Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast that watches all the zombie movies. Today, we finally made it to the 1970s, and we are back in the ring with an old friend. That's right, Santo is back, and this time he has backup. It's Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters.

You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures.

What do they call them? Zombies or something?

Zombies. Zombies? What's a zombie? Well, a zombie, they are some disabilities.

The living dead.

They are the living dead. Get in the zombies. It's an army of zombies.

No armies could stand.

The unburied dead are coming back to life and seeking human victims.

I saw the dead rise.

Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul.

Hey everybody, I'm John.

I'm Andy.

And I'm Brad.

And I'm Javi.

Who's that? What happened?

Who let me in?

A security breach in the Zombie Strains lab.

Hey everybody, yes, that is our good friend, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, commonly known as Javi, famous TV writer. He wrote for Lost Charmed, The Witcher, among other things. But most importantly, he's on Producer Brad's other podcast.

I am. I am a refugee of Multiplex Overthruster.

And also just as a side note, we've known each other for 45 years.

Since the earth was young. I've known you only slightly less than I've known Producer Brad. So yeah, we've got like 150 years of combined something or other.

Yeah. I think I became not uncomfortable is not the right word, but I think I became concerned when it got into the 40s of years that I've known you. You know what I mean? I've known Javier for 25 years. That didn't feel like such a big deal. But now I've known him for 46 years.

Kind of makes you question your choices, doesn't it? Makes you want to go like, maybe I should have cut that off at 20. I think I had plenty. I don't know. Yeah.

Fun fact about Andy, he was actually born in San Diego, Los Angeles area, and moved to Michigan. So he has the opposite.

Yes. Yes. You know what? I think you traded up. I love Michigan. You know?

You're the first person that has ever conveyed that sentiment.

You know, Ann Arbor is my favorite city in the world. And then I say that, and then there's a pause, and I have to go like, yeah, and I've been to Paris and shit, guys. I've done that.

Yes.

It is a delightful little place. Yes. Also, Andy lived there before horrible wildfires and extreme heat all the time. So, there's that. In any case, welcome. And let us talk about our movie. But first, does anybody have any zombie-related news they would like to relate?

Well, Javi and I, in our other podcasts, we're watching our first film for the summer of 84, and it's The Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones. And Javi, what, remind me, what's the evil priest's name?

Mola Rahman.

Mola Rahman. What does he do to all the people?

He makes zombies out of them using the blood of Kali, yeah.

It's an 80s version of a zombie master using some sort of potion to make zombies, which is interesting.

Does that mean you guys are going to do Temple of Doom?

Yes, in about 3,000 episodes. It's 1970, so if we do the math, it'll be 2042.

I will have known you for 40 more years is what you're saying.

So I saw the back rooms recently. Do those weird creatures count as zombies in some sense?

Which ones?

In the back rooms?

The entities in the back room?

Yeah.

I haven't seen it.

It's pretty iffy. In 30 or 40 years when we get to it, we can discuss.

Yeah, maybe that's when we should, well, anyway, we don't want to spoil back rooms either because I haven't seen it. I haven't seen Obsession yet. I'm a horrible horror fan this summer.

You are dropping the ball.

Good heavens.

You know what? My kids are still small, so I'm in that part where I have a really hard time seeing horror movies because my kids, I think once they get to be teenagers, I'll be okay watching horror movies again, but yeah, I can't handle it right now.

Yeah, I had to turn up when my kids were like seven and 10 is when David Tennant's villain in Jessica Jones was on.

The man in purple, yeah.

The man in purple and he orders these kids and I had to turn it off. I'm like, well, I'm not watching this.

The big parenting milestone for me was deciding at what age I could show Alien to my kids.

Oh, yeah.

You got to, it's important when there's certain horror movies, you do need to be a little too young for them when you first watch them for them to really work.

Yes.

Andy, my balance was they have to be young. I went for on 10 and my wife had to be out of the house and not know I was doing it.

At what age do you show them Reanimator? That's what I want to know.

We'll get to that one too.

That movie scarred me for life, I swear.

In a good way or bad way?

In a really bad way. The whole scene with Doctor Hill and Barbara Crampton, I still to this day, that's a tough one. That is a tough one.

I actually think about that every now and then because we're going to get to it eventually.

We're like 10 years out and we're like, how are we going to talk about that?

Also, you have to understand that was my first exposure to that particular sex act.

Yeah.

I was like, what is happening?

Yeah.

Well, I was excited when I saw it because if you remember, it was unrated.

Yes.

My friend Paul, his sister worked at the drugstore next to the state theater and she had an arrangement with ushers there, so she snuck us in.

Yes.

It does remind me of two things though. First of all, it did introduce us to Jeffrey Combs, and I feel like we value that from the film.

Yes.

Also, Andy and I are just reading this graphic novel by Alan Moore called Providence, and it's a survey of HP Lovecraft's work, so as you go through the story, the main character falls into all the HP Lovecraft stories tangentially, but they're all masked a little bit. The most obvious one is instead of Herbert West, it's Hector North.

Wow.

So I love that. All right.

Well, yeah. I was just going to say, but I think that out of, because we haven't known each other for so long, I think my favorite memories of going to the movies with you guys was watching a lot of horror movies and stuff like that. I remember seeing Day of the Dead in apropos of this podcast at Briarwood, and that just being a watershed movie for me. Yeah, the gore in that movie was just mwah, you know? Yeah.

I always say, I remember the Day of the Dead poster, which was probably when I was nine. I remember seeing that because it was kind of abstract. It had that zombie. That poster, for whatever reason, was burned in my brain and still is. Just turning around to see it, I was going to see Empire. It couldn't have been Empire. But I was Star Wars agent and I turned around and saw that poster. I was like, ah.

It's a bit much, a bit much.

One tangent about film watching is our friendship. This was reminded to me by Javi in your post about your son this week.

Oh, yeah.

In the 90s, we all got together to watch Star Wars and videotape. I remember someone said, okay, no quoting the film.

We're just going to listen.

I was like, none. We got all the way to the Jawas. What happened, John?

Everybody was stone cold silent. It was super awkward. The Jawas come up, they shoot R2-T2 and Javi goes, Oh, Tini.

I thought it was John.

I thought that was you, John.

I thought it was Javi.

No, it was you, John.

You just couldn't hold it anymore.

I just couldn't hold it. I had been chasing because we had watched Superman the movie, I think, at like Anne Crowsley's house and I was quoting every line. You guys threw me out in the snow.

So anyway, I didn't realize I was the villain in that story.

You're not the villain. You're the hero of that story.

All right, my friends, Andy, bring us back to what we're doing today.

We are watching our second Santo movie, Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters. Now, does anyone want to read the title in Spanish?

It's Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos.

So I got a question right out the gate. Why is Blue Demon's name English? Is that part of his backstory or something? Or are they just trying to appeal to the American market?

My guess is that because of the time when this was made, by the way, my backstory, I was born in Puerto Rico. I used to watch these movies when I was a kid. So you guys talked about that in a previous podcast, but this is why I'm here. Look, I think I'm not entirely sure about that one, but I would hazard a guess that back then, America was ascendant, the United States was ascendant in a lot of ways. It was still very much at the top of the heap, and I think that there was a predilection for English words, like in Japan, like you'd get t-shirts with, and I think just making that in English just made him cooler in some way. I remember thinking that about him. But I do have a question about Blue Demon, which is, I never understood whether he was blue because of the color of his mask or because of his temperament. Do you like a sad, Dima's melancholy? I don't know anyway. Like the Blue Raja from Mystery Men. It's not that he was melancholy, right? Never mind. Anyway.

That film is full of delights. My favorite line from Mr. Men is, you can't have a balanced attack until you learn to balance attack hammer.

If you can balance attack hammer on your head, you will head off your opponents with a balanced attack. That's right.

We are getting all sorts of-

So far away from Santo, I'm so sorry. All right.

Hey, Brad, do you want to walk us through the production history of this?

Let's go through some notes.

This film was produced?

Well, let's talk about that.

Great question.

Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters was released in Mexico on May 14th, 1970. Movies released this month include A Man Called Horse with Richard Harris, Let It Be with The Beatles, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and Watermelon Man.

Wow.

Can anything truly be beneath the planet?

And the horror movies from this month were Beast of Blood and Christopher Lee in the Hammer film, Taste of the Blood of Dracula.

Do you know which number in the series that one was?

I think it was the fourth or fifth of the Hammer Dracula films.

Also, wasn't Franklin Jela's Dracula sometime around here?

Seventy-eight or seventy-nine, I think.

Oh, it was later.

Okay, never mind me. Because he was kind of like Disco Dracula. He had like the junk, derolta hair. Yeah.

This is the second Santo film we have watched on Zombie Strains, which means it's the second Lucha Libre film we have watched. The first film we watched was the 1961 film Santo vs. the Zombies, which we all enjoyed at the time.

Yes.

There are a total of 52 Santo films, and this is the 23rd. And this is the first Santo-Blue Demon team up. There are eight in total, and we will get to see one more.

Yeah. Can I just say something here? It's 1970. I don't know. He's probably got like 35 films under his belt. Spoiler. He dies 14 years later, so he must be in his 40s or approaching 50. Like, this guy must be exhausted.

I'm looking up. He was 48 or so at the time.

Wow.

Yeah. And he's still like running up and just jumping in the car, like no problem.

I mean, the wrestling is pretty, they're not kidding around there. I mean, they're really doing the wrestling there, so that's pretty, yeah, wow, 48. Darn.

Yes.

Yeah.

Gilberto Martinez Solaris directed, he directed his first film in 1938, and he went on to direct over 160 films, making him one of the most prolific directors in Mexican cinema.

I heard Curaçao wasn't available, so they got...

Can you imagine? Yes.

Yes, I can.

