If you ask a professional wrestling fan who Ian Hodgkinson is, chances are they'll just kinda look at you like you're speaking Swahili. If you were to then ask them who Vampiro is, chances are they'd at least be able to give you some vague description of the man with the “horror-punk” ring motif... a lot would also confuse him as being Mexican, in which case they would be off by about 2300 miles. Born in Ontario, Ian Hodgkinson started doing the wrestling thing in the mid-80s, gradually working his way up the ladder of fame down Mexico way amidst the mighty luchadores south-of-the-border. Here he was given the name “The Canadian Vampire”, the Canadian part of which has since been dropped. It was probably for the better too, because that name just conjures images in my brain of Christopher Lee dressed like Captain Canuck.

During the apex of his Mexican popularity, Vampiro bought into a shifty movie producer's attempt to make him the next Santo. The project failed miserably and Ian never got his promised payday. I don't just mean he didn't become the next Santo, I mean he never even got paid for the movie! Speaking of rip-offs, although he can speak fluent Spanish (seriously, if you're gonna build any kind of celeb status in another country you better learn the language... unless you're Cuban in which case all you need to do is hit a baseball) Vampiro's lines were all dubbed over... then again, just because you can speak a language well doesn't automatically qualify that you can act a language well. Oh well. What's that Lassie? Sadako fell into the old well?! Meh, leave her there.

Appearing here under the name “Vampire Casanova”, Vampiro starts the flick out like every Mexican movie does: with a wrestling match! Have you ever watched flicks on Telemundo over the weekend? Every Mexican movie starts with a wrestling match whether it's about wrestlers or not! Ever wonder why Highlander begins at a wrestling match? Russell Mulcahy is Mexican. Everybody thinks he's Australian but he's really from Mexico. His birth name is Russell Ramirez. True story. Hand to God... not that that means anything coming from an agnostic. Doesn't make Russell Mulcahy any less Mexican though senor.

Vampiro's opening match isn't just any match though. They're apparently wrestling under Twilight Zone rules because what starts out as stock footage of 'Piro and a handful of other wrestlers attacking each other outside of the ring in a packed house takes a sharp left turn down Head Scratch Boulevard when suddenly our hero is in the ring, wearing completely different face paint (not unlike the Ultimate Warrior), in an arena that's now only half-filled with spectators, and fighting back and forth with some big dude in a yellow and black jacket-mask combo who looks like the luchadore answer to Bumble Bee Man. “Donde esta mi tequila?” Some bald old fart in the crowd with a metal *cough*plastic*cough* gauntlet (and who looks like the results of an experiment to splice Reggie Bannister and Peter Boyle's DNA together that went horribly wrong) points it towards the ring and *ZAP*s 'Piro, distracting the Painted One and getting his ass body slammed (not that way, perverts) by his mysterious opponent, laid out flat on the giant Corona logo in the middle of the mat. When the referee checks on the fallen protagonist, the man shows no signs of life and an ambulance is called to the arena. Before they can load the guy into their meat wagon, the paramedics are also smited by Baldo's mighty metal power glove and corresponding flashing lcd light-up championship belt! I'm waiting for him to put on one of those shitty Laser Tag helmets before this is over with. “Yooooooou're laaaaaate, Rooooooookieeeeee!”

So the melty faced elderly bald man of ultimate doom (I'll call him “Geezer”) and his bimbo henchgirls (who look like Guns & Roses groupies) body snatch Vampiro. Geezer frolics and capers alongside the gurney as the girls push, but their corpse-napping does not go unnoticed, because Aunty Entity's Mexican sister and a midget dressed like King Ceesar ( after being shrunk in the wash) follow the trio of evil, Tia Entity blasting off the back door of their escape ambulance with her own invisible zapping powers, causing Geezer to lose his blasty gauntlet as they speed off. Who are these people and what the fuck is happening here? I dunno. The whole thing's in Espanol and I spent all three of my years in Spanish class trying to get south of my teacher's border. Oh man was she ever muy caliente...

A homeless guy comes across the discarded Glove of Combusting Goodness, which he immediately uses to take over the turf of Bumble Bee Man and his gang of urban dirt bike riders... where this is going I'm not sure, nor am I positive it's somewhere I want to be. As for our titular hero, he wakes up alone in someone's bedroom, dressed in a black vinyl jacket so shiny that you could probably catch the camera guy's reflection in the right shot. 'Piro wanders away from the room and down some kind of random sewer pipe before finding his way to Geezer's lair... behind the monitors of some security guard post watching Tia Entity try out new contact lenses she keeps inside of an upholstered waffle iron... did I get high this morning and not know it!? I haven't cleaned my apartment in months, but I'd almost swear I've suffered exposure to a toxic mixture of cleaning fluids right now. Despite not having his blast mitt any more, Geez still zaps Vampiro back into a coma. He wakes up again later, both of his enemy's crony chicks pawing at him, and seemingly unable to leave the room again. Not for the fun reason either, but because leaving the area of the bed immediately makes him ill. Yeah, that's your heterosexuality kicking your ass for trying to leave a bed occupied by two hot and horny women!

Back to our new favorite wino, after being attacked by Bumble Bee Man and friends again, the big masked galoot finally gets the drop on Drunky and strips him of the Gauntlet of Explodiness, taking it for his own bumble bee activities. Today's lesson kids? If Dr. Doom ever drops some hardware while trading fists with Iron Man and you come across it? Give up the cheap whiskey long enough to get yourself a nice secure place to sleep at night. After that you can drink yourself legally retarded and just *ZORCH* your enemies from an open window. Getting back to Geezer, for some reason he poisons a group of day laborers with a gas gun at a construction site, but only after he gas bombs his pants first. That's right, grandpa farts himself. The old fart lives up to his name. Who said Mexico lacks class? Viva diarrhea.

