Music: The f'ing champs.

A surf rock tribute to perhaps the greatest collection of crime fighters ever? The very idea knocks Blue Demon's socks on his ass! See figure 1 below.

Here's ANTSS fave The Ghastly Ones doing their Los Campeones Del Justicio live. Dig, my little screamers and screamettes.

Movies: Let's get ready to fumble, or "This place better get ready for some good, hardcore, crotch-on-crotch action!"

Bad movies are like vampires: You have to invite them in.

I put writer/director Jesse Baget's 2006 Wrestlemaniac (a.k.a. El Mascarado Massacre, a.k.a. The Mexican Porn Massacre) in my Netflix queue. I did this while sober and in full knowledge of its "plot." I knew exactly what I was getting. And now, in fairness to the flick, I think it would be dishonest to pretend I was disappointed.

I do have a bit of an excuse for this one. The core premise of Wrestlemaniac touches on one of my worst critical blindspots. The film is essentially a comedic slasher in which the titular maniac is a homicidal lucha libre wrestler. I was doomed. Them masked wrasslers make me the worst kind of dumb. I can't help it.

In the "making of" featurette that accompanies Coppola's Dracula, the famed director states that the secret to his success is to "steal from the best." Sadly, Baget's major influence seems to have been the 1972 z-grade flick Ghost Gunfighter, with, believe it or not, nods to the 2005 remake of House of Wax and the second Jeepers Creepers film. The results fully reflect the quality of those influences.

The flick starts with a sextet of folks going to Cabo, looking for an exotic backdrop for their amateur porn flick.

One often hears the complaint that the victims of slashers are too unlikable. Baget seems to have taken that as a challenge and set out to create the most disposable cast of killer-fodder ever gathered. In the trio of men, only chunky camera jockey and exposition-provider Steve is likeable. The director, Alphonse, is a sleazy, self-aggrandizing, sexist, racist jackass and stoner Jimbo is a non-entity. The women fare even worse. Despite a slight edge of post-Buffy badassness, final girl Dallas is abrasive and her presence in the porno cast, given her comments about the sexism of the undertaking, is somewhat nonsensical. Her bi-curious blonde friend Debbie is there to flash tit and scream. Finally, and worst of all, is poor, sad Daisy, whose spends most of the movie passed out, face down, with her bare ass sticking out from under her nightie (which is her entire wardrobe). When Daisy is eventually revived, she gets a single line delivery, a boob flash, a puke scene, and a death scene, in that order and one right after another. Its such a crap role that one wonders if dancer/actress Catherine Wreford took the role as part of some court mandated public service requirement. Mercifully, the actors seem to have been in on the joke and everybody approaches their role with over-the-top gusto. The actors gesticulate as if they're in a silent film, every line delivery is given the sing-songy emphasis of porn actors trying to act their way through the fill-scenes, and one more than one occasion the actors visibly corpse and break character with a short attack of the giggles.

This wink wink, nudge nudge approach is a blessing, otherwise the actors would have to deliver some of the most wooden dialogue I've ever had the pleasure of hearing in a horror flick, with the winner going to the line that gives this post its title:

This place better get ready for some good, hardcore, crotch-on-crotch action!

Just reading the line off the screen doesn't do the line justice. To get the proper sense of the line, you've got to use it on an audience. Stand up. Put on some sunglasses. Walk towards the nearest occupied cubical. Sawgger so that your arms swing at your sides. Start the line, but make the commas full stops, with half stops between syllables. "Good." Stop. "Hard, core." Stop. "Crotch, on, crotch." Stop. "Action." When you've got your coworker's attention, whip off your sunglasses. Optimally, this should coincide with the second crotch.

Where were we?

Oh. The plot.

So the porn crew gets lost. They stop at one of those miserable, filth-incrusted gas stations that dot the byways of America in the horrorverse. There they are told about a nearby ghost town, now legendary as the home of El Mascarado – a mass murdering Frankenstein luchadore created by the Mexican government out of the bodies of the country's top wrestlers in a failed bid to created the ultimate Olympic wrestler. (I kid not. That's the backstory.)