Solaris directed two Santo films and one Blue Demon film. He wrote and directed many comedies in the Mexican Golden Age of cinema, but he made all genres of film. In 1994, he received an Ariel Award for Special Recognition for his contributions to film from the Mexican Academy of Film Arts, and this is their Oscar. Rafael Garcia Trevesi co-wrote the film with Jesus Sotomayor Martinez. Trevesi wrote seven Santo films. Martinez wrote three films, all Santo films, but he was also a producer and produced over 50 films.

Can you believe it took two people to write this movie? Wow.

How long do you think it took them to write this?

Yeah.

More than 10 minutes? How long is the movie?

It's an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah, here's the question. Did it take longer to write or shoot?

I think they were doing a whole bunch of these, and I think it's more recollection. Remember this from that film? Let's do that here. It has that kind of feel, where would they just sort of do it on the spot?

Yeah, yeah, it does, it does.

Gustavo Cesar Carrion composed the music for the film. He has credits on over 300 movies, including several other Santo films. And Ralu Martínez Solares, brother of Gilberto, was the cinematographer, and he has nearly 300 credits as a cinematographer, including Dr. Satan, the first one. All of what I'm trying to say is that the people who made this film are very highly experienced filmmakers.

Yeah, like hundreds of movies under their belt. So any criticisms we have of this film are not perhaps because of lack of skill or incompetence. Perhaps it's being in a bit of a rush.

Well, I also imagine that there's a certain expectation of this genre, that they're not really like, yeah, that they kind of churn them out, was sort of my sense of it.

All right, on to the cast. Rodolfo Guzman Huerta is Santo. Santo was a Mexican wrestler, a luchador. Did I say that right, Happy?

Yes, you did.

And they are known for wearing masks in the ring. Santo wore his mask even in public. He never took it off, keeping his identity secret. His first public appearance as Santo was in 1942, and by the late 40s, he was a fan favorite. In 1952, comic book artist Jose Cruz made Santo a comic book hero. In 1958, Santo appeared as a sidekick in two movies that were filmed in Cuba, and Santo became the star of the third film, Santo vs the Zombies.

And don't forget those first two movies that he was the sidekick in starred our lead actor from Dr. Satan. That's right. He was Dr. Satan, who we absolutely adore.

Was Santo Dr. Satan's sidekick? No, he was...

No, but the actor who played Dr. Satan was the lead in the first two Santo movies.

Got it, because the whole Satan-Saint thing is kind of interesting there. Yes, it is, actually. I think there's a theological, exegetic examination of that, that we could do, had it been Dr. Satan's sidekick, which it is not. So, sorry.

No, sorry.

Sorry. Yeah, moving on.

All right, Santo died in 1984, one week after an appearance on a TV talk show where he lifted his mask to show his face. Alejandro Munoz Moreno is Blue Demon. He started his wrestling career in the late 40s. In the 50s, Blue Demon and Santo had a famous feud, with Blue Demon defeating Santo in the ring. Blue Demon got into films after Santo. His first starring role was in the 1965 film Blue Demon. And one of the reasons he got the role was the producer of the Santo films was nervous that Santo was going to ask for too much money and he needed another star to keep it going. He made 25 Blue Demon films and nine of them were team ups with Santo. And like Santo, he wore his mask when in public. And in Mexican culture, he's second to Santo in popularity. He died in 2000.

You've listed some of the Blue Demon movies here and there's just one I want to call out. Blue Demon, Destructor of Spies.

Wow.

Wow.

So is the idea that Blue Demon is like the Batman to Santo Superman?

Absolutely.

Yep.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, and there was some of the Blue Demon films, he was the leader of his own little trooper superheroes or super wrestlers. It was called the, I think, the Champions of Justice. I'll have to look that up.

Yeah. One of the movies is called The Champions of Justice.

There are a couple of those.

One more question. Did Santo ever do a heel turn? Is that like permitted with a character like Santo?

I don't think so. I don't think Santo ever did that.

No.

I think he transcends the... He couldn't... Of all the wrestlers in the world, Santo can't be a heel turn.

For those of us who don't know wrestling, what does that mean?

Well, it's just like when a beloved character becomes a bad guy for a little while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like when Hulk Hogan went bad for a couple of years there, right?

Yeah. Santo started as a bad guy.

He did?

Oh, really?

Yeah. There's a term...

Rudo. He was at Rudo. Yeah.

And then when he got in the feud with Blue Demon, Blue Demon became a good guy. And that term is... What's the term for the good guy, Javier?

Technical.

Yes.

So, Andy, Santo didn't have a heel turn. He had a good guy turn.

Yeah.

There you go.

Yeah, I like that.

I like that. Yeah.

Look at that.

I'm learning about Santo, all sorts of stuff today. I'm very excited about this.

This is what happens when you let producer Brad do your research.

You know what? It always yields interesting results, dare I say.

You know, like this is... I had the same experience when Brad was going through the Santo history last time we covered a Santo movie. And that is, regret that it is too late for me to have worn a mask my whole life and then remove it shortly before I die.

And get buried in it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

You can't really start that like in your middle age. You got to start that early, yeah. There's too many photos of you probably.

All right. So, Carlos Ancira plays Bruno Halder, the evil mad scientist. He has 67 credits, so he acted for a long time. He was in The Vampire's Coffin. He was in Orlok, Frankenstein's Hell. He was also in Santo and The Mummy's Vengeance. So, he did another one of these. Ivan Rado plays Otto Halder, the brother of the evil scientist. He was in a few other Santo and Blue Demon films, as well as The Wild Bunch, Fantasy Island, Mac and Me, and Puppet Master 2.

What you're saying is he's a breakthrough star.

Wow.

Yeah. Crossover.

Wow. Well, a couple of people in the cast were also in Acapulco Heat in the 90s.

Uh-huh. Okay. So a minute ago, you mentioned, is it Santo and the Revenge of the Mummy? Was that? If I were the mummy from this movie, I would want to slink off and into a deep dark hole after my poor performance against Santo.

Yeah. He got thrown off a roof, but we'll get to that.

The mummy was wearing jammies. It was less like bandages and more like a onesie, sort of like a sweat suit or something. Yeah.

He was a bit scrawny, shall we say.

Well, he's been buried in a pyramid for centuries. Of course, he's going to be scrawny, John.

Perhaps, that's unfair.

He's no Boris Karloff, unfortunately. Hedy Blue played Gloria Halder. Her acting career was short. She was in nine films between 1968 and 72. Aldo Alberto Martinez played the dancer in the Extended Dance Sequence.

The Extended? Yeah, no, it was literally like when that happened, I was like, well, we'll get to it, but holy, holy crap.

Wow.

Yeah, that was something.

I have a question about this, but anyway, when we get there.

You have a question, John?

So, Gloria, so does Santo have like a canonical girlfriend, like Lois Lane or something? Like, were we supposed to know, oh yeah, that's Santo's girlfriend, which she kind of is in this movie, right?

I think he's like James Bond. I think he always has a different like girlfriend because Santo is more like James Bond than Superman that way. He's kind of a man of the world. That's why he drives that silver, not Mercedes, but Erzat's Mercedes, right?

Yeah, it's a-

Don't worry, John will fill you in on that.

Yeah, I have thoughts. I have statements on that car, too.

Wow.

Martinez, he was in over 100 films. You might have seen him on Instagram in compilations of dancers doing the moonwalk before Michael Jackson. He did it in 1959 in a film called Escuela de Verano.

Wow. That means a summer school.

Yeah, I was going to say, I got Escuela, but I didn't get it. That's because my wife is- let's just go all out. This is the All Tangents episode. When my kids were like tweens, my wife weren't super communicative. My wife would try to say silly things to get them to talk about school. So she started saying, how was Escuela? And it didn't really work, but that's why that stuck in my head.

Martinez also received a special award from the Ariel, so he was well respected. All right, three of the Monsters were played by wrestlers. Vicente Lara played the Wolfman, and he played the Wolfman in two other films, El Castillo de la Monstro. How do you say Monstro, Javier?

The Castle of the Monster, Monstro?

Yes, and in Santo in the Wax Museum.

Wow.

Tinia Blas played the Frankenstein Monster. He started his wrestling career a year after this film was released. And Gerardo Zapata played Cyclops, and he was also a wrestler.

The Cyclops is just one of the great, great inventions of this film. It really is just like, I mean, wow, we got to talk. Let's get into, I got to, we got so much to talk about.

That's all I got. The film obviously didn't harm the series. The series kept going, so let's jump in.

Harm it? I think it enhanced it. Yes.

I said it did not harm it.

But that implies that a Santo film could be harmful. I mean, I don't know.

No, I'm saying that I don't have any box office records to say it made this much money. Right.

Right.

And we do have to admit this is one of the more experimental chapters of the Santo saga, so I understand how there might be some worries.

Yeah, it's their white album.

John, it's our first 70s film. Do you have any cultural context?

No.

But we will. So this is our first 70s movie and it's pretty 70s. It's got the funky music and all the good stuff. However, Andy and I are going to release a 70s episode, not right at the beginning of Season 3, because this is the beginning of Season 3, but in a couple of episodes, we'll have our 1970s cultural episode and we'll address more of the context in that one.

All right. Well, I think I am driving the discussion this time around, guys. So, John, do you want to give us a 30-second... I don't know how you would really provide an overview of a Santo movie, but can you give us 30-second overview of Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters?

There are two... There's a mad scientist who dies. This mad scientist has a brother, and that brother's daughter is dating Santo.

Like you do.

Like you do. However, when the scientist dies, that's not the end of it. Immediately, his minions come, bring him back to life, and he spends the rest of the movie getting revenge on Santo and his brother and niece. So there you go. And to do so, he recruits every monster from all the universal horror monsters, except they're not. They're different versions of them, including Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Cyclops for some reason, two vampire women, and I think there was somebody else.

