The Drive-In Ronin Presents: Lucha Lunes - Santo vs. Evil Brain

Disillusioned with the #MutantFam yet pledged to the Drive-In Oath, one man walks the Earth in search of the Three B’s (Blood, Breasts & Beasts) and the fabled Kung Fu City. His guiding mantra is that the Drive-In is everywhere…you just need to look for it.

These are his journeys.

He is…The Drive-In Ronin.

Longtime readers might recall that I swore that I’d NEVER discuss professional wrestling on this site.

I might have lied.

In my defense, I still will never mutter a peep about AEW or WWE or whatever passes for professional nonsense these days. I couldn’t care less about that rubbish. Okay…unless Danhausen. Then maybe. No, instead, our Drive-In Ronin travels take us to south of the border…and just in time for Cinco de Mayo. Today, we’re kicking off Lucha Lunes, where we’ll take a look at the rather unique genre of Mexican film: the Lucha Libre film. And if you’re heading down this cinematic highway, you’d do yourself a disservice by starting anywhere other than with the genre’s greatest star, and, even 41 years after his death, El Santo and his films remain a touchstone within Mexican culture itself.

While I encourage you to look into this mythic figure on your own, I’ll provide a brief primer here. El Santo was born Rudolfo Guzman Huerta in 1917 and, while performing under many other names before the alias El Santo stuck, was an active luchador from 1934 (or 35) through 1982, a career of nearly 50 years. In fact, it was very near to the 50th anniversary of the start of his career where El Santo finally passed away, in 1984 at the age of 66. An interesting story that ties into this. Once he’d adopted the mantle of El Santo, Huerta never showed his face in public again…save for once. As a goodbye to his fans, Huerta removed his mask on a Mexican talk show, letting the public see him for the first time. One week later, he was dead from a heart attack.

But what a career. Not only did he have his in-ring fame, but El Santo was also the star of a long-running comic book series and, what we’re here to talk about, a long series of cinematic adventures. And, in what will be many returns to this rich vein of material, we start off with his first: Santo en Cerebro del Mal…or the English title: Santo vs. Evil Brain.

Scientists are disappearing…and while working on the case, so too does Santo, professional wrestler and agent for the police! As the police entrench themselves around Dr. Campos, who they feel will be the next target, Santo returns, but this time in league with the kidnappers. Can Lieutenant Zambrano find the evil mastermind behind these abductions before the villain’s scheme can come to fruition? And can he figure out the reason for Santo’s heel turn?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: this isn’t exactly a deep film. At all. Mad scientist develops a means of mind control, thus turning Santo, a banker…and likely the kidnapped scientists, but we’re never shown that…and plans to not only sell this to the Soviets, but also wants to use it on his assistant’s fiancé, Elisa (who’s also his secretary). To sweeten the pot for the Russians, Dr. Campos also has a formula for cellular disintegration he’s willing to sell them, but it’s this last act of greed that proves to be his downfall. By this point, Santo has been rescued by another masked wrestler, El Incognito, and is now serving as a mole…feeding the police information so they can finally get their man. There’s no drama, no mystery and at times, very little reason to pay attention really. Perhaps the biggest sin however is the fact that not only is Santo not in the film very much (in fact, I’d even dare say that El Incognito seems to have equal screentime) and doesn’t seem to be either the film’s star nor its central protagonist. In all fairness though, that might be due to the fact that Huerta was uncertain as to whether or not he wanted to do movies at all.

This leads us into how many of us in the American audience got to know Santo in the first place: Mystery Science Theater 3000…albeit once under his Americanized moniker, Samson…Samson vs. The Vampire Women and Santo and the Treasure of Dracula. Even here, Santo vs. Evil Brain is rife with riffing opportunities. In fact, it might be more of a challenge to not riff than to riff. [The smartass’s “To be, or not to be” moment. – Ed.] This on its own would be reason enough to recommend the movie.

