EssenceStory Well Deserved Praise

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

SincereFinest disgusting, overrated, pointless

O2D This movie is about a Mexican Alfred the butler who has a machine that can see anything in the world, much like the Chinese guy in that wrestling women movie, and a vampire woman who needs thugs to bop her victims over the head. The vampire women literally have nothing to do with the movie.

Leofwine_draca The third of the Mexican wrestling movies picked up by K. Gordon Murray for US television (the others being INVASION OF THE ZOMBIES and SAMSON IN THE WAX MUSEUM), SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN is more atmospheric but even less action-orientated than the other two, trading numerous run-ins with henchmen for an extremely slow pacing, with lots of lingering pans across creepy, cobwebby rooms, dark crypts, and cheesy rubber bats flying about on strings. As such, the film is only for the die-hard Santo fan. Anyone else watching from a modern perspective might well find it dull, clichéd, and utterly predictable.This time around the villains are a bunch of sexy female vampires, who lurk around looking through windows and occasionally transform into ugly old hags (surprisingly efficient make-up effects are utilised here). They also have a couple of male zombies (including one weird alien-looking bald type) to do their bidding, which is mainly kidnapping and strapping prone victims to stone slabs and then draining them of their blood. Unfortunately the viewer must wade through dozens of minutes worth of exposition, badly dubbed dialogue about nothing in particular, some excruciating musical numbers and some minor characters being offed before he gets to the good stuff, which is almost worth waiting for.We first meet Santo about thirty minutes into the picture. Amusingly, our doctor protagonist attempts to call him on one of those flat television screens all Mexicans seemingly have in their homes, only to find that Santo is away at a wrestling match! Later, the vampires send an undercover agent in to attack Santo, and a lengthy match ensues before the bad guy turns into a hairy werewolf and runs amok in the audience. After numerous encounters with the villains, the admittedly strong finale is set in the vampires' crypt, where a devastating ray of sunlight turns most of the bloodsuckers into burning ash, at which point (the coolest moment in the whole film) Santo runs in and finishes off the rest of the evil ones with the help of a fiery torch.Sadly, the film offers little flair or excitement for one's money and the deathly slow pacing never seems to pick up until the very end. On the plus side, the set design is of a good standard, especially with the vampire's crypt which is very atmospheric. Sadly the low budget means that this is the only detailed set in the whole movie, with the rest of the action taking place in parks, wrestling rings, and people's houses. The human characters lack interest and the film spends far too much time concentrating on their activities when a look at the vampires and Santo himself would be far more interesting. As for Santo, he proves to be reliable as ever although his presence is sorely lacking in the opening stages and he needs far more screen time in my humble opinion. As such, this curio is for collectors only, and if you've never heard of Santo my opinion is to not bother.

winner55 The Santo films, indeed the wrestling superhero genre as a whole, is unique to Mexico (I recently tried to sit through an Italian variant, Superargo, and wasn't impressed), and on that basis alone deserves more respect than it is usually accorded. Which is not to say they are good films, only that for Mexicans, most of whom do not have a lot of money to spend on frivolities, these films were important enough for them to keep the genre buoyant well into the '80s.For a a US viewer, however, the films are oddities, no denying that. I find them fascinating in small doses, but eventually their cultural reasoning eludes me. They are most entertaining when they are at their most gratuitously irrational, so long as the pacing is kept reasonably swift (and the films often lag). For my money, the best of the Santo films I have seen is Santo el enmascarado de plata y Blue Demon contra los monstruos, which is wildly exploitative and inane, but the clips I have seen of Misterio en las Bermudas, together with what I have read of it, suggest that it is truly an epic of its variety.In any event, here we have a fairly early representative of the genre, and I write this because I was able to see an English dub version, that appearing in the Mystery Theater 3000 series. I'm not a big fan of MT3K, the performers of which frequently think they are funnier than they actually are, but I admit they added some laughs to the experience (although I didn't need that song to a vanished continuing character at all). But it is the Santo film that really makes the viewing worth it.It should be noted that for some reason best known to Santo's management and audience, a large chunk of his filmography has him battling vampires - he even battles Count Dracula himself on at least three occasions. Perhaps that's just as well - when he battles simple gangsters, as in his first film Santo contra cerebro del mal, the going gets pretty slow."Vampire Women" is an odd film and a silly film. It is odd because the first half is pure vampire movie - it is full of atmosphere, weird rituals and menace, and the usual blood sucking, etc. Suddenly, literally out of nowhere, Santo appears, and the film becomes an excuse for the masked one to thrash some vampire - and werewolf - butt, in and out of the ring.It is silly because there is no coherence to how the myth of the vampire is used throughout the movie; one moment they can be seen in a mirror, then later not, the vampire becomes a werewolf then soon disappears in a fire-bolt at simply the sight of a cross on a church-steeple - The whole narrative seems terribly ad hoc - as if the script were written on the fly (and I suspect it was - although the first half has some money showing in its atmospherics, which are quite impressive, the second half looks pretty cheap).Fortunately, this is a fairly short movie, and the pacing is pretty good. It is also representative of both the wrestling superhero genre and the Mexican horror genre, so may be a good beginning point for those interested in either. Great movie making this is not - but even without the MT3K commentary, it's actually kind of fun.

AlbertoAbreu In the late 50's and early 60's Mexican wrestling was flowing with renewed popularity. El Santo, The Man in the Silver Mask, was the most popular wrestler at the time, a true idol of the masses. So somebody at some point decided to make "wrestling movies" transforming popular wrestlers into superheros (after all, they are masked and caped, aren't they?) and pitted them against criminal mobsters, evil scientists and in one occasion, a martian invasion. Of course these movies are on par with the best (and worst) of B movies of the time, but this particular movie is considered an icon, receiving awards in Europe and Asia. Today this movie would only inspire chuckles and outright laughs, but its a nice history lesson of the time when caped and masked men were in the imaginations of millions of Mexican kids.