But there's like three zombies, right?

And there's zombies as well. So in any case, this movie is then just a series of battles where these monsters try to kill Santo. The end.

There you go. And they fail.

And they fail.

Oh, but you forgot that, John, you forgot the dramatic heart of this film. This film is, it predates Frank Miller's work, but this is one in which Blue Demon and Santo go up against each other, right?

Yes, I forgot to bring it. Yeah, Blue Demon, by the way, is in the title and he's here too. What happens is Blue Demon gets captured by our villain scientist, and a duplicate is made of him, and this duplicate is evil and attacks Santo.

It's really because the duplicate becomes like the leader of the monsters, but it's like he literally just has these hospital beds that duplicate people.

Yeah, I feel like you could have just made 20 Blue Demons, but anyway.

With that power, this guy could have accomplished a lot more, kind of an underachiever.

Yes. It's like the replicators in Star Trek where it's like, I think that's actually the most important technological thing that's ever been created. Yes.

Who cares about a phaser when you can make anything?

That's right.

All right. Well, guys, I'm going to lead us to the discussion. So let's jump right in. We open with, of course, our opening credits and the fun thing about the opening credits is we get our whole Rogues Gallery come up and pose for the camera. It starts with Santo striding heroically onto the screen. Then we get Blue Demon who's introduced as, correct my pronunciation if I get it wrong, El Enmascarado de Plata, the man in the silver mask, which also describes, no, that's Santo.

I think Santo gets two title cards. He gets both Santo and the man in the silver mask. That's right.

Blue Demon does not have a, so Javi, will you describe Blue Demon for us? What's his trademark look?

Well, he has a blue mask with sort of a gold accent, and he wears a blue T-shirt with a mysterious crew neck, and also, but also his, well, there's a weird T-shirt style in this movie. They'll have like a beard half, like semi half turtle-mock turtleneck, but not quite.

It's almost like Steve Jobs turtleneck kind of.

And also, but Blue Demon also has like a much more, his cloak, he's got a cloak that he wears, but it's got sort of a harness on top of it that kind of encompasses his shoulders kind of thing.

Yeah, so when he's, so like when Santo is shirtless, his cloak just looks like Superman's cape. But when Blue Demon is shirtless, like his arm, there are arm holes in his cloak so you can see his, so you can welcome him to the gun show, or you welcome him to the gun show, whichever way it goes, but yes.

But I love how, I love how the opening title sequence, like literally, it's like everybody sort of steps out like a curtain call and poses.

Yeah. Yes.

But they don't freeze, they just pose.

No, when the vampire woman comes out, she does a little twirl, like, so let's talk about it because all of our monsters come out one at a time and let's, if anyone, I'll rattle through our monsters and if anyone wants to make a comment about their appearance or how awesome and menacing they look.

Yes.

So first off, we get the mummy. Anyone have thoughts on the mummy?

You know, I know why they went first with the mummy. The mummy is just tragic. It's cursed.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the actor who plays him, like he looks so tired. Like when he, like again, 4,000 years in a tomb, like when they first opened the thing, his little face is like, ugh.

Well, I think about it, of all of them, he's not a wrestler. And so he knows what's coming. All these big guys are going to be tossing him around.

Yes. You know, yeah, he's kind of scrawny and sort of like, also like he's been alive forever. So it's like, of course he's tired. I mean, he's seen some shit, you know?

So next up is by far the wild card of this monster troupe. And I know you guys will have thoughts about it because it's the Cyclops.

Yes.

John, John, do you want to tell us about the Cyclops?

So the Cyclops is like a giant creature. It's got almost like fish ears and it's got a single orange glowing eye, which they do manage to animate in the suit. The suit is incredibly doughy. It looks a lot like a suit. However, later in the movie, his attributes are more like the creature from the Black Lagoon. Like he lives in a swamp and stuff. So I don't know if they were stealing that and just didn't want to use the name, so they made him the Cyclops. Also, they're very careful with the Cyclops because clearly that's a rented suit. So when they show Santa punching him, they cut away before the blow lands.

The fight with the Cyclops rivals Steve Austin fighting the Bionic Sasquatch. For just a brutal, visceral impact.

Yes. Also, it's always like the Cyclops is just off-camera. You can just see his hands and then, anyway.

Yeah. The Cyclops is the one of these monsters that looks most like a Muppet, I thought. Yes. All right. So next up, it's introduced as Frankenstein. We want to be pedantic. This is Frankenstein's monster. Yes. Any thoughts on Frankenstein here?

Could you say his name in Spanish, Javier?

It's the thing is that it's spelled Franquestein.

Yes.

Because it's not spelled Frankenstein, like F-R-A-N-K-E-N-S-T-E-I-N. Yeah.

Why not just say Frankenstein?

Yeah.

No, because- It's not a Spanish word.

It's not a Spanish word. It's not an English word either. It's a German word, yeah. So I don't know.

I think there was a previous film and I think there's a typo in the poster where they dropped the end. I think that might be part of it.

You know, I also wonder if it's not like also like like just the one thing I was actually surprised. So when when actually, no, I was not surprised in Puerto Rico when you'd watch shows that were dubbed, somebody would read the credits out loud. And I always wondered if that was because of literacy or because of translation. But then nobody was reading the credits out loud. But I just I just have to assume that like people just sort of read that word like phonetically, you know, because it is a phonetic like like, yeah, yeah.

Huh? Yeah. All right. Well, we have three more Monsters to come. We have the Wolfman.

Yes.

I was kind of overwhelmed by the Wolfman. I'm going to be totally honest. Yeah.

Were you overwhelmed by any of them?

Yeah, I do. The Cyclops is hard not to love. But everybody else is a little in the weak side of things.

And their vampire dude with the top hat was kind of entertaining.

What is that about?

The guy literally is in the top hat. He's attacking women, biting the necks. The top hat does not come off the guy.

No.

Javier, I know you don't know the answer to this, but this is our second film we've seen from Mexico where there are vampires. And why do Mexican vampires not have sharp angular teeth? They're all crooked and sort of rounded.

Oh, I have no idea.

I mean, did you notice that in this film?

Yeah, I remember that from Dr. Satan too.

The same in Dr. Satan. Yeah.

They don't have the clean little incisors. They're like these giant hooked things.

Yeah. It's just more frightening, Brad.

It's the unique artistic vision of this movie.

That's right. Yes. Exactly. It fit the character. It's their Guillermo del Toro-esque design philosophy.

Yes.

So yeah, the last monster is the vampire woman. I think it's a little weird that one of the monsters is vampire and the other one is a vampire woman. But what do I know? Actually, there are two vampire women in the movie, but I don't know why only one of them gets stupier in the credits.

I got lost with the two of them. But also, I feel like in the final credits, they list her correctly as Vampira, the feminine. But in these credits, like at the beginning-

Is that La Mujer Vampiro?

Yeah. They used an O, but at the end, they used the feminine A. So anyway, I was confused. I was going to ask you, but then they corrected it in the final credits.

Well, it's a difference between saying Vampira or saying the vampire woman. So that's it. It's a very important semantic difference.

Now, we don't have to dwell on this, but I think you guys have missed the cinematic art of this sequence. I would like to compare it to one of our early films, the film from 1919, J'acuse. What the one cinematic technique that those films share is tinting the film. Yes. So as we intro these creatures, it's all against the sky in the background, but they tint the sky a different color for each creature. Yes.

Kind of like how Soderbergh in Traffic, like the Mexico sequences had a different color than the American sequences.

Exactly.

Yeah. But I got to say, in terms of the tinting of this movie, a lot of this movie was shot day for night.

Yeah. A lot of times they just switch in the middle.

Yes.

It's dark and then it's light. Yeah.

Because also with Day for Night, you just put very dark blue lenses in the lens to make it look like nighttime. But it's like, it does not, I mean, I don't know, this movie takes place in a kind of liminal. You don't know where you are, what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess they couldn't wait for a cloudy day. This makes me think they had three days to shoot it. They're like, it's too sunny. They're like, well, we got to get done.

You know, John, before we launch into the, since we've done all of the introductions, I just want to say, before we launch into talking about this movie, I remember a conversation you and I had a couple of years ago about how some movies require suspension of disbelief.

Yes.

Then some movies require suspension of narrative expectation.

Yes.

I feel like this falls very much into the latter care. If you suspend your narrative expectation, this movie is actually quite a bit of fun. It's delightful. Yeah.

Speaking of that, we usually go through these movies beat by beat. I can do that, but the plot is not the important part of this movie here. So I'll start going through this, but if you guys feel like you just want to start calling out favorite or noteworthy scenes, feel free. But we do start with, we start with, of course, a wrestling match. As with our previous Santo movie, when you watch a wrestling match, I think we're watching a whole match from beginning to end, because it's like 10 minutes. But Santo is not in the ring yet because we are watching a battle of beautiful women.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God.

We have a bunch of masked women throwing each other around a wrestling ring. While Santo watches from the sidelines.

The narration for this is so sexist. It's like hilariously, it's like literally, they may be beautiful, but they're also strong. These young ladies with their, oh, my God. It's just like.

One of the closed caption translations, they use the phrase, the weaker sex.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And they said it in Spanish too, yes. The translation was quite accurate.

I have a question though. I think, like in my mind, it's 1970, right? Like how old is female wrestling in Mexico? Like I have this fantasy that despite all of what you just said, it might actually be like a response to feminism. Like we want to show women in powerful ways in this Mexican film, or maybe they've been wrestling since the 50s and I'm making that up.

I honestly don't know. I think that the moment somebody figured out that men slapping each other was going to be entertainment, they probably stuck women in it immediately.

Yeah, probably.

There you go. I'm sure they got to women before they got to little people.

Yes.

So anyway.

But don't worry, this movie also features a little bit.