The porn auteur and his chubby sidekick decide that, logically speaking, if the town turns out to be real, then the rest of the story must necessarily be false. The two quickly rethink their porn flick to set it the ghost town.

The rest of the story you can guess. They find town. El Mascarado (played by lucha legend Rey Misterio Sr. at an all-time career low) finds them. Killing ensues. To add an extra level of gross out, El Mascarado "unmasks his opponents" by ripping the faces off his victims. Good times.

One of the chase scenes also features the first time I've seen a victim snag her denim shorts on something and lose them. This happens to shirts all the time, but jean shorts? That must count as some sort of innovation.

In his defense, Baget manages to wring several effective scenes out the fairly predictable plot. Most notably, there's a nice scene in which El Mascarado traps Steve and Debbie in his "kill room," a bloodsplattered, windowless room with a jerry-rigged wrestling ring and a display of his many victims "masks" nailed to the wall. Steve decides that, following the rules of lucha that El Masc has hardwired into him, if he can unmask the mad luchadore, the killer will give up. He decides to make up himself and fight. The scene starts with a shot through the door. Through that frame we see Steve charge. The door slowly closes. We hear fight sounds and screams. The door bursts open and a blood-soaked Debbie comes crawling out of the room on all fours. She's crying. Then, suddenly, she's grabbed by the legs and dragged back into the room. The surprising restraint of the scene makes it a genuinely grim moment in what is otherwise light and laughably cheesy.

Still, despite such occasional moments, most of the flick is too silly to involve the viewer, but not clever enough to ride on the strength of its comedy elements. I suspect that cast and crew had a blast making the flick, but that doesn't carry over to the viewer in a sustained way. I can't hate on the flick, cause I'm powerless to hate anything with masked wrestlers in it. You, however, most likely do not suffer from this same condition.

Comics: Tilting at cannibal organ-theft conspiracies.

The cover of Strongman, the lucha-centric graphic novella by Charles Soule and Allen Gladfelter, is deceptively simple. The front cover shows a bleary-eyed luchador with a cig dangling from his mouth. The smoke rises to make a tiger's face, the eye's are fierce, but the mouth is strangely pursed, giving the impression of tired old age. Something once awesome, now grown feeble. In the background: a tattered movie poster. Open the book up, so you can see both covers at the same time, and the spine acts like a flashback swipe. On the back cover, one sees the same mask. The eye of this luchador is lively, almost playful. He smiles. Behind him, a movie poster shows him taking on a gang of bat-eared, be-clawed luchadores. You can't fully make out the title, but you get enough to know that the luchador's name is El Tigre and the baddies he's about to apply some heavy manners to are demons, possibly from outer space. Above the poster's title, there's an abstract, harshly angular logo of a tiger's face.

These two images basically tell the entire story of the comic, but the real treat is in the color of the mask. On the back cover, the lucha's mask is a pristine white – a testament, no doubt, to his good living and an homage, I suspect, to Santo: patron saint of luchadores, hero of the multitudes. On the front cover, it's a sickly yellow. Stained from years of smoking. Little details like that sell the thing.

The plot of the slim volume fuses a last-shot-at-redemption tale (a staple of gringo comics since Watchmen and Dark Knight) with elements of the late career Santo actioner Border of Terror. The book opens with El Tigre, a second tier lucha legend from the late 1960s, living in NYC. Instead of fighting villains and acting as the champion of the oppressed, he mostly spends his time drinking, smoking, and conducting a sustained low-intensity full-spectrum campaign of self-destruction. He makes his cheddar playing dozens of semi-individuated "villains" on the sub-sub-sub-pro wrasslin' circuit. His job is to show up, put on a new mask, get smashed about by the main attraction, gather a Grant, and then beat it. Occasionally, something reminds him of the good old days, when he and his partners – brilliantly inventive Brujo and the hot-headed archer Conejo – used to cruise the streets of Mexico City, righting wrongs, winning matches, and filming the occasional cinematic blockbuster. But, mostly, he just wastes away.

