The film begins and ends extremely well, but in between becomes a draggy police procedural in which the vampire women remain largely in the background confined to their lair while only their High Priestess Tundra goes out into the field to suck blood and stalk heroine Diana Orloff. Tundra's appearance at Diana's window sufficiently spooks her father Prof. Orloff to get on to his video link to Santo rather as Commissioner Gordon used to contact Batman on the batphone; with Santo himself resembling a sort of blue collar Caped Crusader who wears only the trunks and cape and nips about in a nifty little sports car.
In the hands of cameraman Jose Ortiz Ramos and production designer Roberto Silva it all looks good, especially Ofelia Montesco as pouting High Priestess Tundra - easily the hottest chick in a film full of them - and María Duval as the virtuous young heroine Diana, who gets disappointingly little screen time. Unfortunately there's far more screen time given to Santo - who we twice have to watch in the ring taking ages to floor his opponents - than to the vampire women; who Santo only takes on at the film's very conclusion. For the rest of the time Tundra is flanked by three beefy henchmen (one of whom turns out to be a werewolf!) who handle all the rough stuff instead of the vampire women themselves until Santo finally sees them off in their lair in a climactic vampire holocaust that justifies sitting through the talky preliminaries. (If Tundra and her girls had thought to put blackouts on the window of the crypt and kept track of the time as dawn approached Santo would have perished on the slab to which he'd been chained, Diana would now be leading the vampire women; and I for one would have been well satisfied at that outcome.)
One puzzling question remains. Was that a pair of spectacles the blonde vampire woman seated at Zorina's feet when she's giving Tundra a dressing down was wearing?
In the hands of cameraman Jose Ortiz Ramos and production designer Roberto Silva it all looks good, especially Ofelia Montesco as pouting High Priestess Tundra - easily the hottest chick in a film full of them - and María Duval as the virtuous young heroine Diana, who gets disappointingly little screen time. Unfortunately there's far more screen time given to Santo - who we twice have to watch in the ring taking ages to floor his opponents - than to the vampire women; who Santo only takes on at the film's very conclusion. For the rest of the time Tundra is flanked by three beefy henchmen (one of whom turns out to be a werewolf!) who handle all the rough stuff instead of the vampire women themselves until Santo finally sees them off in their lair in a climactic vampire holocaust that justifies sitting through the talky preliminaries. (If Tundra and her girls had thought to put blackouts on the window of the crypt and kept track of the time as dawn approached Santo would have perished on the slab to which he'd been chained, Diana would now be leading the vampire women; and I for one would have been well satisfied at that outcome.)
One puzzling question remains. Was that a pair of spectacles the blonde vampire woman seated at Zorina's feet when she's giving Tundra a dressing down was wearing?