Oh, yes it does. Waldo.

There was female wrestling in Mexico in the 30s, but then there was a ban in the 50s.

Really?

And then it was officially lifted in 86. I don't know if they snuck stuff in between.

Well, I also my theory about this, and again, I'm really not trying to drag this out. But my theory is that we are used to TVs everywhere by the 70s. But I think my theory for the last one, which was just almost a decade before this, was that you couldn't go see Santo wrestle, or you just couldn't go see a wrestling match. So they put the whole match in the movie, so that you could, like that was actually the draw. Like I just want to see Santo wrestle for five minutes. And that's why the movie starts.

I listened to that episode, and I think you're out, and I remember going, I think he's absolutely right on that. Yeah, right.

I think that explains the long numbers, dance and song numbers in this thing too.

Yeah.

Or they just needed to pad it.

But anyway, sorry, Andy. We need to get to that bizzaro world interruption into this film. It is like literally, it goes into like Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel territory at that point. It's so weird. Look, I just want to ask a question. So, you have the 12-minute wrestling match, right? And then you go to the grave site where the zombies are, can we move from, I don't want to move on from the wrestling match unless you guys feel like you've.

No, I think I'm good.

Yeah, I guess the only thing I had mentioned in the wrestling match is after the women fight for a while, we do see Santo, Blue Demon and a couple of other named wrestlers who I assume the audience probably recognized throwing each other around the match.

And their names happen to be the Black Giant and the Arab, just in case.

Yeah, not good.

We're like the Ebony Giant really. I mean, let's not, you know, there is a finesse to what they were doing here.

We do get some cool, I do enjoy these, watching these moves. And as the announcer identifies a couple of them by name as The Whip and The Breaker.

Yes.

And so, you know, this was kind of fun. It wasn't 12 minutes of fun, but.

I remember, I remember that it was called La Quebradora was The Breaker. But then there was another one that they didn't use in this movie called La Dormilona, which is the sleeper hold.

Nice.

Yeah, which is like, yeah, exactly. So like, yeah, you didn't want them to do La Dormilona on you. That was bad.

So yeah, then we do move on to a church or a chapel where a burial of sorts is taking place. Javi, you want to describe this? Sounded like you had something to say.

You know, the Greeks had this tradition of starting their plots in medias res, right? Which means in the middle of the action. And I feel like there was an entire hadler, hadler, is that their names? It sounds like Hitler. Yes. Yeah, it's Haldur. Haldur, yes. A lot of these villain names in Spanish things sound like Hitler, you know, like in Mazinger's Z, there was a kid named Baron Aschler. I just feel like anything with ER that sounded vaguely Germanic, people just quoted as evil. But what I thought was, so the zombies come in to steal the body, right? They're these three dudes in black t-shirts with sort of lazily applied green makeup over their face. Very lazily. Very lazily, yeah. Yeah, like my kids apply sunscreen with more rigor than these guys.

And who's leading them, Javi?

Oh, who's leading them?

Our friend, a little person.

Oh, that's right, Waldo.

Yes, who also has a top hat.

Yes. But it's not pronounced Waldo, by the way. The true Spanish pronunciation is Gualdo.

Gualdo.

G-U-A-L-D-O-H, Gualdo.

Nice.

But what I thought was interesting here was that at some point, and I don't know if it's when the later after they take the body, but it's like, at one point, my brother's last wish was that nobody mutilate his body, which is a huge red flag, right?

Yeah.

Also, we all have to specify that.

Yeah.

What family do you live in that that's a concern?

Well, that's why I feel like we're in the middle of this Atreides versus Harkonnen feud that's been going on between these two brothers. We just stepped right into it and somehow Santo is just indigencially involved by dint of dating the Otto Hadler's daughter. I think...

Yeah, it's Otto and Bruno. Bruno's the good guy and Otto's the bad guy.

That did make me... It did feel like these were recurring characters. It felt to me like Halder was the Joker to Santo or something, like a recurring villain. I imagine maybe it wasn't, but that's what the feel was.

I feel like it's like if you watch Avengers Endgame without ever watching Infinity War, I feel it's like what's happening here.

Also, I would like to say maybe you didn't get this from the uncapped inversion hobby, but it shows a newspaper and it just says, famous dead scientist.

That's right.

Yes.

There's another one where Santo, literally something happens and then they literally just got to Santo at his desk reading it in a newspaper like he's got some magic newspaper that just manifests what's happening in the world automatically because it's literally like they kidnapped the girl. Then he's literally sitting there going in the newspaper says, girl kidnapped and he goes, what we better do something about this.

In the last Santo movie we had, he had a whole monitor setup.

He had a bat caper.

Yes. Watching the whole city. Yes.

But there's no sign of that in this movie.

Because I remember you guys talking about that in the last one. I once pitched a TV show called, I'm a TV writer for those of you who don't know. I pitched a TV show called Santo City. I wanted to do a modern Mexican wrestling TV show. So I got a bunch of pictures in one of the Santo and his bat cave. It's more like he's gone from being Batman too. He's like his office looks like the Charlie's Angels office.

Yes. He's like a private detective.

Yes. He changes, man. He contains multitudes.

So, yeah, the brunt of this scene, though, is we meet our villain. So the scientist who has died is Dr. Halder. And we find through some exposition, he was famous for doing all sorts of dubiously ethical experiments about returning people to life for transferring brains. And it was a little vague what he did, but it was sinister. And it had to do with coming back from the dead. And so Waldo, or Waldo, I'm sorry, I don't have the pronunciation down, and a team of zombies are Dr. Halder's servants or assistants, and they are here to break him out of the funeral, and they take him back and revive him back in a pretty classic mad scientist lab in the basement of a castle.

Yeah.

Yes.

Any thoughts on the mad scientist sequence? Well, so I have a question. Why is there a weird alien-looking guy with a huge exposed brain?

What was that?

Brain homunculus, right?

What the hell was that? No one mentions him.

It looked like an Aztec totem statue carved out of stone, but with a giant exposed brain.

Made by Sandra Marty Croft.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's insane.

At first, I thought it was just like a statue, but then it moved just a little.

My question about the lab scene is this. You guys know obviously the concept of object permanence, right? Like when you're like a grown adult, if an object is removed from your field of vision, you still remember the object, right? Then when it comes back, it's again. I do.

Can I give you a quick aside there on your side? When my friend was in middle school and his friends started insulting each other over the headphones when playing Xbox, when somebody made a mistake, I think it was Wyatt. My son just said, Wyatt has yet to achieve object permanence.

I feel like there was a problem with character permanence in this sequence because I feel like sometimes they would cut away and then come back to the master, and some of the characters just weren't there anymore. Yeah. Brain Homunculus guy is just deeply confusing to me because he also seems to, or it, I don't know, let's not misjudge.

Yeah, let's not judge.

They are confusing. They appear and they're not really in the movie. They're just there in this scene and then maybe in another. It's very weird.

I think that's how we see. I thought they were part of the brain transfer. I thought they were at first like a totem that was allowing the science to happen or something, but no, it's just hanging out.

Just hanging out.

We missed an opportunity. The three of us should have said, what do you talk about, Javier? We didn't see it.

I know.

But the other thing that's really interesting is like, okay, so just like an apropos of Day for Night, the scene before this, the zombie squad with torches to get Dr. Halder out of his grave and it's like daylight.

Daylight.

It is daylight.

You can see the flame of the torches.

We should take a moment and break down the zombies because this is Zombie Strains.

Let's do that real quick.

For sure. So we'd learn in this scene that the zombies are dead criminals who Halder has revived and brought back to life, maybe replacing some of their body parts that was implied in one line, but to be as mindless as that.

Yeah.

And they're all pretty, they can fight, you know, they can take on Santo in a wrestling match. They're like the zombies from the last Santo vs. Zombies movies we saw. They've got green face paint, very hastily applied.

That's all patchy.

What else do you guys got to say about these zombies?

I think that that's supposed to indicate the decay of their flesh. Like it's, you know, if it were even and smooth, you'd be like, these guys, their complexion is too good for zombies, you know.

You know, they're just solid green.

And like the last Santo film, they all are in the same uniform.

Yes, black turtlenecks.

So, Blue Demon and Santo are just kind of hanging out in an office.

Yeah.

And Blue Demon is actually, they're both going on vacation.

Yeah. Right.

Yes.

And Santo says, you know, with Dr. Halder dying, I'm really worried about what might happen. And Blue Demon's like, oh, Santo, you worry too much. Let me just grab my suitcase that's in your office for some reason and go on my vacation and tell you not to worry. So Blue Demon then goes out in his car and he actually stumbles upon the zombies. Right. He's not investigating.

It's just luck.

It's just dumb luck. Right.

Yeah.

I thought Blue Demon was lying to Santo and saying, hey, it's nothing. And he, but he knew that Santo was right, but he didn't want to trouble Santo on his vacation.

Because Santo is going to go with his girlfriend, you know, and he wants Santo to like kind of enjoy. Oh, how self-sacrificing. That's nice. Very Dark Knight.

Yeah. We all want a friend like Blue Demon. Yes, we do.

Well, I have three or four comments on this scene and then I think we move on. So first of all, the hearse, by the way, is a 1959 Cadillac funeral coach. It's actually a designed car. But the zombies vehicle is not a car. The zombies don't get a car. They have a horse-drawn carriage.

Oh my God.

They steal the body and escape in a horse-drawn carriage, which is amazing.

So I have a question about that. So does that mean that in a certain cinematic universe, your conveyance hinges on the century in which the crime you're committing would have been committed? So if you're robbing a bank, you get a car. But if you're grave robbing, you get horses.

This is confusing because later in the movie, Frankenstein is driving.

I've forgotten that Frankenstein drives. Wow.

