Santo vs. the Riders of Terror is a straight-up western except, you know, Santo is in it. It concerns a gang of lepers that has escaped an insane asylum and start to rob farms and attack people. Now, they’ve joined a gang of outlaws and that’s when the lawman Darío calls on the man in the silver mask. The strange thing is that the lepers are portrayed as sympathetic and simply on the wrong side of luck.
Santo eventually kills the gang, rescues the town and informs the lepers that a new drug will change their lives. Seems like a pretty neat wrap-up, all things considered and would be strange for any other film, but at this point, we’ve already seen Santo battle vampires, go back in time and battle Satan himself.
This was written by Murciélago Velázquez, who started as a wrestler and actor before writing films himself. Perhaps his best is El Mundo de los Vampiros. If he and René Cardona were still alive today, I’d ask how Santo went back in time to be in a cowboy movie and why they decided to go all Peckinpah with the squibs.
Five years before this movie was released, wrestler and actor Fernando Osés asked Santo to be in a movie with him. Santo had already turned down Rene Cardona’s El Enmascarado de Plata as he wanted to strictly be a wrestler and thought that the films would fail. Somehow, Oses was able to get the Mexican wrestling star to play his sidekick — Osés plays a masked cop named El Icognito — in this film and Santo contra Los Hombres Infernales. Of course, that wasn’t the title of either film as Santo was meant to just be the second banana. But after Santo contra Los Zombis became a success in 1962, both of these movies were rushed back out with Santo’s name in the title.
Strangely enough, both were filmed in Cuba with production ending literally the exact day before Fidel Castro entered Havana and declared that the revolution was a success. This seems like William Castle kayfabe BS, but who are we to deny Santo (or El Dandy, for that matter).
In the first fight of his film career, Santo loses to a trio of crooks who beat him down to the point that an evil doctor named Doctor Campos brainwashes the man in the silver mask and gets him to commit crimes. Luckily, El Icognito saves Santo, who is called El Enmascarado throughout the movie. By the end, Santo gets his revenge and El Icognito gets a bullet, even if he comes back for Santo contra Los Hombres Infernales.
This film does not fit into the crazed form of the later Santo films, but trust me, things will get much more interesting.
Also: Do not be confused with 1961’s Santo vs. the Diabolical Brain.
Last year, I watched every Saw film in a day or two and it’s not an experience that I would wish on anyone. Well, seeing as how this had the lofty title of Spiral: From the Book of Saw and was directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who also was behind Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV, I was for sure that I was going to hate every single moment of this.
Guess what? I didn’t!
I mean, it’s the best Saw movie I’ve seen and I still didn’t love it, but it didn’t make me continually look at how much time is left in the movie, which is a major improvement on past episodes in the franchise.
Honestly, this movie could have been its own film and had nothing to do with Jigsaw or any of the past films and it would have been just fine on its own.
This film got its start when Chris Rock met Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns at a wedding and decided that doing a horror film would be a new direction for him. He’s right, but it’s kind of like the entire film is Rock testing out his “I’m divorced now” material on the audience, which isn’t all that bad, because I laughed at a lot of it, but I’m also not certain that the film should have been about Rock’s “big divorce energy.*”
Rock plays Det. Marv Bozwick, a man whose father — Samuel Jackson! — was a cop and when he finally became a cop himself, it turns out that everyone was dirty. Well, just from the opening, it seems like maybe Marv is on his way. Or maybe he’s having too much fun playing a criminal. And hey, that scene is never brought back or discussed again.
The idea that a copycat killer is cleaning up the police department is a good one, yet we’re forced to feel sympathy for the kind of cops that have given the justice system the bad name that it currently lives under. There are about five minutes of actually trying to turn this into something interesting before people start getting hung up by their tongues, which is pretty much what this franchise is all about.
The end of this was one of the weirdest edited mishmashes I’ve seen, more given to scattered imagery and flashes than showing what was really happening. It was like they realized they only had a few more feet of film — it’s digital, guys — and just went with what they had. Or maybe this was shot during quarantine and they did the best they could.
That said — the buddy cop aspects of this and where they go were interesting. And I’d much rather see where the Spiral and Mr. Snuggles the cop puppet turn up next than go back to the same story that the other films have mined more times than I thought was even necessary.
Spiral is available in so many formats for your viewing pleasure: a 4K Ultra HDCombo Pack (plus Blu-ray and Digital), a blu-ray Combo Pack (plus DVD and Digital), DVD and Digital On Demand. You can get any of them wherever you choose to buy movies from Lionsgate. The physical media sets also include two commentary tracks: one with director Darren Lynn Bousman, co-screenwriter Josh Stolberg and composer Charlie Clouser and another with producers Oren Koules and Mark Burg.