Then, of course, the shot at redemption. Because this is a lucha tale, you know it's going to come in the form of either a small child woefully lacking in father figures or a lovely woman in jeopardy. Strongman opts for the latter: a sexy and perhaps too innocent plot device named Maria. This beautiful and mysterious woman pulls El Tigre into a slightly gonzo noir-tinged conspiracy involving government corruption, drugs, sex slavery, organ trafficking, cannibalism, and the nearly 30-year-old betrayal that marked the end of El Tigre's golden age.

The story is well handled, combining a mean and efficient hardboiled plot with the highly stylized, over the top muscle melodrama of lucha flicks. The lucha noir a combo has attracted other American lucha-lovers – see Hoodtown by Christa Faust – and can be surprisingly effective. The characterization El Tigre stands out both for its sincere love of the lucha hero as an icon of justice and for the smart awareness of their surreal and almost Quixotic place in the world. Also, while there have been enjoyable spoofs of the genre – the bombast of lucha tradition almost begs for it – it is nice to see somebody get mileage out of playing it straight.

The art is fine with bursts of awesome. I have a suspicion that the smaller format of the book (8 1/2 by 5 1/2) took some of the petrol out of Gladfelter. Several scenes are inventive, energetic, and bursting with smart details. Gladfelter has a cinematic vision and a taste for the well-made pop allusion. But often, his work feels constrained by the limitations of the format. Should El Tigre ever be revisited, I hope Gladfelter's given more of a chance to explore the space they've created and flesh out his ideas.

Why does lucha work? Curt, of Groovy fame – come on now, don't play like you don't know him – once wondered how I could dig on lucha flicks, many of which are admittedly awful enough to actually qualify as slanders against the concept of cinema, and yet I was unable to wrap my head around the appeal of, say, the painfully inadequate filmmaking of Spanish horror icon (they've got to have one, I guess) Paul Naschy. In trying to explain Naschy's appeal, Curt described a sort of genre fandom "double vision." Nobody is blind to the cheesy make-up, occasionally awkward acting, or often heavy-handed "stylishness" of these films. But, for the fans, you see through - not past - these things to the mental world they suggest. In the works of Naschy, it's a darkly seductive alternative universe driven by the erotic and forbidden impulses we confine and suppress in the real world.

I suspect my love of lucha works on almost the exact same principle, only the end result is different. I don't really buy the whole "dark and forbidden thing." When I look around me, I see a world that happily caters to our basest whims. Short of homicide on demand, is there anything we can't pull up on the Internet? Certainly there are self-appointed guardians of morality out there – folks who'd like to scrub clean our minds and return to a (utterly fictional) prelapsarian past – but their efforts have been considerably less effective at squashing free expression than, say, computer glitches in the search algorithms of amorally-capitalistic monopolistic cultural gatekeepers. Instead, what I see is a world sadly lacking in nobility.

Most luchadores, taken at face value, are not all that noble. Beefy, sweaty entertainers that slap one another around for a few pesos; it's bread and circuses, certainly. But when I see Santo putting the beat down of some hoods or sending a vampire (and what's a vampire but a metaphor of exploitation in fancy evening wear?) back to the infernal pit that spawned it, I think I catch glimpses of a slightly better world: a place where the poor and those in need have ready and capable champions, where the corrupt and vile do not prosper. They remind me of the image of Christ chasing the moneylenders out of the temple with a lash – violent, righteous, simple but confusing, inspiring but profoundly impossible. But, I suspect, you either see it or you don't.

Strongman's got that a healthy share of that charm, the pathos and nobility of the better world we don't have. I recommend it for lucha fans.

Stuff: Who's wrasslin'?

ANTSS is wrasslin'! That's who!

Movies: Run from the border.

Amongst my people, there is well-known bit of folk wisdom that I present here in the native tongue:

La domina masklo estadas pli ol dudek jaroj aĝa kaj ĝi tenas sian postenon proksimume dek jarojn.

There is no exact English equivalent, but it can be roughly translated to "El Santo will get you through a movie without redeeming qualities better than redeeming qualities will get you through a movie without El Santo." Not just a clever turn of phrase, scientists at leading places were science is done have tested this hypothesis under the most rigorous conditions – and it don't get none more rigorous than the truly dire 1977 stinkeroo Santo and the Mystery in the Bermuda - and the rule has held.