Anyway, and Blue Demon drives a 1956 MGA Roadster, which is pretty cool car.

Is that his trademark car? Does he always have that?

No.

In fact, Santo had a sweet Corvette in the last movie and has this weird Mercedes. The last thing I want to say on the revival of the Dead Mad Scientist, a huge opportunity was missed. They should have flashed famous undead scientist on the screen. In the newspaper, right?

That's what sounds like famous scientist revived.

It was undead scientist.

So the scientist is a zombie?

Yes.

Yes. The scientist is technically a zombie. He's come back from life, from death, I mean. Yes. I thought this scene made me feel like the zombies got the short shrift here. Why didn't they get to walk out in the credits? Because they actually fight Santo and Blue Demon as much as anyone else in this movie does.

This is true. Also, one observation I'd like to make about the zombies in Santo. Is Santo short? Because when he's standing next to his girlfriend in this movie, they're the same height and when he fights these zombies, they tower over him. Like, I don't know how we would figure that out, but it just...

Cyclops is like two Santos in a cyclo-suit, I mean.

Yes.

The Internet says Santo is 5'9.

Okay, so he's average height. Easy there, Chief.

I'm 5'7. Typical tall guy shit right here, John. We've been dealing with this our whole life.

There it is.

I'm racing you. Now you get the 10... 40 years. Here we go. 5'9 is not average height, guys.

Yeah. Is Santo as short as Javier?

Shut up.

So one important thing happens in the scene and that is, Blue Demon breaks in, he fights a bunch of zombies. Did you guys notice that anytime there was a fight, if it was in the wrestling ring, we saw sweet wrestling moves. Yes. But if it was outside like just a general melee, it was much more boring. There was a lot just more regular punches being thrown. I feel like in the first Santo movie, even when Santo was fighting enemies, even not in the ring, they were still launching off of chairs and walls at each other.

Yeah.

I was a little underwhelmed. Later in this movie, Santo is even going to use a gun, which felt like Batman.

That was shocking to me. Yeah. That was so weird. That was so weird.

I took that note though that the fight scenes are not as well choreographed in this one as the first one.

I honestly got the sense that this was a more slight effort than maybe they had made a couple of movies already. Even by the standards of, I think, this type of cinema, this one felt a little tossed off.

Yeah, I agree. Anyway, I keep dragging this out. But the big thing that happens here is Dr. Halder captures Blue Demon and they duplicate him. This is such a superhero plotline, by the way. They make an evil duplicate Blue Demon who is evil, who serves Dr. Halder, and who exists to destroy Santo.

Which is weird because you don't see them programming that into him, or they're giving him drugs and showing him movies where Santo is evil, like in A Clockwork Orange. They just duplicate. Well, I want to say two things. One of them is, first of all, now Blue Demon fights a bunch of monsters. He does get overwhelmed and all of that, whatever. Do you guys notice just how swinging and mellow the music is when they're fighting? It's like they're fighting but the music is like, do do, do do, do do do do do that, hey, do that. I mean, it was just so mellow, man. I just like, just kick, this movie felt like just kick back and enjoy. And I think maybe, and look, I think maybe the fight scenes were a vibe.

Yeah, it's a little groovy.

Yeah.

I think Blue Demon is just really good at, the evil Blue Demon is just really good at reading the room. Like he wakes up, ever in the room, hates Santo. All right, we got to move this train along, and we're never going to get through the movie, guys. All right. So, a sort of things happen. Santo is driving along, also by coincidence along this same stretch of road.

So Santo's car is a silver car. It's got a Mercedes grill, but I could not find any reference to this being an actual car. The one good source, the CarInternetMovie database, just refers to it as a custom Mercedes Benz. So I don't know what that means, but it must have thrown a couple of cars together.

It looks a little zhushed up. It has a little bit of a PatMobile quality to it. Yes. I don't know if you also like this. This chase scene goes on for approximately 32 hours. And it's also undercranked. So it's like an old James Bond movie where they're moving much faster than physics, because they speed up the film to make it look like they're going faster, but it doesn't really work because the physics don't quite match up. But it just goes on and on and on. It's like Tarkovsky shot this part of the movie. It's kind of amazing.

Yeah. There's a really long car chase. So Santo is here with his girlfriend Gloria. Is that her name?

I laugh only because literally, not only could this movie shockingly not pass the Bechdel Test, but do Santo and this woman have any scenes where they talk? Did they ever talk to each other or do you ever know the nature? What do Santo and Gloria talk about at home? What was their meet cute? I don't know anything about this. I don't know what is the glue that holds this relationship together other than that she's there to be kidnapped.

Well, later in the movie, Santo is going to start making out with the vampire girl. I don't think Santo is as committed to this relationship with Gloria as he should be as a hero.

I mean, seeing as she's the daughter of the brother of a mad scientist who reanimates people, I think they probably have a good idea to keep it casual.

That's right. There was one thing in this car chase. There is a moment where, I don't know a lot about filmmaking. I always just wonder about, there's a kind of dangerous looking stunt where Gloria jumps from one car into the other. And I think the cars are only moving at like three miles per hour, if you watch, but I don't know. That was like, there was more thrilling action in this.

And it looked like it was her doing the jump.

Yeah, it looked like the actress just jumped from one car to the other. I don't know if that's allowed.

No, it's not.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Santo does all his own stunts, too. I feel like that was the one. It stands out because it's the one real thing in a really fake and unconvincing chase with a bunch of back projection and sped up film. It's like the one concrete thing in this whole car chase, you know what I mean?

You know what it reminds me of? So there's a moment when we're watching a lot of Hong Kong movies in the early 90s. I remember in the audio commentary for The Killer, John Woo says that when he came to America to make movies, it was really upsetting because there's all of these safety regulations. He's like, in Hong Kong, if we have to blow up a car, we just throw a stick of dynamite in it and ran. I don't think Santo does all of his own stunts out of some masculine pride. I think he just has to.

Yeah, they can't afford anybody else.

Yeah. All right. The movie rolls along. This is where Dr. Halder hatches his real scheme, which is you would think that having a duplication machine that could make a million blue demons would be his evil plan. But it's all a setup for his real plan, which is with his resurrection technology, I guess he's going to do a tour around the world, although it appears that he's just doing a tour of the caves beneath his castle where he finds all of the movie, all the monsters of the world and brings them back to life. That's the whole the rogue's gallery when we went through at the beginning. I wanted to note the first one he recruits is a vampire, which he finds in a little coffin. I felt like they invested more special effects in the vampire than in all of the other monsters put together.

Yes.

Did you notice he has like bat ears?

Yes. Yeah.

That was curious.

I think they're holding the top hat in place.

He can turn into a bat where they vanish the actor out of the shot and replace it with the bat.

By the way, that special effect is like, look.

Stunning.

There's literally Robert Patrick stepping out of the ball of fire in the LA River and he's silver, and then he turns into Robert Patrick again and there's this. I mean, wow. In T2, just start going out. Terminator 2 Judgment Day. I got to say, when I saw this VFX shot, I went like, whoa. Yeah. That's shocking.

My other favorite thing is, as they're going around recruiting the monsters, like Blue Demon and the good guy brother have a conversation where he admits that, oh, I'm really from Transylvania.

Yes. Oh my God. It's like, oh, yeah. And it's like, what is that? They're both Transylvanian. What is that about? John, do you have any insight on that? Because I was like, I made a note of it here. And I literally was like the same way. I was like, okay.

Yeah.

That feels like evil villain essentialism.

That's what that feels like.

No, but yeah, like we have to have a reason why they're bad. And suddenly he has all this, I think it's just to make sure that we know why the brother Bruno has all this information about all these cinematic monsters.

It always mystifies me what movies feel a need to explain to you. Because I didn't need this explain to grasp the concept. I didn't need a justification for why Dr. Halder is a mad scientist.

That is so interesting that you say that because it's like you watch these movies and they all seem so slapdash and all of that. But then there are things that they just glom onto that are necessary. You're like, literally in the writing of all of this, this is the thing you felt we needed to know.

It's like they spent extra time polishing up this part.

It's like some studio executive was like, listen, I'm not gonna give you notes on those fight scenes. But you gotta make sure the audience knows these people are Transylvania.

In other words, how are they gonna know they're villains?

For God's sake, put a line in it, will you?

Yeah, that's great. After this, we get basically a montage of the monsters going around killing random people. My only note, so Wolfman kills a family, Frankenstein kills some lovers out at a picnic. My only note here was that if Frankenstein is strangling you, but you're still screaming, the strangling is not working.

Well, I'd like to say two things about Frankenstein. First of all, just so you guys can picture him, he looks like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, but he didn't comb his hair.

Yes, his hair is all over the place.

It's sticking out and it's very strange. Also, when he kills the couple, they make an extra point of him crushing the guy's head with this giant Frankenstein boot.

That was like a weirdly brutal moment.

The same at the end of the movie when they kill the vampires. You're like, this movie is pretty tame and then suddenly you're like, whoa, Sam Peckinpah directed this day.

What the hell?

Now, this is around the time when Santo fights the Cyclops, right?

Yes.

Okay. Okay.

Well, so these attacks happen and then Santo decides. Somebody talks to Santo about what happens to the victims of the Cyclops, and he says, it's an animal. I'll go hunt the animal and find out. Then we get probably the best part of the film, which is snorkeling Santo.

Oh my God.

I didn't understand what we were watching or why. Nope.

I guess he's hunting the Cyclops, who's actually the creature from the Black Lagoon. He sees them and then they're out of the water again.

