One month later, on Pre-Orientation Day at the University of Maryland, I began my inevitable future as the compleat film auteur.  I was enrolled as a film major and found myself in the company of a single fellow “auteur.”  He was a Woody Allen-type, only taller, and looked just as bewildered as me.  We struck up a conversation, and he casually mentioned that he’d made a number of 16mm shorts.  One of them had even aired on Channel 20.  It was, of course, Attack of the Paramecium Men.  I hailed him like a brother, and from that moment on my life took a turn for the comedic.

My new friend, Pat Caroll, was the comic genius behind the shorts.  They featured himself and fellow Good Counsel High School buddies Jim Phalen and Larry Zabel as the Langley Punks, a trio of hooligans who, when not drinking beer, have encounters with different extraterrestrial menaces.  In Insurance Salesmen From Saturn, the title creatures fail in their mission to bore earthlings to death and end up being bored into oblivion by the Punks’ endless, detailed descriptions of their cars.  Pat’s inspirations for these early films were the Three Stooges, Chaplin, Keaton, and the masked Mexican wrestler-turned-movie star, El Santo.

It was an amazing, exciting time, when a group of friends could get together, lug an unwieldy 16mm camera out to some godforsaken location and shoot a cohesive, if chaotic, short film crammed full of aliens, zombies, hotties, and oblivious, hedonistic “heroes.”  Later on, Pat would share writing duties with one of my best friends, Tom Welsh, and the hilariously brilliant Dave Nuttycombe.  After years of guest-starring as various menacing creatures, another Good Counsel alum, Bob Young, graduated–or flunked–to fourth Punk, and I became the recurring guest star.  One cold, windy Saturday afternoon we were shooting Hyatsville Holiday in a  closed-down drive-in theatre when a police car screeched onto the “set,” responding to a 911 call.  Spotting four scantily clad girls being menaced by several straight-jacketed insane-asylum escapees (myself among them), the patrolman almost called for backup. It took a lot of explaining on our part to stay out of jail.

The Biograph, a local repertory theatre, began promoting and playing the Langley Punks shorts.  A huge following developed and an appreciative, if inebriated, audience regularly filled the theater to laugh and cheer the Punks on.  Commercial film production executive Rich West took note of the phenomenon and offered to partner with the Punks, promising to help them turn out a technically more sophisticated product–possibly even something with sound.   Thus, Travesty Films was born, its motto, “So that others may laugh.”

Intestines From Space, the first Travesty production, faced many of the same challenges comedies in the late 20s  dealt with when making the transition to sound.  Actors used to a breakneck pace and gag-a-minute slapstick, were forced to slow down and deliver actual dialogue, often requiring multiple takes to get it right.  In a scene where four sexy girls introduce themselves to the Punks as “Candy,” “Honey,” “Sugar,” and “Taffy,” Jim mugged, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not a diabetic.”  Despite growing pains on the production, Intestines From Space became a monster Biograph hit, and it appeared as if Travesty was well on its way to bigger things, certainly color.

Alcoholics Unanimous, a short sporting both decent sound and color, was followed by the inspired comedy album, Teen Comedy Party.  After the album was played on the radio during The Dr. Demento Show, it became clear a decision had to be made about the company’s future artistic direction.  Tom and Dave wanted to attempt a more sophisticated “Animal House” type of feature, something they could use as a calling card in Hollywood.  I fully endorsed them in this move, but Pat was adamant about continuing on the same zany course they were on.

Unfortunately, their next project The Travesty Show  turned out to be a kind of last hurrah for the Langley Punks.  It was a throwback to The Honeymooners and was made in black-and-white as a cable TV pilot.  Complete with gag commercials, it was hysterically funny.

The internet, with all the media opportunities it offers today, was still ten years in the future.  In the early 80s, there was no way for Travesty to reach a larger audience, leaving the Punks with very little in the way of options.   Looking back on those days, there’s no doubt the Travesty vision was way ahead of its time.

