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Alright, lets leave Santo and Elsa for a second to go back inside the underground complex. They've put Ursus (now fully alive and active) in a locked cell, from which he escapes. Wandering about the darkened halls, he stumbles up Norma's cell. As all monsters in movies are inordinately attracted to beautiful women, he begins pounding on the door to get at her. Boom, down goes the door and in lurches the creature as Norma screams her head off.

Before anything happens to her, however, One-Eyed the henchman leaps in with a flaming torch! The creature (frightened of flame, of course) is driven back into his own cell and the door is locked.

One-Eyed (the subtitles call him that) has an eye-patch over one eye and is by far the one henchman with the most dialogue and the most character development. I'll give credit to this movie for trying to flesh out some of the background characters, much more so than in most monster flicks.


One-Eyed.
Anyway, while that's going on, Norma takes the opportunity to sneak away and run off. She makes it through the nonexistent security net and out into the dark tunnels. She gets scared by fake bats on fishing line, scared again by a real rat, more scared by fake corpses in coffins along the wall, and really scared when she sees how her boobs sag in that ugly shirt. She eventually makes it to the surface unchecked and runs out into the night.

Freda is now alerted to Norma's absence, and she's pretty pissed. She calls out all her henchmen into the night to find the girl, and she herself is out there with them. Hmm...I think something got cut out of the final edit. It seems now that Freda knows that Santo is out there in the woods also, when just a second ago it seemed like she didn't know. How is that? Did the sheriff call her? Did they have a sentry out?

So three henchmen (all pretty tough-looking dudes despite their pansy red shirts) intercept Santo and Elsa, finding them near an old abandoned barn. Elsa is sent running back to town to get help (presumably from the sheriff) by Santo and he sets about thrashing the henchmen. Three on one seems unfair, but this is Santo we're talking about.

Santo then runs around a bit and bumps into Norma, who has all this time been wandering around the woods in the dark lost after escaping. Their reunion is cut short by the arrival of Freda and her henchmen! And she's got a gun pointed at Elsa (who was captured a bit ago). Whoa, what the hell! Freda is now wearing a completely different wig (I assume it's a wig, or maybe they just shot this scene much later and cut it in), before she had long curly hair and now she has straight short hair.


Check the hair, that's not right.
Anyway, Elsa knocks the gun away and runs off again. Santo tangles with the henchmen to cover her escape. Norma and Freda both go for the gun, and end up rolling around on the ground fighting for it. This must be the first catfight these two actresses have every filmed because they fight like four-year olds on a preschool yard, pathetic.

Despite being a bit bigger and much younger than Freda, Norma looses the fight and the gun. Santo, and this is priceless, looks over at Norma with an exasperated grimace on his face as if to say, "My god, woman, have you not learned anything from watching my matches? Do I have to do everything around here?".

There's a short scene here of Elsa hiding from some searching henchmen, but I really think it should have been earlier in the movie. Perhaps they thought they needed some sort of reminder of where Elsa was while Santo was being captured, so they snipped this out of the film and spliced it in here.

Regardless, Elsa avoids capture and makes it back to the town and heads to the sheriff's office. She's shocked to find that the once-middle-aged sheriff is now a wrinkled decrepit old man! She obviously doesn't know this yet, but the sheriff and his deputy are both in the employ of Freda, hooked on her youth serum. The sheriff was just about to get his injection when Elsa came in (I guess I should tell you that when the effects of the serum are beginning to wear off, before you get another shot you start to age rapidly). Elsa is tossed in a jail cell, after being roughly handled by the deputy.

Captured, Santo is taken to a cell in the basement and chained to a post with his arms up over his head (Norma ends up back in her original cell). Soon, Freda comes to visit Santo, the twinkle in her eye and a new application of blue eye shadow and red lip gloss telling us that she's got something frisky on her mind. She also has her long hair back again, and I must say I prefer the shorter look.


Santo, enchained.
As all women on Earth are in love with Santo, Freda naturally tries to put the moves on him. Santo is not interested and even insults her womanhood! Freda is not one to take insults or rejections (as evidenced by her treatment of her henchmen) and you can tell from here on out he's on her bad side.

Freda moves in close, pulls his mask off (though we only see a tiny sliver of the back of his head, only enough to confirm that he does have hair) and gives him a kiss before slapping him (I think I dated her once...). She says that Gorilla/Man will come teach him some manners soon. She then puts the key to his chain lock in his hand and tells him that he should at least have a fighting chance to protect himself. Ah, very sporting of her. One might wonder why she would risk Santo's death when she needs his blood, but the answer is just that, she only needs his blood. But then again, having him alive to make more blood if she needs it later seems prudent, so risking his death seems really pretty stupid on her part. But she is loosing her mind.