It's funny. I've been showing my son Star Wars, which his generation calls Episode Four, A New Hope, right? He's six. You can't watch that movie fresh. He knows from the little golden books and just what he's heard and clips and all of that, that Darth Vader is Luke's dad and all that. It's really interesting though because all his accumulated pop culture knowledge is actually enhancing his viewing of the movie. Interesting. He'll actually say things like, oh my God, that's Obi-Wan, he's so old. The story has a point by guys, by the way. When Alderaan blows up, he laughed and I'm like, Princess Leia's mom just died. He's like, yeah, but that's a meme. Because I guess that explosion is very popular meme. So I have a feeling that to understand these movies, when I was a kid, growing up in Puerto Rico, they're only showing universal horror movies all the time because they're very cheap. Black and white movies are cheap to get. These television systems in these countries didn't have a lot of money. So you got a lot of really old TV stuff. So I grew up watching probably what boomers would have watched. I literally watched Rin Tin Tin and Flash Gordon's serials on TV in Puerto Rico. I'm just wondering if a lot of you're supposed to kind of infer from the culture of the moment what these monsters mean and who they are. We know they're the Universal Monsters, so we already put this veneer on them. I wonder if that's just sort of expected that you know what's going on, who these monsters are.

Like the director and writer saying, oh, everybody knows who we are. Let's throw these in here.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

I think that makes a lot of sense because there's no time spent explaining Mrs. Wolfman. What's his deal?

Right?

Yeah. They explained Transylvania, but nothing else. Yeah.

Did you guys notice the Wolfman kills by biting your neck like a vampire?

I know. Yeah. I did notice that.

Come on. A Wolfman would savage his vanguards. Tear them limb from limb.

Yeah. Wolf is the operative word.

Yeah. All right. Well, guys, we're coming to one of the more exciting points in the movie. A lot of assorted stuff happens and Santo gets in more fights with the zombies and other stuff. There is this scene. This is where Santo gets a gun and chases the monsters off of the gun. It felt like Batman using a gun.

Yeah. I want to say something about this. There's an extended wrestling scene here where Santo is fighting all the monsters and he's also fighting Blue Demon, I think. Here's what happened to me watching this movie. I had a copy of the movie on my computer, and then I had the little QuickTime postage stamp on the side of the computer. I accidentally started the movie in QuickTime. Then I started watching it in the big screen, so the movie was running two twice. It was running in one window and the other window. So the QuickTime window was actually running the opening of the movie with the narration. So I'm watching this fight and the narration from the beginning of the movie is going on, and I'm like, wow, this is really interesting. Artistically, they have chosen to take this battle between Santo and these zombies and overlay the narration from as if it were a wrestling match. And I kept thinking the ironic contrapuntal juxtaposition here is kind of masterful. I'm shocked that this movie has chosen this weird artistic gesture just when it's been so, and then I realized, oh no, never mind.

That is great.

That is amazing.

A narration. So yeah, the scene, the scene, the central scene here of the whole movie is this big like Blue Demon challenges Santo to a wrestling match in the ring.

No, it's not the Demon, it's the Vampire wrestler. It's the Vampire wrestler.

That's right. The Vampire.

So no, but here's what happens. There's that big fight which is inconclusive and Santo chases the demons away with a gun.

Yeah.

Then like you do, Santo goes back to his wrestling promoter's office because he's only just fought like 10. I mean, he is a wrestler.

Let's all remember his superhero and investigative work is in his spare time.

Yeah, exactly. He's got to keep the light on in the shit box. He's got to keep the money flowing. So anyway, he's got to mind the business that pays him. He's with his promoter and the promoter says there's a new wrestler in town and it's a vampire wrestler, and he's challenging you and Santo says, I will take that challenge.

Yes.

Does he know it's the same man but you guys can't know?

I don't know. What is fascinating about this entire middle and most of the end of the film is, it's just another fight. They ambush Santo here and they ambush Santo in the ring, and they ambush Santo somewhere else. And all of these fights are inconclusive.

Yes.

Just over and over and over again.

Yeah.

So we do get a big wrestling match between Santo and the vampire. And so everyone is here. Like Dr. Halder is sitting and laughing out there in the audience. Yes. And this fight is more what I was here for, which is lots of bouncing off the ropes and flying through the air and tumbling around. And they do that, the pacing. I don't know wrestling really at all, but I do enjoy the pacing of like, someone will just get the tar beaten out of them. And then when it's dramatically time for him to revive, then he completely mops the floor with the other person for a little while. So it goes back and forth like that for a while. And then all chaos breaks out. And basically all of the monsters that were, I guess, in the audience. Like you do. Streaming into the match to overwhelm Santo.

This was so strange.

And then the scene just ends. It doesn't really explain. It just ends. And the next day we get a shot of all the monsters.

No, because what happens is, this is actually very interesting what happens here. Santo is getting his neck bitten by the vampire, right? I mean, it's like a really dramatic moment in the ring. It looks like Santo is going to lose because the vampire is about to suck out his blood. And then his girlfriend gets up, Gloria gets up from the audience and rushes to help him. Yes. And that's the vampire notices she's wearing a crucifix around her neck on a chain. And then that's, I mean, I think, look, I think that's pretty clever. I mean, they could have set it up a little better. Maybe had a scene where she talks to Santo about why she loves God or something. Maybe establishing their piety as the cornerstone of their relationship. But it's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's funny, though, because earlier during the big fight in the house when they again flee, the vampire has Gloria and he's going to flee with her. But he runs in the direction of a of a gravestone that has a giant cross on it. And he's like, he's going to like drop her and run away like.

If you're that vulnerable to the sight of a cross, you really as an undead vampire, you really should avoid the graveyard.

Yeah.

Good tip.

Yeah. Or you should frequent Jewish neighborhoods. A lot easier.

This scene did make me think if all it takes is just a crucifix without any context or without someone powering it with their faith, then it actually would be really hard to get by as a vampire.

Yeah.

Especially in Mexico.

But here's the question I have. In the scene where the monsters appear to be attacking people randomly, the vampire actually attacks Gloria and appears to kill her. So Santo then goes to her and picks her up or something. I'm like, yeah. But then she's in the wrestling match perfectly fine.

Yeah. I thought that she had been killed too, because they showed this long shot of her laying totally still, flopped out.

And then Santo finds her and he picks her up and it's very, very, very like Michelangelo's Pietà. He just sees, but I guess it's fine. I guess it's fine. I don't know.

Andy, are you just stalling because you don't want to talk about the brilliant musical sequence in the middle of this film?

Please. Oh, no, that's a little bit later. So we're almost there. But before we get there, a couple of things I want to touch on. I mean, I guess I don't really need to. But like all of the fights in this movie, the scene kind of, it just ends inconclusively and everyone sort of retreats back to their lair.

This is why I think I like the first one more. Like it had the same kind of thing. Like the villains would come in and Santo would fight them and then they would escape with their victim or something. But they all felt a little different. They were all better choreographed. And Santo looked a little better in all of them. I don't know. Yeah, it's just that they didn't quite pull it off in this movie.

I feel like Santo, you know, maybe was hung over at the end of this movie. He looked a little, he looked a little, like he's Santo. I mean, like there's that Mexican wrestler body. It's not chiseled. You know, it's a little bit softer, but it's very muscular, you know, right? Yeah. He looked a little kind of rounder, a little more water fattened.

In historical context, this is about within a year or so of Sean Connery returning as in Diamonds Are Forever.

Oh, nice.

When he's a little stiffer, you know, a few years out of it, so.

Maybe they were partying together. Maybe. Santo and Sean Connery. I want to see that movie. Sean Connery is on a Mexican cruise, and who else should be on the cruise? Santo.

Yes.

Santo and Blue Demon.

We got to keep rolling. All right, all right, all right.

We got to keep rolling, and we're going to be stuck mid-Santo for hours.

You're going to be the length of a multiplex over thruster episode.

Yeah, that's right. So the next thing that happens is I don't know why this is placed at this point in the movie, but the vampire goes and he makes a couple of vampire women. He brings it back to life as vampires after taking the time to dress them in lingerie.

Explicitly one of them is the dancer, right? Like that's what Santo's magic newspaper says.

Yes, yes. And then the next day, Santo's looking at this and he says, dancer dead.

Yeah.

Now, real quick, the two vampire women and the girlfriend Gloria were both filmed topless for international markets, but it was never released, but there are photos out there.

Wow.

Which I didn't know they did that in Santo films.

We were robbed.

Yeah.

My childhood might have been a lot different. Yeah.

So one of the vampire women is sent out to do a more cunning plan than just barging in and wrestling with Santo. She is sent over. This was a difficult scene for me to accept, okay? So she drives up to Santo's house. No, she doesn't.

She flies to Santo's house and then drops out of the air into his car.

Oh, that's his car? Okay, that makes sense.

That's right. It's so weird. This is so weird. Oh my God.

He comes out of the house and she's just sitting in his car having flown there as a bat.

I thought she had driven to his house and then for some reason needed Santo to drive her back home.

No.

She lures Santo out in the car by himself. Then I was really disappointed in Santo here because he starts to kiss the vampire girl. I like to think that she was doing some sort of vampire seductress routine.

She put the whammy on him? Yeah.

Put the whammy on him. But then another ultimately pointless fight happens at this point, right?

She tries to kill Santo. Santo drives her away.

Yeah.

Also, I'd like to point out that this scene, which is on a dirt road in a forest, they shoot-

The same dirt road that is used in every outdoor dirt road scene.

Yeah.

Three times they shoot this. Supposed to be a different thing, it's all the same thing and then they make no effort to.

What I love about this sequence is, now there has been another botched attack on Santo and his loved ones, right?

Yes.

So Santo hatches a cunning plan for safety, to stay safe while he investigates. He says, so we're only going to go out at night and in public places. If we go to restaurants, they won't dare attack us there. If we're in public, so the next scene, they're just in a restaurant. It's just literally Santo in a suit and Professor Halder and Gloria, and they're just having a meal.

Yep.

Then this movie goes into, I mean.

We just get, yeah, what do we get? We get a whole dinner routine, like a dance, like more than one.

