, the daughter of Professor Soler (Jorge Mondragón).
However, Lisa is sick and confined to her bed. Worried that she is afflicted with the strange disease which has caused so many deaths in the area, Mondragón has called in old friend and scientist Professor Van Roth (Fernando Mendoza) to help. The famous expert’s arrival coincides with a visit from their new neighbour, Count Alucard (Monti), who has just purchased the ruined mansion nearby, and has popped round to check on Noel’s health. It’s not long before Mendoza has tagged Monti as Dracula, but the girl has already fallen under the vampire’s hypnotic spell. After showing her his ancestors’ fabulous, hidden treasure, Monti prepares to make her his bride, but Santo pulls Noel back to the present day with his machine just in time. Despite her misgivings, Santo persuades her to take them to the vampire’s grave in the present day, as the monsters’s ring and medallion hold the secret to the treasure’s location.
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Gothic vampire shenanigans with a touch of science-fiction and a little bit of wrestling. Unfortunately, it’s a story so awkwardly constructed that you could be forgiven for believing it to be patched together from pieces of several unfinished projects. Santo’s film career does seem a very odd affair to modern eyes, with an apparent complete lack of overall strategy and very little consistency in how he was presented to audiences. However, it’s no surprise that in the early days, he was tied to the horror bandwagon that was sweeping the Mexican box office in the wake of the phenomenal success of Abel Salazar’s ‘El vampiro’ (1957), a relatively standard re-telling of Bram Stoker’s original version of Dracula.
Unsurprisingly, this sudden wave of horror owed a massive debt to the Universal Monster Classics of the 1930s and 1940s, which filmmakers plundered unmercifully for ideas and inspiration. Santo played his part in that, too, battling vampire women, mad scientists, an obvious ‘Phantom of the Opera’ stand-in, and many others. However, his exploits were not hardcore ventures into the horror arena, with the films often featuring a good measure of comic relief, wrestling and, on occasion, even musical numbers. By the end of the decade, though, Mexican horror was in sore need of a transfusion of new blood, with Santo even jumping ship to star in two spy adventures inspired by the success of James Bond. When he returned to horror afterwards, though, things had taken a turn into more serious territory.
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Now, if you are questioning my use of the word ‘serious’ in relation to a movie that features a wrestler inventing a time machine, well, everything is relative, isn’t it? If you doubt this was a different type of venture for Santo, then it’s worth pointing out that there were two versions of the finished film: a black and white cut released domestically and an international cut in colour. The latter was thought lost for many years but was unearthed fairly recently. Rumours had long persisted that this was an ‘adult’ version of the film featuring sex scenes and full-frontal female nudity. Although it’s hard to associate such naughtiness with Santo’s upright, family-friendly image, that’s pretty much exactly what it is. The extra footage included in the retitled ‘El vampiro y el sexo’ (which roughly translates to ‘The Vampire and Sex’) was clearly shot at the same time as the original film, being either alternative or extended versions of scenes from the original cut.
Almost all of the adult content involves Monti’s harem of vampire brides in his bachelor cavern. In the original film, they are clothed in long dark robes, but in the colour version, their modesty is only hidden by flesh-coloured panties. Monti brands all of the members with a small vampire bat tattoo while extensively groping their naked breasts. The most notable inclusion is an extension of the scene where Monti seduces Noel in her bedchamber. This time, she’s topless, and he pays close attention to her naked beasts before he slowly disappears south out of the shot. Her ecstatic reaction leaves little doubt about what he’s up to down there. It goes without saying that Santo doesn’t appear in any of these scenes, of course. It’s even possible that he wasn’t aware of their content, much in the same way that Christopher Lee was acting in blissful ignorance of what was going on behind him when he was filming certain scenes of Jess Franco’s ‘Eugenie…the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion/De Sade 70’ (1970).
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For the most part, the scenes set in the past are a faithful reconstruction of the ‘Lucy Westenra’ elements of Stoker’s original novel. The film even introduces its own Van Helsing in the form of Mendoza’s Professor Van Roth, who immediately tags Count Alucard as the bad guy. Rather brilliantly, he figures out the vampire’s true identity by writing his name in big, capital letters on a piece of paper and holding it up to a mirror, so it spells ‘Dracula’! It’s just a shame that’s not how mirrors work. The only wrinkle to the familiar lore is the replacement of crucifix and garlic with mistletoe, Mendoza even holding Monti off at one point with two sprigs of it, instead of leaning in for a quick kiss.
