During the early and mid eighties, the lucha libre genre was painfully tired and this awful movie seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, making Son of Santo stand around with little or nothing to do as his irritating companions annoy the audience with their terrible acting and insipid jokes. Mil Máscaras comes in halfway through the picture and makes a minor attempt at salvaging it but the film quickly slips into the same pitfalls.
There's little to no effort put into the writing as most of it simply skips the meat of the story and goes straight for the key scenes and plot points that advance the "narrative" but lacking any development, sense of rhythm or actual dramatic weight, that kind of describes most of Pérez Grovas' directorial output. Usually, wrestling cinema achieves the impossible while ignoring the traditional "basics" if a talented director handles the picture and makes it purely cinematic, but here we have nothing to hang onto.
The direction is predictably dull, consisting of the static and carelessly composed long shots, medium shots and two shots that Pérez Grovas just loved to employ without thought or artistic instinct.
While it does feature some slightly charismatic performances, a derivative plot but with some potential and the occasionally amusing chase or fight scene, it's mostly a rather generic and uninteresting potboiler.
A far cry from Grovas' two best movies: Santo and the TV Killer (1981) and Chanoc in the Island of the Dead (1977), they worked in their cheapness and awkwardness but were also relatively fun, unlike this hack job. It is, however, more entertaining than Chanoc and Son of Santo vs the Killer Vampires (1983) which was utterly uneventful and the lowest point in the series.
ONLY recommended for wrestling movie completists and no one else.
Pérez Grovas went on to direct some small crime and comedy movies before retiring around 1994, he passed away in 2009. Some of his better productions were the Miguel Morayta vampire movies (The Bloody Vampire and Invasion of the Vampires), the great Chano Urueta Blue Demon films and The Volcano Monster (1963). Those are definitely recommended.
