SAMSON IN THE WAX MUSEUM (1963)

This is not a movie about the legendary Biblical hero, or the muscleman hero from Italian peplum films. Samson is actually Santo, a wildly popular Mexican masked wrestler playing himself, pictured at right—the original title is, of course, SANTO IN THE WAX MUSEUM. His name is anglicized for the English dub, although when crowds chant his name in the film, we hear "Santo!" loud and clear. So I have now seen my first luchador movie. You can Google that term, but it basically refers to a series of Mexican films which starred masked wrestlers (playing themselves) who moonlighted as crimefighters. If you take out the wrestling sequences, you have a low-rent superhero movie. I see this, perhaps the first masked wrestler movie to be seen in the States, as a missing link between the classic era serials and the 1966 Batman feature film with Adam West. Rights to produce an English language version of the Mexican film were bought by producer K. Gordon Murray. This doesn't seem to have gotten a theatrical release but I did find evidence of TV showings as early as 1965. Luchador films were tossed into the mix of Chiller Theater movies, and later MST3K riffed a Santo film. Based on their cheesy reputation, I have avoided watching one, but when this cropped up on my YouTube algorithm, I assumed it was a muscleman horror film, so I watched it, and was surprisingly engrossed in it.

Dr. Karol runs a wax museum which features mainstream celebrities (Gary Cooper, Gandhi) but in the cellar, inspired by "the hidden passions in men’s souls," Karol has a chamber of horrors featuring the Frankenstein monster, the Phantom of the Opera, and other bestial figures in the shadowy background. Photojournalist Susan Mendoza snaps some pics for a story, and is invited back by Karol for an in-depth interview that evening. However, she is attacked by a mustached thug and carted back to Karol’s place where we discover that he is a bit of a raving madman. In the war, he was interned, tortured and disfigured at Auschwitz (later, he says Dachau) and now he has invented a process by which he covers living people in a wax-like substance. It paralyzes them during the day when they are the shadowy museum figures but they can be brought to life at night to do Karol's bidding. Because of his damaged face, he hates beauty and plans to subject Susan to both torture and the wax process. When Susan's sister Gloria and her boyfriend Charles realize she's gone missing after visiting the museum, the police are brought in—this is the third mysterious disappearance associated with Karol's museum. Karol convinces them that he is being targeted by some unknown enemy who has sent threatening letters, and Karol gets a friend to bring in Santo, the famous wrestler hero, known for his desire to "wipe out injustice and crime." Between wrestling matches (we see three of them), Santo is on the case, digging up info about Karol and kicking the asses of thugs, the whole time shirtless and shiny-chested, dressed in only his silver mask, his glittery cape, and snug tights. Just as Susan is about to be waxed up and transformed into a panther girl, Santo saves the day.

As I hinted above, without the wrestling scenes (which were, I suspect, the whole reason for these movies existing in the first place), this is an entertaining and engrossing superhero movie—Santo doesn't have actual super powers but neither does Batman. The villain, well played by Claudio Brook, has almost as much screen time as Santo, and his character is fairly well developed. Roxana Bellini (Susan), Norma Mora (Gloria) and Ruben Rojo (Charles) are attractive good guys who wind up with not much to do. Because Santo is masked, we can’t read his facial features so his acting is mostly done with his body. He’s commanding in the ring (I was going to skip through the matches but wound up fascinated by them, especially the third one with the blond dandy who sort of skips across the ring, pictured above left), and his fisticuff scenes are largely carried out with wrestling moves. Others have noted that the plot combines elements of House of Wax and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the scenes at the climax showing the waxed beasts coming to life are quite effective. It's a little strange that, after learning about Karol's disfigurement, we don’t get a climactic unmasking scene, and, of course, we never see Santo unmasked either. I liked this enough to think about watching another Santo movie someday, though I have heard most of the rest aren't as good as this one. [YouTube]