EDITOR’S NOTE: Samson In the Wax Museum was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 14, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. It’s Santo en el Museo de Cera. 

You have to hand it to the people who made Santo movies, this time Alfonso Corona Blake (who made Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro) and Manuel San Fernando (who made three Santa Claus movies and the American version of Johnny Socko).

Santo is an obsession for me, as he perfectly finds himself in nearly every genre through his long career. He’s a detective. He fights monsters. He becomes a spy. He appears in a gothic horror occult exploitation film. He battles aliens. He goes to the Bermuda Triangle. And then he’s in a karate movie. Santo can be all of these things and so much more.

This time, I can only assume someone watched House of Wax and thought, “This movie would be better with lengthy wrestling scenes and a masked hero.”

The evil Dr. Karol looks the same as he did when he came to Mexico twenty years ago as the survivor of the Dachau concentration camp. He runs a haunted house packed with some of your favorite monsters that come to life, because have you ever seen a horror movie set in a wax museum where things go well?

By the end of the movie, this gets all Dr. Moreau with animal men get whipped. But you have to love a movie where Santo tells the police he’ll get back to crimefighting just as soon as he finishes his next match.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.