So in comes Gorilla/Man, all pissed and growling. It seems that Freda ordered him not to be fed for a while so he would come in here all good and mad. Gorilla/Man is very strong and bigger than Santo, so he really gives our hero a bad whipping to start. Santo is clearly a wrestler here as he rather stupidly keeps trying to grapple with the much stronger monster, without much success.

Finally realizing that if he keeps trying to wrestle with Gorilla/Man he's going to get killed, Santo picks up the thick chain that he was secured with before and starts whipping Gorilla/Man with it! Blood is drawn (though it disappears and reappears throughout the fight) and the beast is clearly going to loose this one. Santo beats down the monster and stumbles to the side, exhausted from this brutal battle.

Furious, Freda orders her henchmen to go in and shoot (!) Gorilla/Man for his failure. We hear three gunshots off-camera and see that Santo is chained back up. Things are not going well for the doctor.

While Freda could just shoot Santo in the head and be done with it, she'd rather come up with something more diabolical and Bond-villainish. She brings Norma to the lab and hypnotizes her (!) with a spinning light wheel and some verbal cues (is it really that easy to hypnotize an unwilling subject?). Freda tells Norma to take this here sharp knife and this here surgical basin and go in there and cut Santo's eyes out (!) and bring them back to her in the basin (!). Ouch!

So Norma, looking all glassy-eyed, goes into the cell where Santo is chained down on his back. Santo realizes what's about to happen and tries to convince Norma that their love is stronger than Freda's bad mojo (awww...). Now Freda sent along two henchmen to watch and make sure Norma did her deed, but they get squeamish and have to step out. Thus, they don't actually see what happens. Of note, One-Eyed the henchman has a fairly strong character moment here as he tells how even the thought of watching Norma take Santo's eyes reminds him of when he lost his own eye. He of all the henchmen gets the best lines in this movie.

Ok, back at the Lab, where the henchmen bring Norma to Freda, who has Ursus in there being tended to. Once the door is open, Santo bullrushes in! Ah, it seems his love is stronger than mental mojo, Norma's hypnotic spell was broken and she cut him loose and he's here now to put and end to all this silliness.

Freda, not one to give up easily, orders Ursus to rise and kill Santo! The monster breaks its straps and lunges up to do battle with Santo. Glass bottles are broken, tables are overturned, makeup is smudged, Freda gets tossed about, and in an homage to cage fights everywhere, a metal chair is used to put down Ursus!

Santo runs out with Norma, locking the door behind them as Ursus screams in rage and pain. They make it out into the darkness and run towards town to save Elsa (who've they deduced is in danger from the sheriff).

And back now to the sheriff, where the sheriff decides to send Elsa back to Freda's house, despite not having hear from her in a while. So the deputy goes in to knock her out with chloroform (who keeps this in a small town police station? and why not just lead her at gun point back to the house?).

Elsa, however, has apparently been paying attention to Santo's wrestling movies more than Norma because she's able to smack around the deputy and run off. The blocking and pacing of this "fight" scene is laughable, and the actress playing Elsa has clearly never done anything physical like this before. The deputy pretty much hits her hand with his face a few times then falls down.

Still on the run, Santo and Norma stumble to a cemetery, where Norma sits down to rest and Santo goes off to look for something. Nice, leave your scared, injured girlfriend in a cemetery, at night, with killer monsters about. Nice boyfriend. Oh, and he was getting pretty cozy with your sister a few scenes back, might want to keep an eye on that.

Sure enough, a nearby crypt slides open revealing a hidden tunnel entrance connected to the lab. By the way, who built this underground complex? Did she build it, or was it there before? Was it once some drug lord's compound? Maybe some old government CIA alien station? It just seems like a lot of work to build all this for her purposes. Couldn't she just have rented some old hacienda with a big barn?

Anyway, Ursus shambles out of the crypt and grabs Norma, who screams bloody murder. Santo comes running and he and Ursus (plus some random henchman that is disposed of quickly) engage in another brutal wrestling match. This one ends with Ursus impaled on a sharp pointy cross, seemingly mortally wounded. Santo and Norma then run off again.