This is not to say that all Santo flicks are equal. Over-generalizing bloggers prone to intellectual laziness tend to group Santo flicks into a three-tiered taxonomic system. At the top Santo Chain of Film Being are the Golden Trio: Santo versus the Vampire Women, The Witches Attack, and The Diabolical Axe. Not only are these three films my personal favorites, but a strong case can be made that the physical laws that govern the structure of the universe persist in their current form because this order of reality is a necessary condition for the existence of these three films. In another universe, under different physical laws, there would either be too many top-level Santo films, which would cause all reality to explode due to awesomeness overload, or too few Santo flicks, which would cause the universe to collapse in an implosion of pointless misery.

Under the Golden Trio is the Silver Horde, a dozen or so flicks that consistent deliver the wrasslin' action, loopy filmmaking, and life-affirming heroic nobility that fans of El Santo demand. Though often marred by clunky plotting and speed-bump "dramatic" scenes, these flicks have a bright, fun pop appeal that carries you right over the rough patches. As an added bonus, they often involve some character culled from the old Universal Monster stable – some distant relative of Frankenstein, one of a pack of wolf men, or Drac, natch – which provides a nice point of entry for those unfamiliar with the Man in the Silver Mask.

Finally, there's what Santo-superfan and surrealist anthropologist George Bataille called "The Accursed Share." These limp late-career flicks can be tough going even for the faithful. By the late '70s, Santo films just weren't the moneymakers they used to be. This meant smaller budgets and casts padded out with comic relief sidekicks and a rotating slate of pop singers. To make matters worse, Santo was getting a bit long in the tooth himself, so there's usually less rough housing and the mandatory wrestling scenes are increasingly handled by cutting footage of past actual matches into the flick. That's not to say that even these flicks don't have their draw, but it isn't where the Santo novice wants to start.

Today's flick, 1979's Santo and the Border of Terror, is a pretty typical example a work from Santo's accursed share. The flick is built on a neat premise. It pits the Hero of the Multitudes against a slave labor ring that disposes of unwanted or troublesome workers by using them as raw material for an organ harvesting sideline. Oh, and it's a musical. That's right: the flick is a lucha action musical about the modern slave trade and organ harvesting. Unfortunately, the film just cannot deliver on all the high strangeness that premise implies.

The film starts with two workers making a deal with a coyote (in the people-smuggler, not dog-like desert scavenger sense) to reach the North American plantation of one Mr. Richards. One of the laborers, Laborer 1, needs the money badly to pay for the eye transplant operation of his girlfriend's, the Nightclub Singer, blind little sister (BLS). Laborer 2 has some backstory about an old mother who needs help or something, but it never really comes up. He's there because he, like Nightclub, is a minor musical star and that gives him an excuse to kick into the occasional musical number.

Santo gets mixed up in all this sorta by accident. Unable to find a convincing way to fit Santo in this drama, the filmmakers decided he would just show up. Literally. When the Laborers, Nightclub, and the BLS are walking home one night, they get jumped by some thugs. Santo and his comic relief Manager, happen to be nearby. The Man in the Silver Mask opens up a can of whoop-ass on the thugs and, Q.E.D., he's in the story.

Laborers 1 and 2 make their way in the US and start to work at the Richard's farm. The farm is run like a prison camp by a brutal, but cowardly Overseer and Dr. Sombra, the morality-impaired medico who seems like a nice enough guy until he's got you on the slab. Ultimately, Nightclub starts to wonder what happened to her beau and asks for Santo to intervene. Santo and his painfully unfunny manager make the scene and start solving the mystery in Santo's own inimitable fashion.

