Lately, I've been watching a lot of Mexican luchador movies, as I've discovered quite a few with English subtitles on YouTube. You might wonder 'what are luchador movies?'. Well, luchadores are wrestlers...and for decades Mexico has been gaga for pro wrestling. So gaga, that they made many (perhaps a couple hundred, perhaps more) films featuring these masked brawlers as heroes fighting all sort of bizarro baddies. After all, Dracula, mummies, aliens and more are regularly seen in the films. And, of the many luchadores who made these films, Santo and Blue Demon were probably the most popular and they made tons of them in the 1960s-80s...and still make them today! Santo made 52 and Blue Demon made 26...but there were other famous wrestlers who also made many films, such as Mil Máscaras, Blue Angel as well as El Hijo del Santo (the Son of Santo).
These films certainly are strange and the production values are always suspect. And, they are all pretty bad when it comes to the technical aspects of the story....scripts, acting, direction and, especially, make-up. But there also is something charming and silly about them that make them fun to watch....if you don't mind watching such nonsense.
In "Santo y Blue Demon Contra el Doctor Frankentein", the duo fight the doctor...but not the original but the mad doctor's mad grandson, Irving! But Irving isn't trying to create monsters like his famous granddaddy. Instead, he's been kidnapping women and performing brain experiments on them...hoping to perform the first successful brain transplants on his long-dead wife! He also is intent on using his dubious skills to terrorize mankind because, well, it's a lot of fun! Can Santo and Blue Demon stop this jerk?
This film has a lot to it. In addition to the above plot, the doctor has created a man who is supposedly 20x stronger than normal and he also wants to transplant a docile drone's brain into Santo's! There's also the kidnapped girlfriend, the obligatory wrestling matches and fights galore with Blue Demon and Santo taking on the doc's minions.
So is it any good? Nah....but the production values of this one are a bit better than normal for a luchador film. Plus, it's funny throughout...though I doubt if the movie makers intended this! Fun and stupid all rolled into one!
* Considering how dopey this film is, I think Irving should have FIRST tried transplanting the writers' brains! At least then it couldn't have hurt!
