I feel compelled to review this specifically because probably no one else ever will. Blue Demon is a Mexican masked wrestler who is known in the U.S. primarily as a sidekick to the better-known Santo. In fact, my tape of this picture erroneously entitles it "Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Satanic Powers" on the box in order to cash in on the Silver Masked One's popularity. Santo does indeed make a cameo appearance, but this 1966 film (along with "Blue Demon" and "The Shadow of the Bat") was part of an attempt to launch Blue Demon in his own series as a stand-alone. The attempt failed, and this movie is one of the reasons why.

The first thing one may notice about this cinematic oddity is its episodic structure. The Mexican film industry was heavily regulated by the Socialist government, which set the rates producers paid to rent studio time. The production of serials, meant to be shown in weekly installments as short subjects, got a cheaper rate than features, which were presumably the big draws and would thus make more money. Producers avidly exploited this loophole by filming bogus "serials" like this one. That is, they were structured in such a way that they could be shown as a series of (usually half-hour) episodes. After a token run in Mexico City in the serial format, the films were pulled and re-edited into features for general release. To maintain the illusion that the pictures were still "serials," many, like "Blue Demon vs. the Satanic Power," periodically interrupt themselves to show a chapter title card.

The next thing one notices about this film is just how darn surreal the whole thing is. Surrealism must run deep in the Mexican soul, as theirs is the industry that embraced Luis Bunel as a director, who made ostensibly "mainstream" melodramas in the fifties, resulting in some the most deliriously whacked-out cinema of the century. Director Chano Ureta is a soul brother to Bunel and is responsible for beloved Mex-trash like "The Witch's Mirror" and "The Brainiac." Working with an obviously small budget and rushed schedule, he invests the movie with touches of flat-out weirdness that provide most of the interest in an otherwise wrong-headed production. The blame can be placed almost entirely on the script, which violates the central tenet of wrestling movies without substituting anything in its place. This central tenet is that if you are presenting a story about a wrestling hero you had better provide him with a nemesis with whom he can wrestle. This film offers a villain who not only does not wrestle but never even meets the hero! Needless to say, the result is one the great shaggy-dog stories of movie history.

My synopsis of the plot is necessarily sketchy, not only because there isn't all that much going on but also because this little-known flick was never dubbed into English, and my knowledge of Spanish is weak at best. There really isn't a lot of dialogue in the movie anyway, making the bare-bones plot readily enjoyable to all. However, a few key points continue to escape me even after multiple viewings.

The film begins early in the century with our villain, apparently some sort of sorcerer or alchemist. His "satanic power" manifests itself rather arbitrarily throughout the movie in various ways. He is imprisoned and sentenced to death but places himself in a deathlike trance prior to his execution and is buried. Fifty years later a pair of grave diggers unearth his coffin and are understandably surprised when he pops up and kills them. The villain (I don't even know his name, as he never really interacts with anyone) sets up shop in a cobwebby old house and begins his reign of...well, whatever it is he does for the rest of the movie. His pattern is to go out, hypnotize a young woman, bring her back to the house, then shut her in a room where she is incinerated by flames (off-screen). Why? I'm still not sure, although I suspect it in some way helps prolong his evil existence. When our villain activates said hypnotic power, director Ureta pulls out the stops with crazy visuals, treating the audience to strobing flashes of light and dripping oil over the lens during close-ups of the villain's evil visage.

Enter Blue Demon, who is introduced in one of several live-action wrestling bouts which provide the only action in this otherwise determinedly static production. He gets involved when his ring assistant is killed by the sorcerer (who abducts said ring assistant's girlfriend). The police investigate but find no clues. In the first of a seemingly endless number of puzzling sequences, Blue Demon decides to check things out for himself. Although the police have already investigated the crime scene in broad daylight and removed the body, Blue Demon goes back at night and looks around with a flashlight! What could he possibly expect to find in the dark that the police couldn't find during the day? He discovers absolutely nothing, as one might expect, and leaves. The entire scene goes nowhere, establishing a recurring motif for the rest of the film.

