The Lucha Diaries: Too pointless to die!

So I finally got all of the domain issues sorted out and The Lucha Diaries is now once again accessible via the luchadiaries.com url. In the course of dealing with that I was reminded that it has been quite a long time since I pulled off a lazy 4DK update by recycling old Lucha Diaries material. So, guess what time it is, kids?

Look, even though I'm no longer updating the Lucha Diaries, I still think that all of the blood and suffering I put into compiling it needs to be occasionally remembered. And, no, I am not being overly dramatic. I suffered! See the below entry from some time in '07.

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La Furia de las Karatecas (1981)
(The Fury of the Karate Experts)

Damn, damn, damn. Here I was thinking that I was done with Santo -- at least for the time being. I thought I'd watched every dvd -- both legit and gray market -- that was available, and in the process had seen all but three of the fifty-four(!) films in El Enmascarado de Plata's oeuvre. Confident that those remaining three films would continue to be elusive for the foreseeable future -- and, let's be honest, too spent from my efforts to put much work into finding them in any case -- I commemorated this milestone by adding an elegiac postscript to my review of Santo contra el Asesino de la Television, wistfully reflecting on the place Santo has had in my life and dreams over all these long years. Then, just days later, I came across a gray market copy of Santo's final film, La Furia de las Karatecas. Thank you, internet. Thank you so very much.

La Furia de las Karatecas stars a 64 year old Santo and Grace Renat, a woman with freakishly enormous breasts. Renat plays twins here, a circumstance that opens such a broad vista of possible juvenile puns that my only response can be to turn and quietly walk away. As the evil sister, she spends almost the entirety of her screen time doing orgasmic, mostly-naked booty dances in supplication to some kind of glowing space rock. As the good sister... well, who cares what the good sister does. There is a monster also -- awakened by Bad Grace In the course of her gyrations -- and he appears to have symmetrically-spaced, hair-sprouting moles all over his body.

I find the fact that this film is a continuation of the immediately preceding film, El Puno de la Muerte, both puzzling and frightening, because La Furia de las Karatecas falls far short of having enough content to make even one movie interesting, much less two -- so what on earth could El Puno de la Muerte possibly contain? Providing little relief are the aged Santo's action scenes, which are limited to a couple of enervated brawls between himself and Tinieblas, who here plays one of the evil Grace's henchmen. As for the karate experts referred to in the title, they really don't make much of a showing, which makes it difficult to ascertain exactly what it is that they're so furious about.

La Furia de las Karatecas is really pretty horrible. The only way it could be worse, really, would be if you could actually catch some kind of disease by watching it. I'd only recommend this one if you're dying to see a Santo movie with an annoying 80s synth score; otherwise, I'd give it a wide berth. And don't even think about the fact that Santo would be dead within a few short years of completing this one. That's just too depressing to bear.