Chanoc y El Hijo del Santo vs. Los Vampiros Asesinos (1981)

Occasionally I will skim through my many hispanic TV channels, looking for old Jorge Rivero flicks or Isela Vega dramas. Looking through today and there was a Hijo del Santo flick from 1981 on one of our many spanish stations, called "Chanoc y El Hijo del Santo vs. Los Vampiros Asesinos" and watching Santo Sr. and Jr. battle vampire murderers with no subtitles to speak of seemed like not the worst way to spend a couple hours. My Spanish speaking experience includes: watching lucha for the last 15+ years, and taking one year of Spanish in high school. There is a good chance I will miss some of the subtle drama that Mexican peliculas are famous for. And I figured that if I took the time to watch this flick, it couldn't hurt to take additional time to write about said flick for you, the reader.

We open on El Santo in some sort of cave fortress bunker speaking to El Hijo in what I imagine is some sort of torch passing. Santo is in full Santo regalia, whereas his son is wearing a tight striped polo, jeans, and is completely maskless. His face is covered, somewhat, by a bushy mustache, fluffy 80s hair and gigantic sunglasses. Like gigantic sunglasses. Like Ace Rothstein in San Diego doing sports handicapping, but deciding he needed some larger sunglasses. El Hijo del Santo looks like Giorgio Moroder on the From Here to Eternity album cover. Like the most hirsute bad ass dude in the room (cave). Santo throws a smoke bomb and then El Hijo is now in all silver. He is now ready to fight crime, whether it be local hoods, a crime syndicate, or vampire murderers.  

And then this movie reaches an impossible peak which it will never be able to top, when the cast of luchadores is revealed in the credits to be Voltio Negro, El Polaco, Maldito Mendoza and…

Charles Bronson Mexicano.

You know, the Mexican Charles Bronson. You know, like Charles Bronson, only Mexican. You know, a Mexican guy who somewhat looks like Charles Bronson. A cursory glance online reveals that yes, this former masked luchador does indeed somewhat look like Charles Bronson, and I cannot think of another gimmick post mask-loss that can possibly be better than Charles Bronson Mexicano.

Plus this will give me ample opportunities to do my not-entirely-inaccurate Bronson impression throughout the whole movie. I'm a pretty big Bronson fan, with stuff like Mr. Majestyk and The Mechanic getting regularly watched in my household. I'm even a fan of bad 80s Bronson, like Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. So, upside of Charles Bronson Mexicano: endless Bronson impressions. Downside: There is zero chance Charles Bronson Mexicano will be anything but a massive disappointment. He was like the 7th billed luchador in this thing. There's a chance the most that will happen is he'll get kicked off a boat or something.

So I'm going to kind of rush through the rest of the review, as I have over 400 words and we've only been through one short scene and the opening credits. 4 minutes and 400 words.  If I keep going at this pace I may as well just do a kickstarter to write a book breaking down the film in 200 pages. So for the rest of this I'll just highlight some of my favorite scenes and observations:

~Hijo del Santo didn't really wrestle in this. I was curious to see 1981 Santo wrestling thugs in a park because I don't really know how 1981 Santo moved. I'm really used to how late 90s/early 2000s Santo moved, but I was really curious to see how different he looked when doing moves. We get a brief match that doesn't have anything to do with the movie, but most of the time Santo fights guys using martial arts moves. A lot of thrust kicks. He does them very nicely but it's weird and I was expecting and wanting weirder (i.e. arm drags and headscissors performed in a real fight against jewel thieves and vampires).

~Hijo del Santo is mostly unmasked during this movie. The only times he dons the Santo garb are during the few scenes where he disappears Clark Kent style from a bad situation, only to return in full Santo gear to thrust kick guys or save them from falling off a boat (seriously he saves like 4 people from drowning). Most of the time, whether it be lounging with ladies in a…lounge…, or lounging with ladies at a restaurant, or watching a lady sing at a restaurant, he is wearing a striped polo, gigantic shades and a bushy mustache. Full on Giorgio Moroder. Or Ad-Rock in the Sabotage video. Yes. Exactly like Ad-Rock in the Sabotage video. How much more do you fucking love Santo picturing him with a giant bushy mustache under his mask!? He could have agreed to lose his mask at some point for a lucrative payoff, and then worked the rest of his career as Detective Thomas Magnum Mexicano.

~Most of the next hour of the movie is merely Santo and his buddy hot on the trail of jewel thieves. There is comedy from an awful man who goes by the name "Tzekub". He wears a gigantic fake white mustache. His comedy style is "make the most of your time on camera. Play it beyond the back row. Play it to the guy past the back row, out in the lobby getting snacks." It's like he saw some Milton Berle and decided to add a few reaction takes into the camera. The triple take wasn't enough.

~There are no vampires. It was a couple guys in a vampire disguise, which was really just face paint. No Santo fighting vampires. Which makes this the most disappointingly misleading movie title since I watched The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, which featured neither dancing, nor cats, nor dancing with cats. In this instance it's smarter to downplay the name, like what Radio Shack does. I've never been inside a Radio Shack, but I imagine it's actually much nicer than a run down lean-to.

Overall, I'd say it was still worth the time. Santo unmasked was truly…not what I was expecting, and the community at large now knows there was a man whose gimmick was Charles Bronson Mexicano. I'd call that a win for the wrestling community at large.