Santo vs Las Lobas AKA Santo vs the She-Wolves (1976)

Whispering spirits call to a lady in a fuzzy dress, drawing her into a dark and abandoned building. Some dirty torch-bearing witches pop out and yell crazy things about prophecies at her. My subtitles are awful and only about one in four lines are translated, which doesn't help, but I really doubt any of the dialog in this movie is going to be important. The audio is so bad, I don't know how anyone could know what's going on without subtitles. The dirty witch girl hands the fancy-dressed lady a fuzzy dagger, mutters about dying to be reborn, and the witch is stabbed to death. Maybe she's meant to be wolfy rather than dirty. If so, that's not really clear.

It cuts to a multi-party lucha libre match, with the crowd cheering for El Santo. They wrestle. For… time. Quite some. After the match, the dress lady comes to meet El Santo backstage. He never removes his mask. She hits on him, and he says "¿Por que?" They talk over each other accidentally, and then she calls for her german shepherd, Dragon, and leaves.

Next, a private investigator comes into his dressing room to tell him about an "absurd" case of a mountain man and "los lobos… licántropas". Santo shrugs. "Licántropas, hah!"

Santo runs around the empty wrestling rink for a bit while the german shepherd is, I guess, dramatically pursuing him… though I'd say it looks more like the dog is wandering around bored, and then playing. Santo escapes by jumping to the ceiling, and los perros magically vanish.

The detective picks up the dressed lady, who is running through the street bloody. She jumps in his car and screams licántropas! There is something accidentally hanging in front of the camera lens for an entire scene. It looks like it was shot on super-8 and the audio track recorded on a Fisher Price tape player. At least the soundtrack of just drums and squeals is fitting. The detective takes dress lady home and makes out with her, but she suddenly has a beard and sideburns and attacks him.

Santo is attacked by a dog in his home, so he decides to go to the mountains to meet the licántropas guy. Some guy tells Santo he has to defeat the curse of the werewolves, and in the middle of their conversation a woman starts drowning in the pool next to them, and then tries to murder the guy. A fuzzy witch watches them from the bushes. Santos does some unnecessary dives in the pool. The girl hops out of the pool and knocks out a waiter. Nothing makes a lick of sense.

The mountain guy explains that his family is immune to the werewolf bite, and has been fighting them for generations, so the werewolves are trying to drown or shoot him. They can only be defeated by a "silver symbol," he says, and Santo drives off to… go have a wrestling match. As you can imagine, nobody can act or deliver lines, the lines they're trying to deliver are awful, and everything shot is staged and cut terribly. There is a cohesive story, albeit an idiotic one, with an arc and everything, but the filmmakers had no idea how to make film.

The bearded lady hangs out with a bunch of other bearded ladies, and one bearded man, in a park. My subtitles don't work for that scene, but I know he's yelling hermanos a bunch. One of them is becoming a queen or something under the "red moon", which is, I think, the sun shot through a neutral density filter.

"Have you seen or noticed anything strange lately?" Santo asks some guy through a hole in a hut's door. Nobody in this village wants to talk to Santo. They call him loco and throw rocks at him, and it's not because he's a grown man who never removes his luchador mask. They hunt him with rifles through a dry corn field, but accidentally shoot each other to death.

I lost track of whatever is happening, and certainly don't care. They go to a party and have 100 shots of rum. The power goes out and Santo slaps party guests. A bearded lady pushes guests over, which kills them. Oh, he befriended a gypsy at some point, I don't know when. Santo does wrestling moves on people with fake beards, plus quite a lot more slaps. They drive a jeep into the desert and slap and body slam more wolf people.

The wolves attack a station wagon full of children with… goodness gracious, great balls of fire! The station wagon drives away slowly, as it turns out flaming tumbleweed can't stop a car. The gypsy yells several sentences regarding the firebombed children, which my subtitles simply translate to: "Mom." They run around doing much of the same, much of it outside with a dark red filter on the lens, and Santo tosses the final werewolf off of a cliff.