Santo and the Vengeance of the Mummy (1971)

We're back into the wonderful world of Mexican wrestling with this charming adventure, Santo and the Vengeance of the Mummy! Santo, who's real name was Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta started his professional wrestling career in the middle of the thirties and kept fighting until his retirement in 1983. About one year later he did a talk show appearance and showed his face, quickly, for the first and only time. He then went home about a week later he died. Did he break the magic? "Bullshit or Not?" as Henry Silva would say in Amazon Women on the Moon. We will never know, but deep inside I feel it was something weird going on. On the other hand, he was a great artist - an entertainer, and what a way to go!

This film beings, as usual, Santo fighting two dangerous opponents: Gori Casanova and Angelo, and is almost defeated - when he's suddenly gets his strength back and beats them both! Lucky for us, wouldn't be so much movie left without him! This time he follows his a professor and his crew out in the jungle to excavate an old Aztec (I suppose it is...) temple and their gold is to find the tomb of Nanoc, a legendary warrior! The find it - very easy - and goes back to the camp... but so does Nanoc - armed with bow and arrow, and he starts killing of the team members one by one... and now it's up to Santo to stop him!

Like the one I reviewed yesterday, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein, this one has an amazing flow. It waste no time with character development, and instead we gets an awesome wrestling match - shot with a real audience and with the same typical flair as usual from director René Cardona. It feels real and the handheld camera and lack of a static studio background helps the action. Then there's a very typical, close to mega-generic, jungle adventure, but in that charming way - in a studio and with a few pick-ups here and there on location. It also sports some very neat stock footage from a bigger budgeted movie with Aztec Indians slacking around a very cool temple.

One annoying detail is the presence of Son of Santo, Santo's real son, who plays some farmer boy being adopted (!) by Santo! He's not as annoying and awful as the Japanese kids with short trousers and cap slumming in our beloved Kaiju films, but because of his stupidity the mummy actually kills more people than he what was probably planned from the beginning - and the boy even doesn't feel sad when his dear grandpa dies by the rotting hands of the monster!

There's not much wrestling in the jungle either, except the end fight between Santo and Nanoc - but it's never boring and there's two great fights in the ring to look forward to. Maybe not the best Santo movie to start with, at least if you want wrestling all the time - but its a good matinee adventure and well worth watching!

Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (1974)

I'm pretty new to Mexican wrestling films and I'm sure I've reviewed everyone I've seen so far (not many) here on Ninja Dixon. The thing is that I've love what I've seen so far. It's right up my alley of entertainment. It's like Godzilla, but with beefy Mexican wrestlers fighting baddies instead of monsters (well, some of them are monsters!) and saving girlfriends instead of the world. The biggest is of course Santo, but I'm sure Blue Demon wasn't far behind in popularity. They did a couple of extremely entertaining movies together and Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein is one of the more famous and popular ones. Not that it's original in anyway, but it has an amazing flow, it's never boring and a story so silly it's genius.

Dr. Irving Frankenstein, the son of Victor Frankenstein, has used some of inherited knowledge to give himself eternal life. But guys who lives forever easily gets bored and instead of just relax, see the world etc, Irving decides to be a master criminal instead and creates living dead henchmen who will help him to rule the world or something like that. He also needs a new brain for his girlfriend. But this time his luck runs out - when he kidnaps the girlfriend of Santo! Santo and his pal, Blue Demon, takes over the investigation - as usual - from the police and saves the day!

Spoiler? No, come on! It's a Santo movie. They're - what I have seen - built the same way: bad guy doing something bad, Santo having  a wrestling match with someone, baddie kidnaps his girlfriend, he takes over the investigation from the stupid cops and finishes the whole movie with yet another exciting game of wrestling. I love it. It's safe and entertaining and you won't be disappointed. But let's be honest. It's often not that much to analyze with a movie like this. It's exploitation. It's made to earn a quick buck at the local cinema, be sold to TV and then fade away into obscurity. But thanks to DVD many of these awesome productions gets a new life.

