One of the most famous wrestlers was El Santo, who, besides his 40-year wrestling career, appeared in some 50 movies (always as himself: part-time wrestler and full-time superhero). One of these, Santo vs. the Martian Invasion, (Santo el enmascarado de plata vs. la invasion de los marcianos) was released a few years ago on DVD, and one of my snooty movie magazines actually recommended it. So, it had been on my list of movies to see, but I’d pretty much given up hope of finding it. Then, milagro, the Hirshhorn museum, of all places, shows it — for free!
The movie was introduced by a professor from University of Maryland who’s an expert on El Santo — I wasn’t really clear if he actually teaches this or if it’s just a hobby, but he was surprisingly droll and must be the only good thing to come out of the University of Maryland (I'm not fond of the Terps). He told us that El Santo never appeared in public without his mask from the day he started wrestling until just two weeks before his death, about 40 years later, in 1984 (which means that the movie contains surreal scenes like Santo lounging on his bed, decked out in mask, cape, and spandex pants that leave nothing to the imagination). He informed us that the movie’s director had also made a few “non-Santo movies,” which for some reason amused me greatly, and I think I’m going to refer to all movies I see from now on as “non-Santo movies,” unless, of course, they are Santo movies.
Anyway, this is prime Mystery Science Theater 3000 stuff, 1960s cheezy sci-fi, plus wrestling — a veritable embarrassment of riches. See, this group of Martians comes to Earth to convince Earthlings that they have to live in peace and get rid of nuclear weapons, and if they don’t, the Martians are going to kill them. The Martians, incidentally, are beefy men and rather beefy women (the women exhibit spectacularly poor dancing skills) who have a lethal third eye on their elongated foreheads. They choose to pick on Mexico, in just one of the movie’s countless inexplicable plot points, because Mexico is a pacifist nation — so, apparently, just the right people to kill to make your point about the need to live in peace. The only one who can save the Mexican people — and the world — is El Santo.
The Martians can materialize and dematerialize at will, although bizarrely accompanied each time by an ambulance siren, and this never fails to utterly flummox Santo, no matter how many times he witnesses it. Every single time a Martian disappears on him, he stumbles around, bewildered, looking around like maybe the Martian completely vanished only to reappear two feet to the left. Of course, this behavior might spring from the limitations that a full-face silver mask perforce imposes on the actor’s ability to convey emotions and ideas to the movie audience. For example, when Santo is puzzled, since we can’t see a furrowed brow, he has to rest his chin on his fist, like Rodin’s Thinker.
Not that you’d have to do much thinking to outwit the Martians. This will give you some idea of their advanced civilization: they have a giant lever in the middle of their spaceship that, if pulled, will blow up the ship. Because every spacecraft should have a mechanism to destroy itself instantaneously, and it should be as easy to accidentally bump into as possible. And the Martians decide that their appearance is scaring the Earthlings (uh, you’re sure it’s your appearance and not your tendency to kill everyone you run across?), even though they pretty much look exactly like Earthlings except for the third eye, so they go into a “transformation chamber” and come out looking exactly the same except that the third eye is gone (which was probably a relief — the men were visibly trying to keep it from getting knocked off their heads during fights) and, in a complete non sequitur, they’re dressed like they just stepped out of a Hercules movie. They subsequently take names from Greek and Roman mythology to be “more familiar” to the Earthlings — because, you know, when I think Mexico, I think Greek mythology.
The wrestling scenes could charitably be described as interminable. It might have been more bearable had we known the rules of Mexican wrestling, to the extent there are any (head-butting the ass, kicking the groin, and punching all seem to be permissible) — as near as we could figure out, whoever tears the other guy’s mask off wins, although this is complicated somewhat when the other guy turns out to be wearing two masks.
Anyway, I guess it’s really the type of movie that must
be seen to be believed, and you should by all means see it. For those
of you in DC, next Thursday (July 15), the Hirshhorn will be showing Santo
vs. the Vampire Women, but it’s dubbed instead of subtitled.
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