The other review was correct, there was tons of animal abuse in this film. While I am far from an animal rights advocate, I was horrified at the Mexican film industry and its cavalier attitude about animal abuse. Some of the many abusive portions included filming a cock fight (yes, I know this is cultural and may not be seen as abusive in Mexico), a horse being tossed off a cliff (and it's a real horse and it bounces many times and at the very least it broke a few legs--necessitating it being put down), drugging a cat and abusing a bird of prey (I think it was a Golden Eagle).
In addition, the film is tough to watch simply because the English captioning is so bad. Most of the time you can understand what they were saying, but occasionally the captions were so mangled, I was left scratching my head. A lot of the mistakes were just the result of the translator only having a passable knowledge of English. Occasionally, too, I noticed that what the people were saying in Spanish and English weren't exactly the same. On a scale from 1 to 10, the captioning was a 2.
Now there is one final problem with the film. The DVD was of very dubious quality. It looked bad even for an old and highly degraded VHS tape! The picture was generally very fuzzy and the sound also, naturally, pretty bad as well.
As for the film itself, it is an amazingly dull film. I've seen a couple other Santo films and this one has such a pedestrian plot, I was surprised. No Dracula, no Frankenstein, no apocalypse...just Santo staying with a rich lady and occasionally trying (very unsuccessfully) to come to her rescue. In fact, I was surprised just how poor this great Mexican wrestler looked in the film--getting a beat down several times. I could try to explain the plot, but frankly it isn't worth it. It's just too uninteresting to get into it--suffice to say, it's about a not terribly good Luchador (Mexican wrestler) who always runs around wearing his silver mask. Heck, he even keeps it on when he's eating (though amazingly, he never gets any food on it despite the tiny mouth hole). I wish the film would have had a nude scene. Usually I don't like this in films and think it hurts the movie, I would have loved to see him having sex while wearing the mask--it would have been pretty funny.
While I have enjoyed the zany weirdness of several Luchador movies, this one has nothing to offer. No odd characters, no bizarre plot twists and nothing to like. It's like eating an entire meal of melba toast--no particularly exciting or filling. Plus, they killed the horse!