This reminded me of, there's two things that I'm looking, there's two references here, one of them, so it's a lot like the Broadway melody from Sing It in the Rain.

Yes.

Okay, I'm not the only one who-

There's no-

No.

I was like, what are they trying to emulate here? Because there's no singing, it's just dancing.

Right. It's like a ballet breaks out in the-

Yeah. But then there's like the Brooklyn Bridge with the Statue of Liberty behind there. Yeah.

And it's ballet and it looks like just this really cheap Laurent version of Gene Kelly's Broadway melody and singing in the rain. But the other interesting is, so they're in this- they never established spatially that the restaurant that Santo is in, that this is like happening on a stage. So they'll come to the restaurant, right? And there's Santo and Gloria and Dr. Halder watching this music.

But a dozen people in the restaurant around him, a dozen.

And then they always cut to the opposite side and there's like this massive liminal space where this dance number is taking place. And it's like, you know, and it's like, and they literally have like Mexican Gene Kelly, Mexican Sitcherese. It's insane.

And it's shot in a way that it's shooting down. So it looks like it's like 20 feet below them.

And I'm sitting here, being a practical person, I'm sitting here going, how could serving dinner to 12 people possibly support a musical of this scope?

John, you've turned into the sales manager for the restaurant. He's like, you got to push the Chacho Breon or we can't pay the dancers.

Upsell the dessert. So that goes on for a really long time.

Then we get like a song. We get like a song, it's not a mariachi band, but like this group of Mexican singers sings this love song, is there walking through a crowd? But it's not the crowd in the restaurant. It's like a crowd on the stage.

And then Gloria says what everybody in the audience is thinking. Because it's so painful, so difficult to be hiding out in restaurants in public places. It's a real burden on her. And she turns to Santo and goes, when will this end? And I'm like, legit. I mean, you know.

It is the only time anyone in the movie smokes, is what she says.

That's right.

All right. Well, it turns out that's the cue for all the monsters to... Santo was wrong. Being in the restaurant does not make you immune to monster attacks.

Weirdly. How dare they interrupt the dinner for gods? What beasts?

They break in, chaos ensues, all the...

They do interrupt the dinner, but the whole show went through. We saw all acts of the dance.

Oh, god, did we have to? We saw the whole thing.

Maybe they were watching the show and waiting for it to end.

It was that entertaining. Actually, they were going to attack, and then the show began, and they were like, guys.

Hold on.

I wonder. I have a theory, actually, and I can't prove this, so let's just say it's true. I think maybe the musical part of this was just part of another film. This is just like inserting footage from another movie into our movie.

It sounds like that, yeah.

Yeah. You remember those crap sci-fi movies in the 80s where they just took the fight scenes from Battlestar Galactica and spliced them in? It's like that.

Yeah.

But here's the thing.

So much of this movie feels like it was put in because the movie, why do we have a 12-minute wrestling match at the beginning? Well, the movie is too short. Why do we have a 12-minute wrestling match at the end? The movie is too short. Why do we have a 12-minute wrestling match in the middle of the movie? The movie is too short. Why do we have a 12-minute dance scene? A little bit further on. The movie is too short. I'm like, what is the movie that's so short?

The plot is so simple. I can't believe I'm favorably comparing the other Santo movie. By the way, which is a much better movie, but in that movie, Santo will find a clue. That'll be like, okay, I found a clue. I now have to go here in my corvette and investigate the clue. Then you have an action sequence there where he gets another clue. This is why they're always attacking him. He's not tracking them down. He's not doing any detective work. He just goes around and they just keep coming to him.

It's so weird. If Dr. Holder had just done whatever he wanted without targeting Santo, he would have probably just gotten away with it.

Yeah, Santo would have gone on vacation with Blue Demon. Yeah.

Just let him go on vacation and then unleash hell and rule the world. Santo comes back, he's like, Mexico is run by monsters now. I guess I shouldn't have gone on vacation.

All right, guys. Well, let's wrap up this movie because we're real close to the end.

Yeah. Real quick, can I say one thing about this scene in the restaurant? So they end up on the roof for some reason.

Yeah.

There's a lot of fights, but Santo throws the porce. There's a great shot of the mummy running at Santo, and there's a point of view shot where Santo is on his back with his foot in the air, and he flings the mummy over the edge of the roof. I'm like, oh, the poor scrawny zombie. I have this in my head, he's got this inner life, like I don't even know what I'm doing here. Why am I here? Then he gets thrown off the roof.

As he falls, you hear him going, I'm questioning my choices in life.

Exactly. The last time that guy was conscious, he was ruling one of the mighty empires of the ancient world.

That's right.

Now he's getting thrown off a restaurant roof.

By a Mexican wrestler. Exactly. I'm like, I'm Imhotep, like Dread Pharaoh of the Nile.

Now I'm a thug for some mad undead scientist.

My death is represented by a pair of stuff Long Johns being thrown off a building. It's like poor guy.

John, you are correct that most of Santo's involvement in this whole story is pretty accidental. However, Santo does one active thing in this scene, and he plants a tracker on Frankenstein's bolt, right?

Yes.

He sticks it in his neck right next to his bolt.

Is it inside the open wound or is it on the bolt? I couldn't tell.

I think it was right next to it.

Yeah. It is described somewhat comically as a vibrator.

Electronic vibrator. Mi Vibrador Electronico, which I was like, Santo.

I don't think that's the word they were going for. But yes, Santo, they kidnap Gloria.

I just love the idea that Santo has a Hitachi Magic Wand laying around. That's all I could think about.

It's to relieve stress, honey.

It's a massager. Sorry, Andy.

Sorry, Andy's mom.

No, it's fine. I got to rein the cats in here because we're in the final scene. It's all leading. Everyone converges on the mad science lab. Otto, Halder and Gloria are being put in the... The actual function of the machine they're being put in is very unclear.

They've been strapped and put into a machine that has some sort of a thing on top of their heads that has a light. So they're going to switch their brains. I don't know, right?

Well, so the machine is used for various things in this film. First, it's used to bring Bruno Halder back to life. Second, he puts all the monsters in it that he's captured to make them his slaves. Then third, I don't know what he's doing to these people. But apparently these machines, it can also bring you back to life. I don't know. Anyway, their hands were waved.

Javi, you said they were strapped in, but as you watch the scene, it becomes clear that there's nothing holding them.

They're kind of not.

They could just step out of these things. Their hands are handcuffed. That is true. But there is nothing forcing them to stay in the machines. And later, when Santo frees them, he basically just helps them step out of the machine.

Yeah, like he tears off the handcuffs, but they're like paper, like it occurs to me they were standing right next to each other. They could have just done this for each other.

Maybe the machine's power is beguilement.

There you go.

They're so beguiled, they can't step out, yeah.

Well, we do get our big Frank Miller moment here though, because Santo does at last come face to face and have a climactic showdown with evil blue demons in the same room where real blue demon is laying unconscious in one of these contraptions. So they slug it out for, I wrote, an extremely long time.

Yes.

It keeps cutting back to Dr. Halder gloating and saying mad scientist things like, you said I was mad, but now it is blah, blah, blah.

Because there's an entire philosophical debate going on between the brothers while Santo and the brothers and Otto is like, Bruno, search your conscience. You know this is wrong and Bruno is like, it's not wrong. Yeah, it's like it's like it's very deep. It's quite dramatic.

We're big fans of the mad scientist rant on this podcast. Like we yeah, like our favorite one, I think so far is still Dr. Blood's coffin where the guy makes a convincing case for stealing dead bodies and turning them into zombies. But in any case, yes, this is a this is an example of that yet again on Zombie Strains.

So Santo throws evil blue demon off a cliff. I love how the fight teleports outside so that they can be by a cliff and then teleports back inside. And then he frees real blue demon wakes up and he is.

This movie has gone on for five days. I estimated that between you don't look, it's hard to tell when it's day and when it's night, but it seemed to me to be about five days worth of time elapsing from when Dr. Halder is revived to the climactic battle. So blue demon is just lying there in the duplicating machine. Santo goes up to him and says, hey, blue demon, wake up, it's me, your friend Santo. And blue demon goes, oh yeah, okay, cool. I'm like, dude, you've been in a coma for five days. Like, he doesn't even have to shake off the cobwebs. It's kind of amazing.

Yeah, do you need to go to the bathroom?

Do you want some water? Like, yeah. You didn't have to slap him. Like in Temple of Doom, at least in short run, I had to slap Andy and burn him to get him like, yeah, no, this is just like, wake up, blue. Oh yeah, okay. Yes.

Did you guys notice the cool zombie moment though in this scene? Because they are fighting a bunch of zombies.

The decapitation.

Yeah, zombie gets its head knocked. Yes.

It's literally knocked off. It's not, it's like.

Yeah. Santo is using like a mace or a flail or something.

I don't even know what he's got.

It's like this metal ball and he knocks it off like a baseball bat.

Santo is fighting with all sorts of, like Blue Demon has his rubber log, which he somehow seems to find again. Oh, he has a torch for a while.

Blue Demon.

He's got like all kinds of stuff. Then Santo someplace got like a morning star from some Dungeons and Dragons campaign that he's like flailing around. Yeah.

Yeah. I brought here just a big silly fight. Breaks out that weird alien thing with the exposed brain is lingering around in the background.

Oh, I forgot.

Was it in the background? It's bad.

It was in the background. I don't think it participated in the fight. Then the lab catches on fire, the good guys escape. We get this scene. I don't know why we really needed to see this scene, but of the good guys going down and staking all the vampires in their coffins.

Yeah. Shockingly gory.

Yeah. Then also heartfelt, they stake the women, and then the women turn back into their normal selves.

Then the castle goes up in flames, and the good guys watch it wistfully from a distance, and then we get credits.

The movie just stops.