I'm not especially nostalgic, but I enjoy a movie like this for what it is - and that it's so shamelessly out there. It's just colours, cool fights, men in masks, beautiful women and cheesy storylines. Perfect for a hard-working Mexican man to sit down with after work, open a can of beer and fall asleep to. It's working-class cinema without teaching any lessons or pretending to have a message.

Truth be told, this one - and the others - are quite well-made. The stunts, often mixed into the fights, is cool and the fights themselves are fast and looks dangerous. Probably more choreographed than they look. This movie is also very stylish, in a comic book way. It's the same director, Miguel M. Delgado, who directed another fine piece of Santo/Blue Demon cinema: Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolfman, a movie as awesome as its title. If you want to start watching Mexican wrestling cinema and think both these movies a prime examples of entertainment, a perfect start!

Santo: Infraterrestre (2001)

Once upon a time I was asked by a big organization (nowadays SweWrestling.com) in Sweden, who gathered fans of American wrestling together for joy and fun, to write a guest piece for their homepage. I did, and after that I realized that 99,9 percent of all wrestling fans is dim-witted and completely lacks a sense of humour. Some of them even threaten to kill me. If you know Swedish you can read it here at my old blog! I became more happy many years later when I finally sat down and watched my first Santo movie and saw how many fantastic and love-filled fans of Mexican movie wrestlers there was out on the big interweb and got hooked directly. I still refuse to watch actual wrestling, but the Santo (and Blue Demon) films are fantastic and passionate action/wrestling/horror/sci-fi flick with more passion than everyone on SweWrestling.com together. It's still kinda hard to find Santo movies with English subs, but here and there you can find them and today I have Santo:Infraterrestre a chance, starring Son of Santo (aka Hijo del Santo), where they tried to reboot the Santo franchise in the same old cheap way as possible. This could have been good...

In ancient times the local extra terrestrials had to flee underground when a big meteorite hit earth - and now they want their earth back! Lead by Blue Panther, a wrestler, they try to infiltrate society. The only one who can stop them is Santo! Our hero quickly discovers that his new wrestling-nemesis Blue Panther is an alien (he doesn't black and he has too quick movements) and together with some brave cops he tries to solve that mystery. But one surviving witness to an alien attack, a little annoying boy, is in danger and now it's up to Santo to protect him from the underground alien terrorists!

This could have been very good, but Santo: Infraterrestre only stops at charming and kinda lingers there the whole movie until it's over and too late to do something about it. It's not the cheap production or the lack of production values, that's something that you can find in most of the vintage Santo films, it's the lack of competent directing - mostly at the action front. Son of Santo is good in the ring, but he lacks his fathers competence to fight in a normal, non-soft, environment. The fights, especially the so-important final fights, are weak and uninspired and it just makes me angry to see Santo always looking where to fall or avoiding to not hurt himself on something dangerous.

When Santo Sr fought his enemies in secret labs, in caves, in kitschy living rooms, he more or less destroyed the sets with cool somersault into furniture... and other wrestling moves that I don't know shit about. Here it's just... blah... and then nothing. Santo Jr isn't in the movie that much either. Much space is taken by the boring cops running around shooting bad guys with the worst fake muzzle flash since... that movie I made for fun with some pals eighteen years ago. The bad CGI doesn't bother me at all, it's not that much anyway and it's has enough of cheap plywood sets for fans of the old and unconvincing.

Yeah, I sound very negative now - and yeah, I'm disappointed because with some more talent this could have been a fun little movie. Or at least a lot more fun and exciting than it is now. Maybe the director and producer didn't trust in the Santo trademark, afraid it would be too silly for a modern audience?

Well, let me tell you one thing: Santo never becomes out of date. Never. 