"Damn you all! My shirt is dirty! Can't you see this!"
They find Elsa, recently busted out of the jail, and the three of them head for Santo's car. Sadly, someone has pulled the distributor cap off! Well that sucks, he's still making payments on it. On foot now (what not one single other car in this entire town they could steal?), they run for the highway.

As the sun comes up, Santo and the girls reach the road, where very soon a powder blue Willys jeep pulls up. The old rancher behind the wheel recognizes Santo and gushes about how he's his favorite wrestler. Star-struck, the rancher readily agrees to drive the girls to the city in exchange for a backstage visit to the next Santo wrestling match. Santo is not going with them, he's going back to kick some Frankenstein butt.

As soon as he's gone, however, it's clear that this rancher is league with Freda! A bit later he pulls over to "check on something under the hood", giving four henchman the chance to catch up to them and recapture Norma and Elsa. Of note here is a flash of Elsa's panty-covered bottom as they wrestler her out of the jeep. In these Santo movies there is rarely, if ever, any sort of the sexy scantily clad girls you see in American films of the same type. Seeing Elsa's underwear qualifies as the most surprising image of this entire movie.

ok, Santo runs back to the cemetery to find Ursus still alive. The creature has somehow managed to de-impale himself and is just sitting there in obvious pain, a big bloody wound in his chest. As he clearly means no harm to Santo now, our hero's big softy heart kicks in. Taking off his shirt (perhaps just an excuse to run around bare-chested now) he wraps it loosely around Ursus' wound (lot of good that's going to do). The creature, reacting to the first real bit of kindness he's received since being animated, is now Santo's friend! Pull the thorn from the lion's paw...


"Here, let me stick this dirty, sweaty shirt in your open wound..."
Santo works his way through the tunnels towards the Lab. Passing the open caskets, we see that the henchmen have set a trap! Knock-out gas begins spraying out of one of the corpses, causing Santo to choke and gag and drop to his knees. Three henchmen rush in now and corral Santo (that gas must have been very fast-acting and not very persistent).

Suddenly here comes Ursus! Wading into the henchmen to save his new best friend, the creature mangles the three bad guys as Santo escapes towards the lab. Hey, Santo, thanks for leaving your partner there, nice teamwork.

Back to the lab, where Freda has the two poor put-upon girls in chains. The doctor is really over the edge now, her mental state already affected by the degrading effects of the serum and now snapped by that bastard Santo meddling in her plans. To take her anger out, Freda is about to cut Norma's eyes out (!) and then pour acid in the empty sockets (!). Arg!


"I am such a nasty bitch."
Just before all that ickiness can happen, however, there is a knock at the door. Yanco (just he and Freda are here) opens the door to find One-Eyed, who collapses and dies right there in front of him (he must have survived the mangling by Ursus and struggled here before giving out).

Right behind him comes Santo! The girls squeal in delight, Freda screams in rage, and we wonder why Santo isn't more surprised to see the girls here, as when he saw them last they were driving away. He takes the sight of them being here in stride, almost like he read the shooting script.

As the only man there, Yanco steps up to the challenge of fighting Santo. Sadly, Yanco is an out-of-shape middle-aged guy and has little chance against the machine that's Santo. Yanco down and unconscious, Santo moves to take out the doctor. But before he can, the evil woman threatens to pour the acid on Norma's face! Oh, you nasty bitch.

But what's this? In through the door comes the creature! Both Santo and Freda tell the creature to kill the other, but Santo's repeated acts of kindness have overridden Freda's hypnotic control. The Doctor tosses the acid in the creature's face but that doesn't stop it from choking her to death.


So much for her.
During the fight, however, a switch on the wall was accidentally thrown. Dialogue much, much earlier established that this switch was to blow up the lab after a five-minute delay. This was a failsafe if the authorities ever discovered the lab and the doctor had to destroy the evidence before escaping. The question is, how did Santo, or the two girls, know this? They ran away like they knew, but how?

So Santo and the girls run out through the same tunnels we've seen all movie, coming out this time through the open crypt in the cemetery. They leave poor wounded Ursus down there to die (pretty crappy of Santo, seeing as how he saved his butt twice) and with him the curse of Doctor Frankenstein. Ka-Boom!

We end back where we started, in the wrestling ring. Santo and Yamaguchi, a thick burly Japanese man, are going at it with characteristic sweaty, grunting, slippery machismo. Norma and Elsa are in the crowd, cheering on lustily. Santo wins, of course, and all is well.

The End.

Written in March 2007 by Nathan Decker.










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