Mexico's and maybe the whole of Latin America's most popular Superhero must surely have been famous wrestler Rodolfo Guzmán
Huerta (1917-1984) or better known as - El Santo, el enmascarado de Plata, the man with the mask. In a string of delightfully trashy
and comedic 1960's and early 1970's action-horrors he portrayed the No. 1 Super Hero battling evil gangsters, cackling with glee
super criminals, monsters as mummies and vampires, murderous robots and aliens about to invade Earth.

Like Batman he has his own lab and cool car, the Santo-mobile, but more than using gadgets he prefers to use his wrestling moves
to defeat his opponents. In the 1969 El Vampiro y el Sexo (Santo et le Tresor de Dracula) - read more about this film on my Mexican
Film Page, El Santo builds a Time Machine and a monitor to view stuff that happened a century ago, so he's a scientific genius too.
But in every El Santo film there are long scenes with our hero battling it out in a regular way in the wrestling ring to a loudly cheering
audience. This could be slightly annoying maybe to non-lucha libre fans, i.e. most people outside of Latin countries or the USA.

El Santo is a very likeable hero and even though Lucha Libre action-comedy-horror is quite uniquemexican genre, these films were made
during The Golden Era of Mexican Genre Film (this is my opinion) appr. 1955-1970 when all types of Great horror films were made.
OK, often somewhat trashy maybe but always FUN. For drama afficionados maybe late 1940's and 1950's are considered the Gold era.

When writing this text in 2020 there were some 15 years ago since i watched Santo vs. La Invasion de los Marcianos and that was the
first time on a DVD presenting an El Santo film in a High Quality transfer, before i had only seen blurry public domain transfers dvd's or
old VHS copies. This DVD though was crisp and clear and had some good extras added, as an interview with The Son of Santo, an
illustrated biography and a text written by mexican film expert Juan Carlos Vargas. widescreen 1.66:1 ratio, spanish audio with english
subtitles, black & white

Due to the enormous success of El Santo a Super Great spinoff film series was created - The Las Luchadoras film series with the
beautiful mexican trash film goddesses, actresses Lorena Velazquez and Elizabeth Campbell - read more about these great films on my
Mexican Film Page