Santo vs. the She-Wolves (1976)

Now, ladies and gentlemen, you will read a review that's far from objective. It's actually shamelessly subjective, more than usual - believe it or not. Some days you find a movie that's so gritty and dirty, non-polished and dark, but still possesses that fantastic feeling of "having fun". Santo vs. The She-Wolves is one of those. I haven't seen many Santo movies yet, but this one differs in several ways from the flicks I've seen so far - and I just love what the director(s) did with this 47th movie in the saga about Santo, el Enmascarado de Plata!

Shit is about to hit the fan when a village of werewolves chooses their new werewolf queen. They have more or less one thing to do before they can take over the world and that's to kill the last remaining man who's immune against the werewolf-illness. And that man hires Santo to stop the werewolves once and for all! Which... is easier to say than actually do, and Santo probably meets his toughest opponent EVER!

This Santo adventure is very far from the comic book adventures I've seen before. Gone is the colourful sets and the feeling of a kiddie matinee. This is more closer to Spanish horrors of the seventies, but even grittier and down-to-earth. The movie itself looks cheap and everything seem to be shot on real locations. There's a lot of hand-held camera and more than ever shadows is important to the visual approach of the story. The fights are a bit bloodier and more rough around the edges and the traditional sequences of arena wrestling is more or less documentary footage from real fights!

So Santo vs. The She-Wolves isn't for kids, but this is a Santo flick for us older who wants something more. It's more horror than ever and in at least two sequences it feels like a awesome werewolf-zombie movie. The first one is when the werewolves attacks a dance - first turning of the lights and then butchering the guests (until Santo saves the rest) and the other is a fantastic scene when a bunch of kids and two grown-ups is trapped inside a car being attacked by werewolves from all sides while driving through the wilderness. This is insanity, illness, made to look like a werewolf-movie.

The only time I laughed was when Santo was attacked by a pack of dogs and - believe it or not - needs to call for help to be able to survive! I never thought I would see that, but it also makes him more human - which I always felt is the strength of Santo. He's not a traditional superhero, he's just an awesome wrestler who wants to do some good for society, blonde women and kidnapped relatives.

Santo vs. The She-Wolves might not be for everyone, but for me it's a minor masterpiece!

Santo in the Wax Museum (1963)

A couple of weeks ago I saw my first Santo-movie, the excellent and fun Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolfman (love titles like that!). I loved every second of it and the next morning I ordered a couple of them. The first one to arrive was Santo in the Wax Museum, in a nice English DVD release. A sharp fullscreen print and in Spanish! Lovely! It's hard to find any deeper meanings in a movie like this. Santo has his mask, someone gets kidnapped, he's trying to solve the mystery and then there's a lot of wrestling, off and on the arena! Like good old Mr J once said, it's like a Godzilla - you know exactly what you get!

The sinister Dr. Karol (Claudio Brook) has just opened a ultra-realistic wax museum in town. Everyone from Gary Cooper or Stalin is portrayed and down in the basement there's a classic horror dungeon with all the classic monsters. But Karol has more plans than just entertain people with his wax figures, he also wants to take over the world with the help of four pig-men (and a couple of the standard henchmen also of course)! He's suspected in the disappearances of several locals, and to divert the suspicions he hires Santo to try to solve the case - but soon Santo knows who's the real bad guy is and has to use all his wrestling skills to save the world!

Oh, this is goooood stuff. The story is mix between every House of Wax-movie made before this one and with a nice dose of The Island of Doctor Moreau and as usual it's a thinly disguised excuse to put Santo in wrestling fights with Dr. Karol's evil henchmen and the colourful opponents inside the ring. My favourite enemy of Santo in the ring is a French blonde bastard who acts like the stereotypical Frenchman - the nose up in the air, a bit feminine and using a lot of foul play.

The only disappointment was that Frankenstein's Monster, Jack the Ripper, Dr. Jekyll, Stalin and Gary Cooper never came alive, because that would have been almost too cool for school. Instead we get these four ugly pig-men who mostly acts like zombies and can't fight! But don't worry. There's enough fights for the whole family and good one's too. I love the form of fights which is close to acrobatics, but never goes into The Three Supermen-territory. The stunts are painful and spectacular and  it looks quite dangerous most of the time.

