Santo Contra el Cerebro Del Mal

At the end only the heroes count. We are in Cuba in the last days of 1958. Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos are leading the revolution going from the south to the capital broke down the yanqui Batista’s system.
In the same days in Havana there is another hero who unlike the others is involved in art, more precisely in the cinema and he is shooting two movies: "Hombres Infernales" and "Cerebro Del Mal" changed later to "Santo Contra Hombres Infernales" and "Santo Contra El Cerebro Del Mal". Both finished, as history says, just before the entrance of the Barbudos in the capital, but it can be said that they are for sure the beginning of another legend, a cinema legend, the one of Rodolfo Guzman Huerta well known as El Santo.
Well, if you, like us, aren’t Mexican must be said something about El Santo.
He was born in 1917 in Tulancingo in the state of Hidalgo but soon he moved whit his family to Ciudad Del Mexico. In the capital he practice different sports and then one day he enter in the world of Lucha Libre.
The debut on the ring is around the mid-thirties (1934 or 1935) with the names Rudy Guzmán, El Hombre Rojo, El Enmascarado, El Incógnito, El Demonio Negro and El Murcielago II, this latter name cause him several problems because it was already used by another wrestler.
The turning point came in the forties, Rodolfo gets married (a marriage that gives him ten children) and in 1942 his coach ask him to join a new team of wrestlers, proposing him three names: El Santo, El Diablo and El Angel.
And so he becomes an icon of Lucha Libre, thanks to his style, his strength, but also thanks to his silver mask that he leaves in public on in the eighties, shortly before his death.
In 1952, El Santo becomes the protagonist of comic books, and then published for thirty-five years and he was offered the role (of course, a masked wrestler) in a movie, but he refuses. A sort of marketing not planned, but very instinctive and perfect that helps to create the myth of El Santo.
Then we arrive in 1958 with Fernando Osés wrestler and actor who offered him a role in some films. El Santo accepts, without giving up his wrestler career and he becomes the protagonist of the two aforementioned Mexican/Cuban movies, written by Fernando Osés and Enrique Zambrano and directed by Joselito Rodríguez. According to the Italian version of Wikipedia (the only one who writes this thing) El Santo had to be the Osés’ shoulder and the original titles that do not mention his have changed years later, when the genre became famous.
It’s the difficult beginning (the two films cashed little) of a lucky and interminable saga that as we will see leads to the creation of fifty-two movies.
So here we are with "Santo Contra Hombres Infernales" and "Santo Contra El Cerebro Del Mal" and although the first on is considered by most the debut, we begin with the second, which is always for the most much successful and more focused on the character of El Santo.
The style is already what characterizes the whole saga that has an extremely easy development, few resources, an easy direction, all things that make these movies a great example of B Movies. Funny and crazy enough.
Naturally, El Santo is the hero always spotless, at the service of humanity, away from the clamor and the pursuit of money and fame. A selfless in every way, entangled in stories that range from the sci-fi and horror.
In "Santo Contra El Cerebro Del Mal" we are in the science fiction genre, if we may say so, seeing the complete lack of sci-fi’s solutions that suggest sci-fi. The enemy is one of the most classic characters of cinema an evil scientist that aims to gain power.
The differences between this movie and the others of the series are that El Santo is called only El Enmascarado, and we don’t see, as in other movies, scenes on the ring and especially our hero is kidnapped in first scene and subjected to brainwashing by the Dr.Campos that makes him his servant.
The estimated scientist Dr.Campos has a truly and amazing plan, because he kidnaps colleagues, transformed them into servants, he plans bank robberies and he sells formulas secrets to foreign agents.
A good business no doubt about it that works thanks to the fact that El Enmascarado is under his control. Fortunately, however, there is another masked wrestler El Incognito which haunt the headquarter of Campos and injects an antidote to El Santo.
It is the beginning of vengeance and Campos tries in every way to escape running from the proverbial secret passages and kidnapping as the proverbial girl that in this case is his secretary. But good triumphs and the two heroes, El Incognito and El Santo, put everything in order.
As already said, we are faced with a very flat acting and a direction who doesn’t strive so much. El Enmascarado mostly runs right and left fighting like a lion, in a very slow story shot in dark places with the few bright scenes that show the latest moments of Havana of Batista.
Fernando Osés who plays El Incognito and also a cop had the merit of having started this interminable saga. Osés is also a very interesting artist, because in addition to being a professional wrestler, he entered in the world of cinema at beginning of the fifties and then he writes various screenplays, became a producer, director, and often a shoulder of El Santo.
In the role of the villain Dr. Campos, we find Joaquin Cordero a true Mexican cinema legend, also starred in the theater in a long career ended shortly before his death in 2013.
The rest of the cast is made by Enrique Zambrano and a series of Cubans and Mexicans actors that in some cases we see again in the adventures of this great hero taken from Lucha Libre.