Yeah. I hate to keep comparing it to It's Better Sibling, but in the last one, there's this big speech about how Santo is leaving alone. He wants no credit. He wants no praise. He's the noblest warrior walking off into the sunset, and we get none of that here. Some of the nobility of Santo is avoided.

They just roll the credits over the shot of the castle burning. They don't even wait for anybody to kiss or say hello or whatever. They're just like, Castle burning. Roll the credits.

Yeah. This one really feels like, hey, we got five days to knock this thing out.

Let's go.

Let's wrap this shit up. Guys, I went in believing that Santo was the greatest hero of all time. But by the time this movie ended, I had seen Santo use a gun. I'd seen him cheat on his girlfriend. I just feel like some of the air went out of the tires on Santo for me.

Hey, you're the one who wanted him to take a heel turn. What are you complaining about?

Yeah, this is what the 70s did this to everybody, I guess. Santo is not immune.

He snorted a couple of rails, just him and Halston at Studio 54. Next thing you know, he's cheating on his girlfriend and using guns. Yeah.

All right. So these are the questions we traditionally ask of every zombie movie we watch in an effort to place that movie in the context of the evolution of the zombie film genre. So we start out by asking in Santo and Blue Demon vs the Monsters, is there a hero party?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, Santo, Gloria and Gloria's father.

How do they do? How many survive?

All of them.

All of them do. Yes. We think maybe Gloria died at one point, but that is that that tension is instantly.

We don't know if she's a zombie, actually.

She could be a zombie.

That's what we know.

Yeah.

All right. Tell me about the zombies in this movie. What strain of zombie are we dealing with?

They are. We don't know. He just has them. I assume they're mad scientists created zombies, but they just show up at the beginning of the film.

I think all we know is that they are dead criminals, and that there may have been some limb transplants done on them.

But it's not miscalculated. Even though he's a zombie master, it's all science-based.

Some sort of energy has been used to restart their bodies.

Yes.

Oh, so yeah, we didn't mention there is some, like, is it a ring or a... I don't know what the heck that was. There's some sort of like a device that Halder seems to use to force...

To control the zombies, yes. He has some sort of a, like it emits a high-pitched noise, yes, indeed. Yeah.

I expected, you know, that that would be plot important or that Santo would sabotage it later, but I did not.

We have time for that.

So, yeah, but all of that says science zombie to me, not mystical zombies. Right. All right. And how fast are these zombies? Slow, regular, human speed, or are they fast ones?

I don't think anything in this movie is fast.

They are. So, yeah. So we'll say the same speed as everybody else in the movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So these are zombies that, you know, aside from not talking, they appear to be able to function normally, right? They can fight you like a human would fight you. They can drive a car or at least a horse-drawn carriage.

Yes.

All right. How are zombies destroyed or killed in this?

You knocked their head off with your Morningstar.

Yeah. One of them is decapitated. Presumably, that has killed it.

Well, that's interesting because when that happens, the other zombies just look at them like, whoa. Like, that could happen to us. They have this moment of like...

They're like, Santo, too much club, man. Come on.

Yeah.

After an early fight against the zombies in this movie, Santo does say something along the lines of like, now we know that they're invulnerable or something.

Yes.

He does say that. That's right.

But you can still knock their head off, which seems to do the trick. All right. Is there a zombie horde in this movie?

A horde ish. Three.

Yeah. That's like a squad.

At one point, there's like five. It seems to be like they attacked the car at one point, and there's like more than just three.

But yeah.

You don't get that sense that you're being overwhelmed by zombies and that great George Romero man. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

If we were in the 50s and talking about our hordes, we were desperately trying to find a horde, we'd say like, oh, this is horde ish.

You know what I mean?

But we've seen a bunch of hordes at this point, so this doesn't feel like a horde at this point.

Well, that brings out the point. After Night of the Living Dead, maybe our reference points change in how we calculate all this.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, at most we have like a gang of zombies, but not quite a horde, I think.

A gaggle.

All right, are there any new zombie firsts that we need to call out? Did this film introduce anything to the zombie canon that we haven't seen before?

Blue Demon.

That's right. Was he a zombie? I don't know.

His first appearance in a zombie film. Yeah, that's it.

Oh, okay, right.

Nothing of real relevance.

That's it. We haven't had wrestling zombies before.

Yeah, we've had decapitated zombies before. It's all nothing too new and exciting here in that respect. Can zombies return to human?

No.

All right.

Can the audience? So John.

We'll check in with your hobby in 10 minutes, I see.

Everybody report back in in a week to let us know what you're doing. All right. At the beginning of this podcast, we identified four pillars of the zombie movie. That John called out as being integral to the genre as we know and love it. Let's walk through those four pillars and see if any of them are present in the Santo movie. All right, guys. Is there an apocalypse in Santo and Blue Demon? No.

It's a small story about a family.

Is there contagion in this movie?

No. You have to go through a process and get stuck in a machine and all this stuff.

So, no. It's a very involved process. Are there tough moral choices in this movie?

Not as part of the narrative, but perhaps on the part of the creators of the film.

Lastly, though, we might get hit on this one.

Yeah.

Does this movie feature loved ones turning against you?

Yes.

I mean, yeah, that's the whole plot. Blue Demon turning against Santo, his most trusted friend, sometime rival, but always respected partner turns on him.

I wish Santo had not just accepted it so readily that Blue Demon turned against him.

I know I'm asking-

Something must be going on. He's like, I guess we're not friends anymore.

Yeah.

There's one moment where someone is expressing shock, well, when someone is saying, well, maybe Blue Demon is jealous of you because he's your rival, and Santo does say, well, but we're only rivals in the ring, like outside of best friends. Yeah. That's the extent of any emotional content in this entire film, I think.

So normally here, Andy had come up with a bunch of really interesting questions that we thought would define 1960s films. Like is there more questioning of authority and increase of violence and grittiness? However, it's 1970. So in our 70s episode, we will be coming up with a new set of cultural questions for the decade, and so we're not going to go through the 60s questions this time. However, that means I just throw it back to you for the last three, Andy.

Yeah. So we always close each episode with three questions. So these are questions for all three of you guys. Would John, Andy, and Javier survive the zombie world of Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters? What say ye?

I think so.

I think we could.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, unless like we were the victim of one of the monsters, but it's not a very broad affair. Like I don't see us getting dragged in necessarily. And a lot of fights just end inconclusively. So I think we'd be fine.

There is that, you know, when we get the montage of the monsters going around killing Rando's, if the movie had continued along that path, then I think, you know, real chaos could have been introduced into the city. But after that, Halder narrows his ambitions to just taking out Santo and his immediate loved ones. So I think I'd be okay because I'm not the sort of person, I don't think I'm cool enough to be friends with Santo. All right, guys, is this a zombie movie or is this just a movie with some zombies in it?

It's a movie with some zombies in it. Because even the title says, against the monsters. So you get this, there's a variety, a gaggle.

They're not even proud enough of their zombies to put them in the opening credits and have them walk by for a little while. Last question, guys, do you recommend this movie? Firstly, just as a movie that everyone should take time out of lives to go and see? And secondly, do you recommend it specifically to the zombie loving listeners of this podcast as a film that has something special for zombie fans?

You first, Javier, as you are our guest.

This one feels, look, like we've been saying, it feels a little tossed off. And I don't think that the zombies are a big enough part of the movie to really merit a recommendation, you know?

I agree. My recommendation is go see the first, if you haven't watched Santo vs Zombies, go watch that one instead. I think there's other good Santo movies out there. This just isn't one of them.

Yeah, I agree.

It's got the camp, but none of the heart, I guess is what I'd say.

Yeah, I mean, I've seen a grand total of two Santo movies, so I'm no expert. But this movie, the other one we saw had some heart to it. You were smiling with Santo, you were cheering for him. This one, there's just not a lot to get very excited by in this film, I thought.

Lots of filler.

All right, well, that's a wrap on our questions, which means it's time for the scariest part of this episode, which is when producer Brad lets us know what we will be watching next.

So our next film is 1970, just a few months after Santo and Blue Demon versus the Monsters.

Okay.

Here it is. Here's the poster.

No, wrong poster.

Santo and Blue Demon in the World of the Dead.

Oh my goodness. Whoa.

You threw me. We're going to watch another Santo movie right away? All right.

Guys, we are almost becoming a Santo podcast.

Same director.

All right. I'm getting a kick out of this poster. Javi, do you want to describe it?

Yeah. It's Santo and he's in a fighting pose. He's wearing his silver tights and his mask obviously, and the Blue Demons on the other side. The title, The World of the Dead is between them and also between them appears to be Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera. Right?

Yes.

And then beneath, but they seem to be standing on a coffin, inside of which is a woman. You can, the coffin is sort of cut out so you can see that there's a woman inside of it. But it's interesting because the way the poster looks, it looks like they're standing on top of the coffin, in which case the other one's keeping the woman in the coffin.

Yeah, that's not good.

Yeah. Get off the coffin.

Let that woman out.

Yeah, but this looks like an actual zombie movie.

Yes, yes.

Yeah. This does look like a more traditional zombie movie poster.

I'm willing to give Santo a chance to redeem himself.

Yes. Okay. Excellent.

All right. Well, I'd like to say thank you to Javier and joining us. Go listen to Multiplex Overthruster. It's awesome. It's hilarious every time. They take the same joy in maybe not the greatest movies that we do.

Yeah, go listen.

If you like this podcast, you'll like that one for sure.

Thanks you guys for having me. It's so much fun talking about these movies. They're such a big part of my childhood, so thank you guys so much.

Yeah, that's awesome. In any case, while I'm thinking of it, subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to Javi's podcast and rate them both five stars in the iTunes store. I guess I should say the podcast app. So in any case, thank you and we'll see you next time for more Santo. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.