The gorgeous black & white photo makes the movie even more great to look at and it keeps the old school horror atmosphere but still mixes in a lot of "modern" Mexican wrestling. You won't get bored watching Santo in the Wax Museum and the R2UK DVD is well worth getting if you can find it. It might be OOP by now. I hope to watch and review a lot more Santo-movies in the future, because I think I struck gold here regarding movies I love and care about!

Hell's Trap (1990)

It’s hard to understand that Hell’s Trap (or the way cooler original title, Trampa Infernal!) was released in 1990, because the fantastic mullets and outdated clothes make it seem more like 1987. Produced by the Galindo Group, and that means – as usual – that this is more or less a family affair. Pedro Galindo III handles the direction duties this time and does it very well. But over to the story:

A couple of youths (I’m not sure they are suppose to be teenagers) goes out on the wilderness to… hunt bear! Dressed in the “latest” fashion and with no obvious skill in hunting bear (but with fixing their hair). After almost killing a rabbit they settle for the night, just to await their horrible destiny: a killer with a pale, anonymous mask on his face, a female wig and Freddy Krueger’s saw-glove on! Yes, saw-glove, no knifes here. This killer is no damn pussy!

To be honest, Hell’s Trap is an effective backwoods-slasher with quite a good amount of blood (but no gore) and well-directed by Pedro Galindo III. Even if the story is extremely unoriginal, the killer is creepy and the kids (at least) funny to look at. The action, chases and so on is shot better than usual in this kind of low-budget flick and delivers a few surprising deaths.

This is one of the first Mexican commercial horror movies from the eighties I’ve seen who was shot in Spanish and not dub seem to have been made. Which is a bit weird, because this form of horror movie must have been easy to sell to other markets. This was a time when such an “odd” language like Spanish in a non-art movie surely would have been overdubbed with the more accessible English.

But sure, this is no masterpiece and those who expect something expensive and very graphic will be disappointed. I wasn’t, because it managed to entertain me, which haven’t been possible with a slasher for a long time now.

Don't Panic (1988)

Forget Freddie and Jason. Virgil's the newest nightmare in town.

Yes, Don’t Panic sets the bar high (or low, depend how you see it) and to be fair, it’s a lot better and entertaining than the rumour says. When I first saw it some years ago I wasn’t especially impressed. I found it boring and way over its head in trying to do a serious horror movie. But after all the thousands of movies I’ve seen, it’s actually just a typical eighties horror movie, just with a way lower budget than usual, uglier hair cuts and a pyjamas that defines ugliness.

After some horny Mexican teens play with an Ouija board, they resurrect an evil demon called Virgil! He possesses one of the boys and starts to stalk the curly-haired hero of our movie, Michael (Jon Michael Bischof). Of course no one believes him, not even his alcoholic mother or those who sees the red eyes he gets when Virgil is in killer-mode. Anyway, Virgil goes after everyone that was present when the Ouija board-incident happen with a big shiny knife!

In short this is a Mexican version of A Nightmare on Elm Street, kinda, maybe a bit more of ANOES part 2 (but very straight-safe) plus a healthy dose of The Eyes of Laura Mars. What I appreciate here, even if I love the Freddy Krueger-character, is that Virgil is a serious dude. No jokes, no slapstick. Just killing teens with a big knife. Jon Michael Bischof is not bad in the lead, but he’s the only one carrying the movie too. None of the other actors are really worth watching. The effects aren’t that bad, and quite bloody and Ruben Galindo Jr makes the movie work despite a very weak script.

The truth is, and it’s obvious, that the reason why the movie has a bad reputation is that it’s VERY outdated in fashion, music and a also sports a very naive look at teenagers. I mean, poor Michael is running around in a pyjamas who look like something a five year old could wear, only made for someone close to seventeen.