The best thing about the flashback sequence is that Santo, Agosti and Rojas are watching it unfold in the laboratory on a TV screen! Santo’s past-life regression technology may look like a yard sale version of Irwin Allen’s ‘Time Tunnel’, but at least its TV channel has better reception! Curiously, Noel seems to have no agency while she’s in the past and is unaware that she’s a consciousness inhabiting one of her ancestors. Santo’s science is a little vague here, and he fails to provide the necessary PowerPoint presentation explaining how it all works. The fact that all this business takes up half an hour of the running time heightens the impression that these scenes are part of an unfinished project, which was mashed together with new footage at a later date. The only points of commonality between the two time periods are Noel and Monti, and Monti doesn’t even share the frame with Santo at any point.
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After Noel returns to the present day, the hunt is on for Dracula’s treasure. Decoding the Serbian inscriptions on the vampire’s necklace and his ring will provide its location, with both artefacts required to obtain the full answer. Although Noel successfully leads them to Monti’s final resting place, they only take the necklace, and the ring falls into the hands of a ruthless criminal gang led by a man with a bag on his head. Negotiations between the two factions end with a decision that possession of both items will go to the winners of a wrestling match between Santo and Baghead’s son, Atlas (a real-life wrestler of the same name). The bout takes place before the public in the arena like a regular wrestling match because, of course, it does. And so, with over an hour of the film gone, at last, we get to some wrestling.
As mentioned already, the plot is beyond clumsy and strongly suggests a compromised production or a film assembled from disparate footage. However, there’s something else going on here instead. More than a decade earlier, Mexican horror cinema birthed ‘The Aztec Mummy/La momia azteca’ (1957), which featured heroine Rosita Arenas spending the first half of the film undergoing past-life regression to the era of the Aztecs. Involved in all those shenanigans was a doctor called Sepúlveda, played by Jorge Mondragón. The following year saw ‘The Vampire’s Coffin/El ataúd del Vampiro’ (1958) in theatres, a sequel to Abel Salazar’s unofficial Bram Stoker adaptation, ‘El vampiro’ (1957). ‘The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy/Las luchadoras contra la momia’ (1963) arrived a while later and featured a battle in the square ring between the heroines and a couple of representatives of a criminal gang. The prize was a codex revealing the location of the Aztec Mummy’s tomb and his hidden treasure. What do all these films have in common? Screenwriter Alfredo Salazar. Who was behind the typewriter for Santo’s encounter with Dracula’s treasure? Take a wild guess.
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So how does ‘Alfredo Salazar’s Greatest Hits’ stack up in the Santo pantheon? Quite well, actually. Events might be a little on the episodic side(!), but there’s a good pace and plenty going on. Monti makes for a fine King Vampire, selling the charm of the suave Count and displaying a surprising intensity when his plans are thwarted. However, fans may not be too pleased with the great man himself. Whether it was an intentional part of a move to more serious projects or not, his character is less heroic than usual. In the first place, he’s prepared to use his girlfriend as a guinea pig in a hazardous experiment using untested equipment. Apparently, it is easier to ‘radiate her cells’ than a man’s because women have ‘four times more resistance’. I don’t know what exactly they are resistant to, but again, Santo fails to explain. Although he can pull her out of the past at any moment, he leaves it until the very last second when she’s about to become a vampire! He also bullies Rojas unmercifully, even setting up an apparently pointless ‘training demonstration’ where the wrestling instructor repeatedly body-slams the youngster. On the way out of the room, Santo even steps on him when he’s lying helpless on the mat! True, Rojas is really annoying, but it does seem a little mean-spirited and far below the great man’s usual standards.
Alfredo Salazar had a long career as a writer in Mexican cinema. He debuted with a co-credit on the family comedy ‘Tía Candela’ (1948), which starred his brother Abel, the same man who kickstarted the Mexican Horror revolution almost ten years later with ‘El vampiro’ (1957). They collaborated on several projects over the next few years, including crime dramas and comedies, including ‘Una viuda sin sostén’ (1951), which Cardona directed. His first encounter with horror was providing the story for ‘La Bruja/The Witch (1954) before he penned the entire ‘Aztec Mummy’ saga. Other encounters with the fantastical included ‘Invisible Man in Mexico/El hombre que logró ser invisible’ (1958), ‘The Man and The Monster/El hombre y el monstruo’ (1959) and ‘Curse of the Doll People/Muñecos infernales’ (1960). Five years later, he took the director’s chair for ‘The Rider of the Skulls/El Charro de las Calaveras’ (1965), an early mash-up of the horror and Western genres. Subsequent directorial projects were generally more grounded, but he did write four pictures for Santo and closed out his career in both roles with clown doll horror ‘Diabolical Inheritance’ (1993).
A somewhat inconsistent assemblage of familiar elements, but still fun for fans.
Santo will return in ‘Santo contra Capulina’ (1969).