Santo y Blue Demon en el mundo de los muertos (1970) Starts right off with a woman being chained up and whipped, half a dozen guys being burned at the stake, and a Black Mass. Blue Demon is summoned in a puff of smoke as an emissary from the Prince of Darkness, and Santo is a sword-fighting caballero with lace collar and cuffs. Then it's 300 years later and the satanic witch returns to possess Santo's girlfriend. Plenty of head-scratching features - when Santo is thrown out the window of his bachelor pad by the gray-faced burned-at-the-stake guys who have crawled up out of their graves, it seems to be located in a cheap looking Old West Town. Santo is stabbed in the chest at the end of a match with a dagger protruding from his bloody chest - he is rushed to the hospital and a couple of minutes of actual open-heart surgery footage is inserted, and with no recovery time at all he is right back fighting the gray-faces again. The finale, in which he descends somehow to the realm of shadows to rescue his girlfriend's soul, is a great example of what can be accomplished with a red filter and clips from more expensive movies. A real muddle and almost entertaining at times. More fun to write about than to watch. 4/10
The Arrival II, a.k.a. The Second Arrival (1998) Included on the disc with The Arrival, ostensibly a sequel but really just a cheap knock-off direct-to-video looking thing made in the hope that some dope like me would think because they liked the first movie they might like the second one maybe half as much but they would be WRONG. It was so crummy looking and boring in the first five minutes I decided I would just give it 20 minutes and see if maybe there were some crappy CG effects or something. In that time there was a Completely Naked Woman, okay but not great, but mostly just people walking or driving or looking at something while ominous music implied that something would eventually happen. After the time was up I skipped ahead to see if anything ever did happen but mostly it was more of the same only they were driving faster and running and hiding. The writer, director, and producer probably aren't sensitive enough to be as ashamed of this lame-ass piece of crap as they ought to be. Interesting to see how amazingly lousy it was. 0/10
Cruel Gun Story (1964) Finally something worth seeing. Jo Shishido is recruited to pull an armored car heist - he just wants to pay for an operation for his kid sister but everyone else wants to betray everyone else. An amazing amount of guys being smacked around, shooting and mayhem, including throwing dynamite down a man-hole, though the guy at the bottom doesn't look all that blown up later. A heist always goes bad but Murphy's Law for gangsters comes into play here and at one point I said, "NOW what could go wrong??" and then it did. From the Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir series. I hope they eventually make some of the ghost and horror movies from that period available. 7/10