And because I’m a gentleman I won’t even mention the eyebrows of Gabriela Hassel. Oups, I did it anyway. Darn.

If you can look beyond the mega-cheesiness and the infamous Michael-goes-rampage in his room-scene, this is a decent entry into the eighties horror legacy. Ruben Galindo Jr is one of my favourite exploitation directors, and I can recommend everything horror-related he’s directed. But be prepared for something very cheesy.

Hostages (1980)

One of the best exploitation-directors ever out there is Rene Cardona Jr. Yes, without a doubt! I love the man and I love his work. Sure, some stuff has been less than stellar, but he surely knows how to tell a story and bring some glamour into any kind of b-action movie. Tonites choice in the house of Ninja Dixon was an old favourite, the absurdly action-packed Hostages, a movie that very effectively brings three genres together as one Hugo Stiglitz-o-rama macho-fest!

Some thugs rob a casino, but during the getaway they split up and everything are fucked-up. One part of the gang ends up in a nice, expensive neighbourhood where a rich businessman and his family live. They are taken hostages, and now the fight for survival begins! Outside, somewhere, in a nice beard and with a loaded gun, is Hugo Stiglitz on the hunt to kill some criminals!

The script for Hostages is a fantastic mix of stories, all which works way better than they should. First it’s a heist-movie, which goes wrong. Then a car-chase flick, which leads to a terror-flick and then ends like smaller version of Airport 1975! Yes, this script never let a fan of b-action down! Cardona handles the small budget very well, and delivers a lot of action. Shoot-outs, a good car-chase, another chase where Stiglitz ends up on the roof of a speeding bus, nail-biting tension when the family are trying to save themselves, explosions and finally a small airplane out of control, and it’s up to someone on the ground to talk it down! Every cliché in the book, but it’s so damn entertaining.

One of the funniest scenes are when Stiglitz is on the bus (and it seem to be him, no stuntman) and one of the bad guys has an accident and slams into a van beside the road and lands on the ground with the guts all spilled out! That and a lot of nice squibs and some nudity, makes Hostages both an effective thriller in it’s own right, but also a fine slice of exploitation.

A co-production between Mexico, Italy, Spain and Venezuela, this movie has a fine cast: Hugo Stiglitz, Stuart Whitman, Antonella Interlenghi, Marisa Mell and Francisco Rabal. All doing very fine here, another quality of Rene Cardona Jr’s work – always good performances from everyone involved.

Hostages aren’t out on DVD, not officially. I have an old Swedish x-rental and also a US bootleg, which has ok tape-quality (even if the tape is very worn in the middle of the movie). If you find it cheap it’s worth picking up, or just find yourself a tape on eBay.

They don’t make movies like this any more, which is a pity. The world needs Hugo Stiglitz, Stuart Whitman and Rene Cardona Jr to survive, to be able to cope with natural disasters, the upcoming end of the world, famine and animal abuse. Well, maybe not. But they deliver, as usual, a lot of fun entertainment for the moment – which is enough for me.

La noche de la bestia (1988)

Some days you hit gold, some days you hit shit. Today I took a big scoop of the latter and ate it all too willingly. The reason for this shit-eating is Hugo Stiglitz, a man I’ve been almost sickly obsessed with since I first saw Nightmare City many years ago. The man can be a bit stiff, but he’s still Hugo – the no. 1 sex symbol of Mexico! This time we meet him in this late cheesy entry of eighties horror/sci-fi La Noche de la Bestia!

It’s the for the annual hunting weekend and the boys, including Hugo, is preparing with bringing a lot of beer, fishing equipment, weapons and a jolly good spirit! After at least thirty minutes of chatting, drinking, shooting rabbits and posing in way to small swimming trunks, a woman comes running and after her a truck of gun-crazy wackos in yellow hazmats and impressive mullets. She’s a scientist on the run, escaping from the result of last nights nuclear explosion (yes, believe it or not) nearby. The boys kills her pursuers and gives her shelter in their cabin. But they don’t know that she has a bloodthirsty parasite in her that want to switch body… and not only that, outside a big monster is lurking, hungry for human flesh!

