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Santo
In
The Witches Attack
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5
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4 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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"What
am I doing in this gloomy mansion? ... This sinister
furniture... This sordid furniture in the corners...
are silent witnesses of many nights of horror.
Nights of screams and voices from beyond the grave...
that belong to creatures whose steps shake these
dusty spider webs... which imitate diabolical
tentacles... ready to trap in their web whatever
exudes life."
So opens our movie, with a young woman named
Ofelia (María Eugenia San Martín) tossing and
turning abed in the throes of a bizarre nightmare.
She dreams that she's held prisoner by a coven
of shapely, toga-wearing witches about to sacrifice
her to their demonic god, the Lord of Shadows.
A brawny hero in a silver mask and spangled cape
attempts to rescue her but is knocked unconscious
by the witches' henchmen; the masked man, too,
is then chained to the altar for the ritual. The
queen of the witches, the priestess Mayra (Mexihorror
staple Lorena Velázquez),
is resurrected from a corpselike state and summons
the Shadow Lord — a horned Wookie in a cloak and
rumpled, baggy parachute pants — to witness a
double sacrifice. Both the maiden Ofelia and Santo,
the masked champion, are to be slain in his honor.
But at the last minute Santo breaks his bonds
and, standing atop the altar, forms a cross with
his outstretched arms... The witches flee in terror
before this improvised holy symbol. Then Ofelia
wakes from her dream.
Santo En Atacan Las
Brujas (Santo
In "The Witches Attack") is an unusual
adventure for El Mascarado de Plata, much
as The Diabolical Axe
(also 1964, by the same director) differs in tone
and style from the wrestling superhero's earlier
and later films. In some ways it's almost like
a Möbius Strip... Ofelia's dream foreshadows
reality, as the events of that nightmare end up
partially coming true —
over and over again! (Or so it seems, anyway.)
Ofelia thinks that the creepy manor house she's
staying in, the home of her dead parents, is causing
the night-terrors. She wants to leave, but unless
she lives there for a year she'll lose her inheritance
according to the will administered by Ofelia's
strange aunt, Elisa (really the evil witch-queen
Mayra). Ofelia tells her fiancé Arturo (Ramon
Bugarini) about this; he does some checking and
is left puzzled. Aunt Elisa should be in her late
fifties but looks considerably younger. More importantly,
the woman is supposed to be dead —
though Ofelia doesn't know this. Arturo presents
the mystery to crimefighting wrestling hero El
Santo, who naturally agrees to help. When Santo
makes a nocturnal reconnaissance of the haunted
hacienda he's jumped by thugs in the cellar. Later
he's lured to another room in the house by a shapely,
bikini-clad witch named Medusa (Edaena Ruiz, who's
pretty hot but needed to shave her legs). She
tries to put the moves on him —
not of the wrestling kind —
but Santo, keeping a cool head, realizes that
all is not as it seems. ("I'm being subjected
to an infernal seduction!") Next day, after
sending Ofelia to safety at Arturo's parents',
he returns to the house with Arturo to retrace
his movements... only to find cobwebs and inches
of dust where there had been none the previous
night.
The witches then
cause Arturo to have a car wreck (he runs into
some stock footage from City
Of The Dead —
literally!) and kidnap him. Santo promises the
frantic Ofelia that he'll save her fiancé,
but not until after he participates in a totally
gratuitous wrestling match. (Apparently lifted
from another, earlier Santo flick, it's actually
a pretty good one.) Next Ofelia herself is snatched
out from under Santo's nose, slated for ritual
sacrifice to the Lord of Shadows. Surviving an
assassination attempt via poisonous spider, our
hero again springs into action to confront the
witches and rescue his friends. But then he, too,
is captured...
The
Witches Attack
is not a good introductory film to the Santo universe.
It's basically a rehash of Santo
Contra Las Mujeres Vampiros (a.k.a. Samson
Vs. The Vampire Women), complete with Velázquez
as chief villainess, but nowhere near as fun.
Sure, there's the expected unintentional humor
(Santo is shown sleeping in bed, dressed in full
costume!) but the story is just too repetitive.
I realize this is a deliberate theme of the plot
— Ofelia's dream is a prophecy of sorts — but
there's only so many times you can watch Santo
climbing up and over the same wall before boredom
starts to set in. I can recommend it to true-blue
Santo fans but others should steer clear.
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A
description of previous Santo DVDs from Rise Above
Entertainment would almost suffice to cover Witches
Attack. We get the same extras here: a
brief still gallery (almost all screen captures),
the two-minute Best of Santo highlight
reel and trailers for three other discs in Rise
Above's Santo Collection. The film itself is in
the original Spanish with English subs. (In this
case sound effects and dialog are clear but much
of the music has a distinct — and annoying — warble
to it.) Like the other Santo DVDs the full-screen
transfer is battered and damaged, though watchable...
most of the time, that is.
Witches
Attack features the worst looking transfer
of all the RA releases I've seen to date. Parts
of the film (brief ones, fortunately) are so dark
you can barely make out what's going on — this
happens from edit to edit within the same scene,
and (not so fortunately) occurs most often during
Santo's fights with the witches' henchmen. As
someone who enjoys watching the Silver Masked
Man kick ass — it's what he does best! — this
was rather disappointing.
12/22/03
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