Santo vs. the Evil Brain
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
This Cuban-Mexican horror-action cult classic opens with three gangsters cornering El Santo in a deserted alley and knocking him out. He is then taken to the laboratory of a crazed Doctor Campos and turned into a docile servant through a series of injections and electric shocks. Filming was done in late '50s pre-Revolution Cuba and ended just the day before Fidel Castro entered Havana, and declared the victory of the revolution, forcing the filmmaker to flee prematurely (with the unprocessed 35mm negative smuggled inside a coffin).
Joselito Rodríguez
Joselito Rodríguez was a Mexican filmmaker, screenwriter, actor, and producer. Also a sound engineer, he invented sound equipment with his brother Roberto at the beginning of the 1930s, which they used on the first-ever Mexican talkie: Antonio Moreno’s Santa. Joselito Rodríguez directed the first two films starring El Santo, one of Latin America's most famous wrestlers.