Well, this sounds like fun, yeah? I would say five minutes of this 73 minute long is worth watching, and these five minutes is represented by these screenshots:






That is probably the WORST VISUAL EFFECT I’ve ever seen in a movie, and if you think it looks “ok” here, just watch the movie and see it in movement. If I understand the Spanish correctly they, after watching the huge nuclear explosions, just decide to go to bed and “let the police handle it”. When the parasite takes over Hugo Stiglitz and makes him go rampage for a minute or two is fun and quite bloody, and the monster itself – which looks silly as hell, but quite original – crashes thru the floor and tries to kill our surviving heroes it’s also fun. Ok, the flashback when the scientist’s finds the meteorite is good too and the scene where a guy get his foot ripped off is entertaining too, but that’s about it.

The rest is Hugo and his gang of Mexican macho men talking, drinking, swimming, burping and joking (I think, but they laugh sometime and the story also include an exploding blow-up doll gag). It’s a pity because they have a cabin by the lake, a crazy monster and primitive gore – so why don’t the use it more, dammit?! If I made this movie it would be five minutes talking and the rest just pure monster mayhem! The ending is “meh” by the way, and seem to be a bit sentimental and serious, which is hard to take serious because we just saw a big papier maché monster trying to whip our heroes to death with its tongue!

But I own this on original DVD, which still makes me cooler than all of you. Ha!

Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell (1988)

And now the third part in the Deathstalker-saga, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell! This time shot in Mexico and with John Allen Nelson as our hero. He's no Rick Hill, but he makes the character his own and injects a Robin Hood-esque feeling to the otherwise quite cynical Deathstalker. The story is as usual nothing to remember. The baddie, Troxartas, played by Thom Christopher in a very fun and charming matinée-mode, wants a magic stone. Well, he wants three magic stones. Somehow Deathstalker has one of these, and I just don't remember where the other two are - but the show up finally. Troxartas is also going to marry a princess, and she's good of course just to be able to get the second stone (aha, now I remember!). When he has all three stones he will be able to rule the world or something... like that... Anyway, Troxartas also has a (very small) army of living dead-warriors! But their kinda nice actually, but that's another story. They are of course The Warriors from Hell!

Yeah, I know. It's hard to retell the story. Deathstalker III is just a charming, never boring, adventure-movie with all the clichés you need from this genre. The only thing missing is dwarfs and dragons... not actually, there's a dwarf, but I guess the dragon was to expensive. John Allen Nelson is not bad as Deathstalker, but is very different from Rick Hill in every way. He's more charming and more of a gentleman, but never says no to an adventure of course. The budget is also a bit higher then part 4, and here they actually have quite a big castle! It looks plastic though, so I was thinking if they might have used parts of some kind of theme-park as a location? Or they probably built it very quickly with cheap Mexican labor!

The only disappointing thing with this movie is the Warriors from Hell. Because they're not much of warriors, and Deathstalker just need to chat with them for a couple of minutes and they're best friends for life. The scene where they break out of their papier-mâché-tombs looks kinda cool in a cheap way, and it's just to charming to dislike. I liked part 3, though I guess it's weak compared to Jim Wynorski part 2. You'll see, sooner or later, here Ninja Dixon.

Cemetery of Terror (1985)

I often prefer to watch a really mindless stupid movie after work. I don't mean stupid like everything by Rob Cohen, but more naive, more silly. After watching the fantastic Grave Robbers the other day I decided to give Cemetery of Terror another try. I've seen it before, but felt it was the weaker of the two movies. It's still the weaker, but more fun than I remember from last time.