But there’s a historical context to consider. After all, this is the film that launched a 20-year franchise with anywhere from 2-3 movies a year at the height of their popularity in the 60s and early 70s. Santo vs. Evil Brain does lay the seeds for what will blossom into this massive oeuvre while also showing us glimpses both into the nature of older films and some significant real-world history

Let’s start with the first: the nature of older films. Hollywood films in their ‘Golden Age’, mainly the 30s and 40s with a little spillover into adjacent decades, were more of a “total entertainment” sort of thing. Yes, you had the main story and such, but they’d also be chock full of musical numbers, dance numbers, big events like the chariot race in Ben Hur or a prolonged swashbuckling swordfight scene…so on and such. For the price of a ticket back then, filmmakers did their best to give you a taste of that old Hollywood ‘razzle-dazzle’. While I’m certainly not any sort of encyclopedic font on cinema, it seems to be that every country’s film industry goes through something like this. Take Bollywood for example. Again, you can have these rousing stories, great action scenes, modern special effects…and then everyone breaks out into song and dance. Why? Well, sure, some of it is down to culture, to be certain…but some of it is, simply, their version of old Golden Hollywood. Razzle-dazzle, man, razzle-dazzle.

If Santo vs. Evil Brain is representative, then Mexican cinema had to find itself in this place in the late 50s or early 60s (Evil Brain was filmed in ’59, released in ’61). We have a scene of Flamenco dancing in a casino and at least two very wrestling specific scenes (one of which opens the film). As you’d expect, these lucha scenes would prove to be the foundation of the films going forward, going so far as to just straight up showing lucha libre matches within the context of the film. In fact, in portions of rural Mexico, this might be the only way to actually SEE a lucha libre match with the stars of the day (because there’s ALWAYS a way to see lucha libre in Mexico! Probably…). As I travel further down this lucha-rabbit hole, I’ll be curious to see if matches in the films take on a Corman-like pattern. [For reference, Roger Corman had the nudity in his production company’s films meticulously planned out: topless in the first act, nude in the second, either/or in the third. Or something like that. – Ed.]

One other thing to point out is the real-world backdrop that this film as well as the sequel was shot against. As I already mentioned, this movie was filmed in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution happening in the background. The amazing thing to me is that you really can’t tell. Now, granted, thanks to sound editing and all that, I didn’t exactly expect to hear gunshots or anything, but I expected maybe fewer people in scenes or some buildings showing signs of the conflict. No. Nothing. In fact, everything looks so normal, people driving, eating at restaurants…practically no sign at all that a revolution was occurring. The timing may have something to do with it though, as while they were filming, Castro was entering into Havana…pretty much signaling that the conflict was in its final days. Interviews suggest that the production didn’t have to deal too much with the violence as the granddaughter of producer Jorge Garcia Besne (who also has a role as a Russian agent) relays the tale that they were “protected”…although whether or not is was by the faltering Cuban Military or the revolutionaries is never really clarified. One story I’d love to know more about is that the film lab they used in Cuba refused to release the developed negatives to the production company, so, with fighting nearby and the lab technicians having fled for safety, Besne actually broke into the lab and stole their footage back!

Just such an amazing dichotomy: a bare-bone lucha libre film surrounded by so much history…yet none of it is visible. I’d highly recommend tracking down Powerhouse Films’ blu-ray release of the film as the Special Features included within help provide the background to this interesting behind-the-scenes story much better than I can do here.

Look, Santo vs. Evil Brain doesn’t really stand out much. Yeah, it’s fun and riffable…but it’s also the movie that started an empire. Between that and how it is actually a footnote to a larger historical context, I think it’s worth tracking down. Plus, just the concept: you find yourself transported to a world…not too different from ours…and yet, there are these masked men, luchadores, wandering around in masks and tights, no shirts…and it’s totally normal. I mean, they’re practically, each one of them, a Mexican Batman: serving justice, casually accepted by law enforcement, sought out when needed without a second thought or a bat of the eye toward just how ridiculous it all seems to be. There’s a charm to that…and I can’t help but wonder if that somehow didn’t factor into the popularity of these films. If I grade the movie strictly on its cinematic ‘merits’, giving it a Plain Cat would be generous. But between the film’s history and the fact that this is like issue #1 of a comic or the first season of a new TV show, you have to accept that everyone involved in the film were feeling their way around in the dark…honing what would become a new genre in film. Given what issued forth afterward, Santa vs. Evil Brain was certainly a success. For that, we give it a little nudge upward into Happy Cat territory. So turn off your brain, throw back a few drinks, gather up your best smartass friends and crack some jokes. It’s stupid and it’s fun…but El Santo has only just begun. From what few films I’ve already seen, that we’ll take a look at here later on, this is going to be one fun ride!