Maybe I’m wired differently, but hypothetically speaking, if I were sheriff of a wee town in the late 1800s, and six lepers escaped our local hospital, I doubt I’d ever arrive at the solution of “I know how to find this dirty half-dozen and keep their gnarly disease from spreading. If only I could locate a masked wrestler who rides horseback while wearing white pants.”
But who am I to question the great René Cardona? Basically the Roger Corman of Mexploitation cinema, he’s at the helm of Santo vs. the Riders of Terror, one of the silver-masked superhero’s scant few Westerns.
As word of the free-ranging lepers leaks, the townspeople rile each other up with the fearmongering fury of a thousand Infowars broadcasts. Despite the sheriff (Armando Silvestre, Cardona’s The Batwoman) pleading for compassion, even his best gal (Mary Montiel, Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy) buys into the mob mentality by wrongly assuming those goddamn lepers are to blame for the fatal gunshot in her papi’s back.
Fresh from donating a match’s winnings to some nuns, Santo (Santo) finally shows up to render aid to the sheriff — and presumably to Riders of Terror. But instead of leaping into action, Santo goes full Science Corner by visiting the doctor (Carlos Agostí, Cardona Jr.’s Guns and Guts) for a sit-down lesson on leprosy. Per Cardona’s typical peso-pinching ways, the lepers’ sores look like each actor fell asleep into a plate of room-temperature ground round.
The issue with Santo vs. the Riders of Terror isn’t Santo’s anti-violence stance nor Santo’s unexplained existence in a prior century. It’s that the movie is as dull as the dirt beneath the horses’ collective clopping feet. End to end, it’s among the least engaging outings I’ve seen from the genre-hopping film series. If you do watch it, go for the longer version.
You read that correctly: longer. Because it adds three recently unearthed sex scenes. Similar to the magical switcheroo of Cardona’s Santo in the Treasure of Dracula into the NSFW El Vampiro y el Sexo via Russ Meyer-ian mammaries, a spicy version of Santo vs. the Riders of Terror exists under the unappetizing title of Los Leprosos y el Sexo. However, it mines a level or two of explicitness deeper than Treasure, especially in a fully nude makeout session ’round second base between the physically gifted Montiel and a lottery-lucky Silvestre. —Rod Lott