The five “Champions of Justice” in this film are Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Rayo de Jalisco, Fantasma Blanco and Avispon Escarlata. Sure, we’ve seen Blue and Mil before, but let’s get you up to speed on a few of the others.
Rayo de Jalisco started wrestling in 1950 but didn’t find success — and the gimmick that would get him said fame — until the early 60s. Once he put on the black mask, he quickly won both the NWA World Middleweight Championship and Occidente Welterweight Championship. He was named best wrestler of 1963, as well as forming a tag team with Blue Demon, the man who would take his hair 26 years later in Plaza de Toros Monumental (the same arena where Los Brazos lost their masks to Los Villanos).
Fantasma Blanco is actually Coloso Colosseti, who wrestled as El Internacional (he lost that match to Tinieblas), El Enterrador (that hood was lost in ring to The Tempest), Batman, Maskaraman and Tårzan.
As for Avispon Escarlata — the Scarlet Hornet — he was created for this film and echoes the Green Hornet. He’s played by Manuel Leal, the man who is also Tinieblas. He was a bodybuilder who was scouted by Dory Dixon and the Black Shadow for wrestling, yet before that, he was already in movies, playing Frankenstein in Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos and Satan in Las Momias de Guanajuato. As Tinieblas, he shows up in The Champions of Justice — why he was that role in the first in this series and switched in this one is beyond me — as well as The Castle of Mummies of Guanajuato, Macabre Legends of the Colony, El Puño de la Muerte, La Furia de los Karatecas, El Investigador Capulina and Las Momias de San Ángel. The character was originally intended to be the faceless enemy of the man of a thousand faces, Mil Mascaras! Instead, he became a comic book hero — he had his own book for years — and even has a mascot, the Ewok-like creature known as Alushe*.
One of his nicknames is El Gigante Sabio (The Wise Giant) and he even has a column called Pregúntale a Tinieblas (Ask Tinieblas) where people send him questions to answer. Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons why people thought that he and the respected Mexican commentator Dr. Alfonso Morales were the same person. On August 21, 1970 when Tinieblas made his debut, Dr. Morales was not there. They were both tall men, so the joke for years was that they were the same man.
The main story here is that a team of rat-men — yes, the same miniature henchmen from the original, but now looking like rodents — are trying to take over the world for a Mexican superscience villainess in hot pants named Gatussy. I’m not certain if these guys were men who became rats or rats who became men, yet most of the film is about them swarming all over our heroes.
If you have an issue with a movie about cool lucha dudes riding motorcycles and watching their women go-go dance in between fighting miniature rat men, you should really examine your life.
*Alushe was based on a Mayan mythical elf born in the year 1767 in the city of Anahuac in Xibalba, the Mayan version of hell. When he made his debut in 1988, he was already 221 years old. He was also bribed with candy, money and women by Pierroth Jr.’s group Los Boricuas and suddenly became a Puerto Rican rudo for some time before rejoining Tinieblas. A second Alushe debuted shortly afterward and the original became the blue monkey KeMonito entering into a threeway mascot feud with Mije and the dreaded evil dancing Zacarías el Perico. Man, how much better is lucha libre than pro wrestling?
For some reason, the mongoose to the cobra that is the mad scientist is the lucha libre hero. Across several other films, Neutrón and Dr. Caronte have fought to the death. Literally, I’ve seen Caronte let slip this mortal coil several times in this movie alone.
Wolf Ruvinskis plays our hero and he was known as El Lobo Letonia (The Latvian Wolf). Born Jewish in Latvia to a Latvian mother and Ukrainian father, Wolf began wrestling professionally in Argentina as a way to help put food on the table for his poor family. He toured the world, ending up in Mexico where he wrestled until 1950. Injuries pushed him out of the ring and into acting where he played the lead in Ladron de Cadaveres and as this character in four other movies, including Neutrón vs. the Karate Killers, Neutrón vs. the Maniac, Neutrón vs. the Death Robots and Neutrón the Man in the Black Mask.
Dr. Caronte would inspire the real life rudo Dr. Karonte. According to Luchawiki, Leonardo Morgado, promoter of Arena Monumental, had the idea of featuring Neutrón and Dr. Karonte in the ring. However, there were not many matches between the wrestling versions of Neutrón and Dr. Karonte, as the rudo had a higher status than his archrival.
