Everyone from Gary Cooper to Gandhi guests in the eighth of luchador Santo’s escapades. So what if they’re basically sculpted candles in a Mexico waxworks? They help make Santo in the Wax Museum a field trip worth taking. Get those permission slips signed early, kids.
Said museum is owned by Dr. Karol (Claudio Brook, Cronos), who’s particularly proud of the horror figures in the basement: Mr. Hyde, Quasimodo, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Phantom of the Opera. Despite all being fictional characters, Karol deems them “faithful reproductions.” Some stand noticeably more still than others.
When a foxy magazine photographer (Roxana Bellini, The Brainiac) doing a story on the place becomes the third visitor to vanish of late, Dr. K falls under the authorities’ glare of suspicion. They call upon El Santo and his sparkle cape to help find the kidnappers — well, between matches in the ring, naturally.
Is it possible that Karol’s time in a Nazi concentration camp infused him with mad-scientist leanings? You already knew the answer by paragraph 2. You wanna watch anyway. I get it. I feel the same, although — heresy alert! — I have no patience for its long wrestling sequences, even as I recognize the Santo series wouldn’t exist otherwise. One of Santo in the Wax Museum’s bouts pits our hero against El Tigre del Ring.
Taking inspiration from the then-decade-old House of Wax, director Alfonso Corona Blake follows up his first Santo pic, 1962’s Santo vs. the Vampire Women, but never made another. Both in black and white, the Blake joints were among the quartet dubbed for Yanks by K. Gordon Murray. —Rod Lott