Well aware of this, on June 7th, the American Film Institute honored Travesty with a tribute entitled From Here to Obscurity. The night was a tremendous success, and a sold-out audience filled the large, prestigious AFI Silver Theatre. Pat finally got the chance to be on the same screen as his idols: Chaplin, Keaton, and the Three Stooges, although not El Santo.

Across the Rio Grande,  film distributor K. Gordon Murray caught sight of the Santo phenomena and was inspired.  At that time in 1962, the Italian Hercules movies starring Steve Reeves were pulling in large young male audiences.  Murray bought the US rights to two Santo titles, Santo Contra las Mujeres Vampiras (Santo VS the Vampire Women) and Santo en el Museo de Cera (Santo in the Wax Museum).  He dubbed the films into English, and hoping to cash in on the Italian muscleman fad, changed Santo’s name to Samson.  Vampire Women soon became a local-TV horror favorite, in no small part because it is the stuff boyish dreams are made of (including mine),  especially when those dreams are populated by the alluring title villainesses.  Not surprisingly, hot vixens became a staple of future Santo films.

By the mid-60s, the muscleman genre gave way to the spy craze, and with this change in tastes, Santo’s cinematic adventures ceased being adapted for a US market.  In his native land, however, Santo’s reign continued uabated as a Mexican movie hero.  He appeared in movies with even larger-budgets, not only as a monster-alien basher but also as a suave super spy himself.  In Operation 67, for instance, Santo wore a Bond-like tuxedo below his ever-present mask.  Some things couldn’t change.

A hero from a more innocent time, Santo found he was unable to compete with the rebel films of the late 60s and the Altamn-esque cinema of  the 70s.  Santo’s pictures of that decade, although replete with monsters and sexy women, were mostly chaotic, directionless efforts that lacked the atomosphere and charm of the earlier films.  Sadly, Santo himself was in something of a decline by the late 70s, a time that would usher in a resurgence of traditional fantasy heroes like Luke Skywalker, Superman, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan.  The legendary wrestler would have fit right in among them, but he chose instead to retire in 1982, dying two years later in 1984.  Tens of thousands of fans turned out at his funeral.

Many of us baby boomers will never forget the late-night hours spent in front of a flickering rabbit-eared TV watching the masked champion rescue a gorgeous babe from the clutches of some madman or vampire queen.  Even as a kid, part of me knew this was silly.  Still, years later, that didn’t stop me  as a teen from going to the Spanish-language theater in DC to watch the latest Santo adventure in color.  Today we’re much too cinematically sophisticated and critical to enjoy such simple fare, and yet, when ever I think of Santo, I always smile at the memory of him.

SANTO (SAMSON) IN THE WAX MUSEUM.

One hero.  Three reviewers.  The Misfits take on Mexico’s famous masked hero in one of his most well-known movies.  On a scale of 1 to 15 (15 being best), the Misfits give Santo in the Wax Museum a…

For more Santo entries, check the sidebar under Categories and click Santo.

Carradine, of course, became world-famous as the old west-wandering Shaolin monk and warrior Kwai Chang Caine in the 70s television classic Kung Fu.  There his brilliant acting struck an almost impossible balance of inner peace against the frontier wilderness, always concealing Caine’s injurious martial arts prowess until the point of physical threat.

Kung Fu was so good, and Carradine so memorable, it could have dampened his post-series career the same way Superman did George Reeves’ (or even Christopher Reeve’s).  But in the late 80s I spent three very enjoyable journalistic hours with Carradine, and realized that his interpretive intelligence enriched every role he played.  By that time, David had already won acclaim in Rober Corman’s Death Race 200, Hal Ashby’s Bound For Glory (as Woody Guthrie), Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg, and Walter Hill’s The Long Riders.  Quentin Tarantino certainly trusted Carradine’s talent and charisma enough to give him the title role in his popular Kill Bill.

When I heard about David’s death in Thailand last June, I was saddened by the loss of him and maddened by the absurdity of his demise.