Week 47: Santo en el Misterio en las Bermudas (Santo in The Bermuda Mystery, 1977)

      So we're at week 47, and we've come to our final team up with Blue Demon. He and Santo may not have liked each other's company in reality, but in movie world, they had a pretty good run. Not all of their team ups were winners, but the batting average was generally on the positive side. It was usually only the later team ups that were clunkers, and that can probably be blamed on low budgets, or the age of the two men.

Not Three Amigos!

     Also joining them once again is Mil Mascaras, or Thousand Masks. Apparently the movie is being told in flashback, a point I didn't realize until the end of the movie. A fishermen off the coast of Bermuda is telling a young colleague about his friend El Santo. He tells this tale of how Santo and his amigos Blue and Mil are conscripted to be personal bodyguards to the princess of a fictitious country, in Bermuda to work out a peace treaty with another fictitious country. Blue and Mil seem really put out by this good deed, as its forced them to cancel their upcoming European wrestling tour together. To hell with world peace! These boys need to make that money!

Blue and Mil, macin' on some ladies.

     Their issues are quickly put aside though when the three masked do-gooders meet some Latina cheesecakes who are vying for some steamy luchador action. All three get a bit randy, and a little rapey even at the site of these women. Of course their affections are superfluous, as it turns out their agents of the movie's big bad, who is determined to undermine these peace talks, and kill the princess. I need to take a moment to speak about this bad guy, "Godard", played by Carlos Suarez. This creepy bald headed dude seems to have taken the place of the previous "That Guy" that used to appear in a lot of the early Santo films. Like the previous "That Guy", he tends to play the heavy, or the sidekick, or a thug. Sometimes he's comic relief, and sometimes a genuine menace to Santo and company, and sometimes both. 

Carlos Suarez

     The titular Bermuda Mystery of the film is a bunch of nonsense thrown in to cash in on attention being given to the Bermuda Triangle phenomena at the time. It turns out that one of the three girls, who is Santo's love interest, has secretly infiltrated Godard's terrorist organization, believing him responsible for her father's disappearance. In the middle of a fight scene, two weirdos in chrome silver jumpsuits materialize out of thin air to whisk the young lady away to their underwater home off the coast of Bermuda. It turns out her father was clandestinely shuffled there to live among scientist elites. Wait, what? What the hell does this have to do with anything?! It's a seriously strange tangent the film takes, made worse by the fact that Santo, Blue and Mil never become aware of this place's existence during the rest of the damn movie! Making things even odder, is that after all is resolved, Santo and his friends take a boat headed back to Florida, only for it to be disappeared off the ocean's surface by magic undersea city machines that pop out of the water. Their boat is there one second, and gone the next, and we return to the fishermen who says the three luchadors were never seen again. Huh? 

The (not so) amazing undersea city!

    You might think I would penalize the movie for such nonsensical behavior, but on the contrary. I admire the movie's moxy, to throw something so totally deranged and off the wall into the storyline, a viewer can't help but laugh. The movie would've been another dull crime caper, with these three guys, two well past their prime at this point, bumming around and chasing tail. 

Enjoyment? 

Three Silver Masks out of a possible Five.

Fun Fact: Carlos Suarez was actually Santo's manager in real life.