So, what in Borders works? Despite the overall predictability of the plot, there's some clever twists and oddities thrown in to keep the viewer interested. For example, there are at least three major villains in the piece, but what they all know and just how evil they are is unclear. Mr. Richards, for example, seems to understand that he's getting labor for cheaper than he should, but it isn't clear just how much he understands about daily life on the farm (and he clearly doesn't know that workers who've "left to go home to Mexico" are actually being chopped up into spare parts). The Overseer is a bully and douchebag, but his real moral failing seems to be cowardice. It's unclear if he knows that nobody ever gets paid, but it's clear that he's not cool with the dissection and sale of workers. However, being a coward, he doesn't blow the whistle on the doc, but rather attempts to use his knowledge as leverage to get away from the farm with a bit of cash. Admittedly, this ain't the most complicated characterization you'll run across in a flick, but it adds a refreshing dynamic, giving the baddies varied and shifting motives and allegiances. The film's conclusion is also morally ambiguous. The BLS gets her vision back, but the eyeballs come from one of Sombra's victims. I don't know if the viewer is supposed to care (after all, the victim's not coming back and not using the eyes to save a girl's vision would be wasteful), but the fact that nobody mentions this moral paradox is dissonant note that runs contrary to the we-all-laugh-and-freeze-frame ending viewers see. The topical content of the film is handled well. Unlike the dreary lectures at the ass-end of Mystery in Bermuda, nobody lectures viewers about the dehumanizing effects of the US immigration policies when coupled with a voracious market for cheap labor. Plus, there's Santo being Santo. That should be enough.

What doesn't work is a much longer list. The dialog is painfully wooden. The acting is subpar, even for the subgenre of lucha action flicks. This is especially true in the case of Santo's manager, who is actually so unfunny that he might have single handedly discovered some sort of comedic anti-matter, "jokes" that actually destroys any joy and mirth it encounters. Though there's a certain charm to the artless way in which musical numbers are included in the flick, this charm is overwhelmed by the mediocrity of the tunes themselves. The special effects are a drag and, despite the wonderfully grand guignol premise of the film, we get no gore whatsoever. Seriously, a film about an organ harvester and there's not even so much as a bloody butcher's apron to be seen! WTF? OMG, DSKWWACTS? IAHDAMLJ, ICTYTM. Late stage Santo doesn't have the moves he used to, so the wrestling action is quite tame. Finally, the voice of the BLS is what I imagine is so unbelievably unpleasant that it's a wonder nobody's tried to weaponize it. Certainly this shrill, flat, dentist drill of a voice would be a more effective torture method than, say, waterboarding.

Perhaps, like me, you're one of those sad Santo addicts, living on the fringes of society, stealing car stereos to pay Netflix bills and sustain the habit. If so, then by all means, check out Border of Terror. If, however, you are a normal human being with a healthy and regular relationship to movies starring legendary Mexican wrestlers, then I'd give it the pass.

Music: He's only got one eye!

The lucha-tastic video for Noah and the Whale's "Shape of My Heart" features a wrestler in a Santo mask dubbed El Corazon going up against a colorful rouges gallery of unlikely foes, including Killer Robot ("He's programmed . . . to kill") and Frank ("Just call him, 'Sir!'").

Enjoy.

Movies: Santo, fun-sized.

In 2004, Cartoon Network managed to produce a handful of animated Santo clips. This somewhat obvious step of animating the lucha legend is actually a remarkable achievement in that the Santo estate has been notoriously gunshy about signing up with American companies. Anybody who has seen "Sampson versus the Vampire Women," the chopped up and name-changed Americanized version of "Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro" might understand why. Still, however this coup came about, we're all winners.

The shorts, a series of five quick flicks that make a nod to Santo's beatdowns of various stalwarts of the Universal horror stable, collectively tell the story of Santo versus the Clones. These shorts, to my knowledge, have never been featured with subtitles or been dubbed. However, I don't think you need to speak Spanish to enjoy them.

Screamers and Screamettes, here's Santo, "El Enmascarado de Plata," the Hero of the Multitudes, in Santo versus the Clones, episodes 1 through 5.

Enjoy.


Santo versus the Clones, Episode 1




Santo versus the Clones, Episode 2




Santo versus the Clones, Episode 3




Santo versus the Clones, Episode 4




Santo versus the Clones, Episode 5

Music: Sometimes surf rock, like justice, must wear a mask.

To start off the short work week right, enjoy the retro surf rock sounds of the lucha-themed Los Straitjackets. Here's their "Rockula":



And, as an added treat, here's the masked legends performing the theme song to The Munsters.