Suicide Mission is another one of those El Santo adventures that finds everyone's favorite Mexican wrestler doubling as an agent of Interpol. This time, he’s after some Nazis who have been hiding out after the war. The ringleader kidnaps a plastic surgeon and forces him to give him a new face so he can go out and conquer the world. It’s then up to El Santo to rescue the doctor and stop the Nazis.
It’s only seventy-five minutes, but Suicide Mission sometimes feels much longer. The boring plot doesn’t do it any favors either and the talky set-up hobbles the pacing right out of the gate. Stay with it though, because things improve somewhat in the second half, if only for the scenes where El Santo is jumped by random henchmen every ten minutes or so.
Even when the movie looks like it’s going to turn itself around, it still manages to piss away its momentum. Every time it introduces an interesting concept (like El Santo fighting a shark), it winds up feeling rushed and/or poorly executed. Take the villain’s lair for instance. He surrounds himself with an all-girl army of soldiers who spend their days practicing Kung Fu and… uh… volleyball. The lethal ladies’ scenes look promising enough, but there is ultimately very little payoff.
The cheap production values are good for a laugh. Some of the driving scenes are phony looking and the editing is often atrocious. The scene where Lorena Velazquez watches El Santo wrestling is particularly odd. She is seen sitting on some steps with some people cheering while shots of El Santo wrestling are hastily edited in. The wrestling footage doesn’t match at all as it looks noticeably older with the print suffering from a lot of wear and tear. To make things seem even more out of place, the spectators behind Velazquez are the same goons who just attacked her and El Santo in the very last scene! It’s almost like they finished the movie and realized there wasn’t a wrestling scene in there, so they just stuck one right in the middle without much care or thought.
On the plus side, the musical numbers are a lot of fun. There’s a great song by a bubbly, busty babe in a spangled bikini named Pola Sanders who jiggles with gusto. Velazquez also gets an energetic number, even though her wild gyrating sometimes seems out of step with the mellow song she’s performing. While Suicide Mission isn’t El Santo’s worst movie, you know you’re in trouble when the songs are the best part. (The surgeon’s final F-U to the head Nazi is pretty clever though.)
AKA: Mission Impossible.
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