Santo vs. the Riders of Terror (1970)

The masked wrestling movie is a unique invention of the Mexican film industry and Santo was the king of the genre. Most of these movies feature a masked wrestling hero (almost always a real-life wrestler playing himself) doing battle with such monsters as Dracula, Frankenstein, or the Wolf Man. But, this particular movie is a little different from the bulk of the masked wrestling genre movies, because this one is actually a western.

Santo’s wrestling career stretched through five decades, while his film career touched four decades, and his legend lives on to this very day. Several of his films were dubbed into English in the sixties, a couple of these films were altered to make Santo’s name Samson, and enough people saw them that it lead to a minor American cult for Mexican masked wrestling movies. The movies were all very exploitation oriented and the director of this particular movie, Rene Cardona, was Mexico’s reining champion of exploitation cinema. With nearly a hundred and fifty directorial credits to his name, Cardona was certainly a director that liked to keep busy, and he also acted in over a hundred and twenty movies too. One thing that Cardona was very good at was imitating other filmmakers, particularly hit filmmakers, if a movie was exploitive and successful, it was more than likely going to find its way into Cardona’s bag of influences, and he would usually rip it off at some point. Oddly enough, there were two things that were popular in the cinematic world when he made this little movie, one was George Romero’s incredibly successful horror movie called the Night of the Living Dead, and the other was spaghetti westerns in general. In a very odd way Santo vs. the Riders of Terror is the bastard child of these two elements. If that statement sounds a bit confusing, I promise to clarify it in a little bit.

Santo vs. the Riders of Terror features Santo as a sort of Mexican variation on the Lone Ranger or perhaps the Durango Kid. I say that because there really isn’t precedent for a masked wrestling western hero, but the Lone Ranger, and to a certain lesser extant the Durango Kid are a couple of the best examples of great masked western heroes. So, we have a silver masked cowboy hero, who can wrestle really great, that’s a new one. By the way, he doesn’t wear a hat, but he does have silver colored cowboy boots, I happen to have a fairly decent sized collection of cowboy boots myself, and even I never felt the desire to own a pair of silver colored boots, but I digress. Basically, in this movie, Santo is a masked hero that travels from town to town, at some point in the late nineteenth century, and tries to set the wrong things right. In that sense, the Lone Ranger analogy truly does work here.

This movie opens with the escape of a group of lepers from a local sanitarium, they proceed to rob from a few locals, and the panicked locals demand action from the sheriff. The sheriff sends word to Santo, who rides into town ready to help. Things only go from bad to worse when a local bandit approaches the lepers to help him in his criminal endeavors. Can Santo save the day?

I can’t easily recommend this movie to the casual film watcher, because it’s kind of loopy in its oddness, and it’s really only for the truly initiated. If it sounds entertaining to you, please try it out, because you may not love it, but you surely will not forget it. It’s made with a lot of kooky style, for one thing, the influence of Romero comes across in the way that Cardona films his lepers, and they are photographed in a way that is very similar to Romero’s presentation of his zombies in the Night of the Living Dead. That said, despite the fact that the western aspects of the film are very reminiscent of old b-westerns, I believe the only reason that Cardona felt like it would be a good financial decision to make a western, was due to the fact that spaghetti westerns were doing very well at the time, and he figured that movie audiences might like a Santo western.

In the end, it’s not great; it’s mildly imaginative, and rather entertaining, if you want to enter this strange world that is the masked wrestling movie. So, if this sounds like your cup of tea, give it a taste.

-William J. White

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older