The sorcerer visits a sixties version of a Mexican Goth club, where kids rock out in a dingy bar decorated with corpses and skeletons. A young lady with an enormous bee-hive hairdo enthusiastically lip-syncs to a catchy, Lesley Gore-type pop song before being hypnotized, abducted, and incinerated. Blue Demon, meanwhile, has come across a mysterious old book which apparently provides him with information about the sorcerer. I say "apparently" because we are treated to many minutes of footage of Blue Demon reading while the text is revealed in voice over. Again, with my poor Spanish, I really have no idea what is going on. I do know that I watch Masked Wrestler movies to see some action, not to see Masked Wrestler doing historical research at his desk. But this is what we get. In contrast to Santo, who is presented as a Batman-style detective with a high-tech crime lab, Blue Demon is shown as sort of a scholarly ascetic, working in a rather austere office with a candelabra and a small statue of some sort of demon in the background. Anyway, he spends way too much time reading this damn book. It must have been helpful, however, because next thing we know Blue Demon has his trusty flashlight and he is entering a spooky cave which contains a secret passage to the sorcerer's house.

This cave-with-secret-passage thing is another frustrating cipher. The establishing shots of the sorcerer's house reveal it to be out in the middle of nowhere (with no apparent cave nearby, mind you). So why enter and exit through a secret passage? Why not use the front door? Who's going to see anything? What is more confusing is that when Blue Demon opens the secret passage in the cave wall, what we see inside is a tangle of what appear to be pine boughs. He pushes through them and disappears from view. The very next shot is inside the house, where Blue Demon enters via a secret door in the fireplace. Now what the heck are we to make of this? Are the pine boughs there to suggest that secret door in the cave leads back outside again? If so, why use the cave at all? The house is already outside! Why not use the front door? Or if the secret door in the cave is supposed to be a tunnel to the house (we never see this, only the entrance and exit), what are pine trees doing growing in there?

Anyway, Blue Demon pokes around the house (the sorcerer is out) and finds some of the kidnapped women's clothes. This seems to be significant to him, but what does he do? Nothing! He doesn't wait around for the sorcerer to return, and he doesn’t reveal the location of the house to the police. Net result of this latest foray into the unknown? Nothing!

After more repetitive kidnappings by the sorcerer and more repetitive live-bout wrestling footage, we finally approach the conclusion of this whole thing. Blue Demon relaxes around his rather unremarkable apartment, which means he wears the very same mask, cape, and tights that he wears in the ring and everywhere else. Unlike Batman and similar crime fighters, Blue Demon has no secret identity -- he's just Blue Demon. He never removes his mask, and even when he lies down to catch some sleep he only loosens the collar of his cape slightly. Talk about commitment!

The sorcerer has somehow figured out that Blue Demon is after him and now stands outside the apartment. Sorcerer hypnotizes Wrestler and makes him jump from the top of a high wall. Blue Demon's athletic skills allow him to land unharmed, and the hypnotic spell is broken. The sorcerer flees. This is the closest thing the two have to a confrontation in the entire movie: they never share the same shot.

Finally, Blue Demon leads the police to the sorcerer's house -- through the cave, through the secret door, through the pine branches, through the fireplace in the house. Armed with his ubiquitous flashlight, Blue Demon finds the sorcerer, who in the meantime has withered away to a desiccated corpse of his own accord. Apparently the fifty years in the grave finally caught up with him. The end.

What's the problem with this entire scenario? Blue Demon never even meets the sorcerer! He spends the entire picture either reading about the sorcerer or poking around with his flashlight looking for clues and not really finding any -- always one step behind the villain. When he finally catches up with his nemesis, the sorcerer has just sort of died of natural causes (natural, at least, for a sorcerer). Blue Demon's net contribution to the entire process? Nada! Minus the live bout wrestling footage, which crops up periodically with no regard for the story, there is no action whatsoever. Did anyone seriously think that this was the movie Blue Demon fans wanted to see? While Santo is pounding thugs, slapping headlocks on monsters, and whipping around in a snazzy sports car, poor Blue Demon is wandering around with a flashlight and reading a book. With a lackluster outing like this it's no wonder he spent the rest of his career as Santo's sidekick.