Luchador

Luchador films are Mexican genre pictures in which a masked lucha libre wrestler fights monsters, mad scientists, gangsters and the occasional Aztec mummy, and also wrestles.

El Santo

Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, known as El Santo, the Saint, is one of the most famous people in Mexican history and almost nobody outside Mexico has seen his face. He wrestled from 1934, appeared in more than fifty films, and kept the silver mask on in all of them. He wore it in interviews. He was buried in it.

He unmasked once, briefly, on television in 1984, a week before he died.

The word, and the mask

Luchador is Spanish for wrestler, the feminine is luchadora, and lucha libre means "free wrestling". Masked wrestlers guard their identities, and a mask can be staked in a lucha de apuestas, where the loser is unmasked or has his head shaved. Not everyone wears one: Tarzan Lopez, Gory Guerrero and Perro Aguayo did well without. Mexico City declared lucha libre intangible cultural heritage in 2018.

How the films started

Santo took the silver mask in 1942. He turned down a 1952 superhero serial, The Man in the Silver Mask, because he thought it would fail, and the part went to another luchador, El Medico Asesino. His own film career began in 1958 with two films shot in Cuba for the wrestler-actor Fernando Oses. Shooting wrapped the day before Fidel Castro entered Havana, and the films sat without a distributor for years. The breakthrough was Santo contra los zombies (1961), his first starring role. Once he was a star, the producers of the first two put his name in the titles and got them released.

He made 53 luchador films between 1958 and 1982, two of them cameos. Only four were dubbed into English, mostly through K. Gordon Murray, who sold them to US television and drive-ins and renamed Santo "Samson" for some releases. The best known abroad is Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962); Santo vs. the Martian Invasion is the sci-fi side, and Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters teams him with his real-life rival.

Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Superzan and the Wrestling Women (Las Luchadoras) all got their own series. The masked-wrestler craze had largely died by 1977, and Santo's last film was Fury of the Karate Experts, shot in Florida in 1982, the year he retired from the ring. Outside Mexico the cult produced the Turkish bootleg 3 Dev Adam, which put an unlicensed Santo opposite Captain America.

The formula

A plot involving a criminal or supernatural threat, roughly forty minutes of investigation, two full wrestling matches inserted at intervals whether or not the story requires them, and a laboratory set that recurs across dozens of films because it belonged to the studio.

The matches are the point for the domestic audience and the reason the pacing looks so strange to everyone else.

The others

Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras had their own series, and the three regularly appeared together. The films crossed over freely with Mexican gothic horror, which was running in parallel and sharing the same crews and sets.

The K. Gordon Murray versions

Many of these reached American television in the 1960s through the distributor K. Gordon Murray, dubbed cheaply and retitled without much regard for accuracy. The dubs are how most English-speaking viewers encountered them, and they are considerably stranger than the originals.

Start here

Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962) first: the best-shot film in the series, later run on Mystery Science Theater 3000, to the annoyance of people who take Santo seriously.

1. Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962): the best-looking Santo picture.
2. The Brainiac (1962): no wrestler, but the same Mexican monster boom and the same nerve.
3. Santo vs. the Martian Invasion (1967): Martians in togas.
4. Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters (1970): every monster at once.
5. 3 Dev Adam (1973): the export version, a Turkish knock-off with a Mexican wrestler fighting a murderous Spider-Man.