Arnold Ainger (Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg during World War I yet became one of the biggest leading men of Hollywood; he was also the star of the radio drama The Man Called X), Mrs. Mardick (Mary Boland, The Women), Stewart Corder (William Gargan, who played radio and TV detective Martin Kane) and Judy Jones (Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night) have escaped their bubonic plague-infested ship and ended up on a jungle island populated with primitive natives and wild beasts.
The print ad for this had great copy: “Once…ladies and gentleman…the last remnants of civilization slipped from them with their tattered clothes…Now they were male and female battling the jungle for life…each other for love!”
This is a movie that doesn’t get mentioned in the films of Cecil B. DeMille all that often. This movie looks great, despite being shot on location in Hawaii. Also, while Colbert used a stand-in wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit for the waterfall scene, she was nearly nude in other moments. This was, of course, before the Hayes Code.
The new Kino Lorber blu ray release of this movie features audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton and the original trailer.
Translate this title as Hellish Spiders and you know what Blue Demon is up against and man, is there any better genre in the world than Mexican lucha libre movies? Get this. Blue Demon is up against the entire planet of Arácnea which is trying to cultivate human brains as food for their demanding queen. How magical!
This movie has an astounding wrestling match where Blue Demon’s opponent Arac suddenly has his hand turn into a spider hand that can bite and instantly kill people. Also, after a match, all sweaty, Blue Demon casually explains antimatter to a scientist and I lost what was left of my mind.
This movie needed a UFO scene so of all the movies they could steal a flying saucer from, Federico Curiel lifted the hubcap from Plan 9 from Outer Space. You know what they say: “El talento toma prestado, el genio roba.”
Santo goes on vacation and shoots a movie, then forgets that he needs a wrestling scene and Alfredo B. Crevenna tells him they can fix it in editing, so he just splices in the scenes from La Venganza de las Mujeres Vampiros and says, “No te preocupes, Santo bebé. Van a comenzar en Sasha Montenegro y todo ese metraje del diario de viaje de todos modos.”
Santo is battling voodoo because Live and Let Die came out the same year. That means slow-moving zombies, dudes putting snakes on his chest while he’s sleeping, voodoo ceremonies in which a goat says, “Is that Ruggero Deodato?” before he’s violently killed for real and scientist fathers brought back from the dead.
Bellamira the evil voodoo queen is not beneath using old school tricks like stabbing a Santo doll with pins. I mean, it’s an old fashioned attack but if it works, it works.
The end of this movie is astounding, as Santo goes all Wood Beast in Arboria and challenges the black magic woman to a contest of putting their hands into a basket filled with snakes and seeing who gets bit. Santo must have some experience with Charismatic snake churches because he just walks away like nothing happened while our antagonist dies an agonizing death.
With all the dance numbers, you would not be wrong to believe that Santo wrote this movie off as his 1973 vacation. I don’t see you fighting Dracula, Satan and blobs, so please give the man in the silver mask his PTO.
To enjoy a Santo movie, you must just say, “Well, yes, alright” to all manner of statements. For example, you must realize that Santo is the equal of Batman, a scientific genius who is also a millionaire playboy who the cops rely on to solve all manner of cases but he also wrestles and unlike Bruce Wayne, he never shows up without his mask. Also, his greatest enemies are ersatz Universal Monsters that avoid lawsuits with the way they appear, aliens, demons, witches and, finally, a Nazi scientist who lives in Atlantis and is ready to nuke the world to prepare for the Cuatro Reich.
For some reason, Blue Demon always gets hypnotized and sent after Santo. I much prefer the movies where Leyenda de Azul gets to be his own man or even leads a team of luchadors.
That said, I love any movie where bad guys get speared with javelins, then wither away and die. Oh Aquiles and Juno, Hope Sandoval may have written about you when she sang, “It was you, breathless and tall. I could feel my eyes turning into dust. And two strangers turning into dust. Turning into dust.”
When a team of scientists on the verge of a medical breakthrough suddenly are killed, two agents come together to protect the last surviving scientist while trying to learn why these murders have happened. Seriously, these enemy agents mean business, because this starts with one of them meeting his girlfriend’s family, who he immediately slaughters.
Director Thomas D. Moser usually specializes in special effects, which comes in quite handy here, as this movie has some decent effects. This is kind of what I imagine the pharmaceutical industry is really like, to be honest.
For some reason, this movie is in black and white, despite being set in modern times. I don’t think that will take away from your enjoyment of this.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.