Hugo "The Man" Stiglitz plays doctor Cardan who's patient Devlon, a serial killer and occultist, escapes one final time to murder some more people. This time he's killed by the police, but Cardan still believes that Devlon is dangerous - even when he's dead! And guess what? A bunch of stupid teenagers decides to have a party in the abandoned house by the cemetery - and to spice things up, they steal Devlon's dead body from the morgue and tries to resurrect with some black magic. Of course they don't expect themselves to actually make him come alive, but you know... kids!

Anyway, he comes back to life again as some kinda demon-zombie and starts killing the teenagers one after one. BUT at the same time a gang of Halloween-pranking kids arrives to the cemetery, and of course they'll meet both Devlon... and his army of the living dead!!! Zombies!!!! It's up to Hugo Stiglitz to save the day!

First the bad stuff. It never reaches the heights of cheesy entertainment as the Grave Robbers did. It takes at least forty minutes of boring talky scenes before anything fun happens. If you can get past that, you will have a fun movie with some gore (but not in any massive amounts, so beware gorehounds) and a lot of cool scenes of quite bloodless zombie-mayhem. First it's more or less Grave Robbers again with stupid kids who's getting butchered in different bloody ways. After that the children arrives, and so the zombies, and suddenly we have something like a family-horror-zombie-movie for the last half hour. Devlon is quite scary, and looks dangerous, and his zombies is lifted directly from EC or Tales from the Crypt. We get a lot of scenes when the zombies is bursting out from graves or crawling up from the earth. It's more or less the same five zombies doing all the job, but it's okey and never is distracting. The effects are most of the time well made, and fits perfect in Ruben Galindo Jr's comic strip world.

It's also exciting to see Hugo Stiglitz back in the zombie-slaying biz (he's almost infamous for his insomnia-performance in Umberto Lenzi's masterpiece Nightmare City), but obviously have more fun here with a striped eighties-style suit, his shirt open up down to just above his navel and of course his well known curly hair and beard. He's hardly credible as a serious doctor, but he owns every scene he's in and also get's his chance to fight Devlon in the end - beard vs beard!

A cool house, a spooky cemetery, some goofy Mexican teenagers, a couple of curious brats, Hugo in fighting-mode: this is not as good as Grave Robbers, but still a funtastic and cheesy movie for all of who are young at heart.

Grave Robbers (1990)

Rubén Galindo Jr. could be one of the most underrated horror directors out there. He made tons of them, often with a lot of blood - and they are hardly mentioned in our respected horror community. Grave Robbers could be his best, or at least most entertaining slice of splatter-cinema. Made in 1990, it look and feels like something from the mid-eighties, which makes it even cooler.

A gang of young and hot grave robbers accidentally finds a secret tomb under the graveyard. It belongs to a famous... satanist... Maybe, at least he was an evil bastard who enjoyed sacrificing virgins to the devil. But now he's dead and buried with a large axe in this chest - a least until the grave robbers (Jorge, Manolo, Raul and so on) decided to steal his gold and grab the axe! Soon they have this axe-wielding zombie after them and it's gonna be a bloody awful night for everyone!

If you haven't seen Grave Robbers (the catcy original title is Ladrones de Tumbas!) you should know that this looks like a long episode of Tales from the Crypt, but with more blood. It's colorful, gory, cheesy, silly and Galindo's idea of scares is cobwebs, skeleton hands, graves, fog and a generous amount of (cheap) graphic gore. There's a lot of axe-cuts of course, a head crushing, stabbings, a belly-ripping (from the inside, by a demon hand!), some general stabbings and decapitations and more. They didn't want so much money on the gore, but it's bloody and fun and shouldn't disappoint anyone.

Grave Robbers is also so stupid that it's hard to dislike it. The characters react like they're from a different planet, and the haircuts and fashion is a different - tasteless - planet too! Sometimes it feels like watching a Mexican soap opera, but with a zombie and some stupid teens in the cast instead of some botoxed "actors" trying to survive another day, another episode of their only life support.

I think this movie is a blast, and almost to much fun for it's own good.