Bumble Bee Man takes a shot at knockin' shiny boots with Vampy's girly girl Enty, but she gives him the zappity-zap with her own explodey Lee Press-On Nail attack and leaves him passed out on the floor of the locker room like so many musty towels doused in wrestler taint sweat. Her blast nails are no match for Geezer though, when he and Lavern & Shirley bust in, knock her out using the enchanted eyeball lodged into his palm, and kidnap her too, leaving her inbred ewok sidekick hung up on a coat rack. The wanna-be Wicket shakes himself loose and carjacks a taxi cab, tracking down Bumble's gang and forcing them to point him in the direction of Geezer's HQ. He shows up just in time to miss Vampiro and Enty, who escape with the aid of some dayglow edible bath beads (don't ask me...) after 'Piro knocks the senior citizen out. Geezer catches up to them again though as they're attempting to escape through what looks like the burnt out city remnants of a post-apocalyptic b-movie (?!) and Grandpa zaps the hero yet a-fucking-gain. Before Vampy can be returned to the bed of penultimate evil, Enty teleports his unconscious ass to safety using her magic earring. Apparently she only has one magic earring, because now she winds up recaptured by the coot... who turned his hench-bimbos into mannequins... or maybe they're really both just ancient Egyptian women played by Kim Catrall randomly body jumping into plastic fantastic delirium and this is the part of the movie where Geezer is trying to convince the rest of the cast that's he's not crazy. Maybe he should take baby steps and start with convincing them that he's not Andrew McCarthy, cuz that would be much easier.

I have to stop and interject for a moment on Vampiro himself here. This movie was supposed to be an attempt at recreating the magic of the old Santo flicks. Although we all remember Santo getting captured and beaten at least twice in every movie, he also beat up a lot of angry mongoloid goons in the process before either falling to superior numbers or just getting floored by a Martian vampire wielding a steel chair. We're an hour in and all Vampiro does so far in this movie is get his brains turned into scrambled huevos every ten minutes and get tied up until he either wakes up and wanders away on his own, or his Tinkerbell reject lady friend tries to save him! What kind of crap is this!? If ol' Ian here doesn't bust out an atomic suicide dive on somebody's face soon, I'm going to have to watch Hell Comes to Frogtown just to stave off my blind rage of fanboy disappointment! And now, back to our movement... err, movie.

Speaking of our less than heroic leading man, he's safe and has decided to go back to work rather than save Entity from Geezer. Maybe he's trying to earn a few bucks so he can hire a group of mercenaries to do his heroics for him? Maybe the other wrestlers have agreed to help him if he can beat them all in a steel cage, no holds barred, flaming ladders gauntlet match? Sadly neither are the case. Instead, Vampiro just gets involved in a six-man tag match... Meanwhile, Geezer turns one of his storefront girlfriends into a perfect clone of Entity (the “real” one seems to have a completely different hair style when the two are on screen together for the first time, but has the time to perm her hair before they meet again later...) and sends her out to snag Vampy AGAIN during ANOTHER match with Bumble Bee Man... I know this review has already run longer than Sarah Palin's political career, but in all honesty I feel I need to convey every mind-numbing moment, either as a way of sharing the madness with you or just as a way of projecting my suffering onto you. Either way, if I was getting paid by the word I'd have enough to hire somebody to translate this for me by now. Then again, somehow I get the feeling that actually understanding a movie like this instead of simply watching it happen wouldn't be as “inspired” an experience as it is right now. And with that, it's back into the flames with me.

Halfway through the match, all of the other wrestlers HAVE CHANGED INTO DIFFERENT RING ATTIRE during a freak stock footage accident. We never see the match's finale so I'm guessing 'Piro's team won (or lost?), and when he heads back to the locker room he finds Entity's clone waiting for him. Also, he presumably had plenty of time before getting there to put on A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SET OF FACEPAINT... I can't believe I'm typing it, but EVEN THE MOST FACE-MELTINGEST GODFREY HO MOVIES ARE MORE COHERENT THAN WHAT I'M WATCHING RIGHT NOW! If I don't survive this, I want all of my DVDs cremated with me and I want every person “creatively” involved with this movie curb-stomped. No, don't laugh, I seriously want those two last requests fulfilled or I will Poltergeist the crap out of you until you do so.

The midget spaz in the bear suit frees the real heroine who shows up on the scene only after Vampiro's been spiked in the neck with a neon green stake courtesy of the be-tassled doppleganger. Real Enty knocks out Faux Enty and the good guys escape back into the badly lit nuclear nightmare industrial war zone, where Geezer's mask wearing security thugs may or may not be battling Bumble Bee Man's dirt bike gang. Somebody goes up like Michael Jackson's hair courtesy of a flaming arrow. A guy gets shot and takes one of the most unconvincing falls to his death this side of the casting call for extras in a Rambo movie. Geezer blows people up with his big Flash Gordon gun. Vampiro picks up someone's discarded saddle bag then climbs a ladder, only to disappear until later. A spinning raver disco party light from Spencer's Gifts looks like it might blow up the world, but is stopped when the Ewok steals Geezer's Christmas light decoration championship belt and Enty throws the belt at the bomb/party light, ending its countdown sequence before she shoots and kills the villain. Vampiro re-emerges later in his vinyl jacket (I guess that's what was in the saddle bag?!) so he and Enty can have a tearful goodbye before she BEAMS BACK TO HER HOME PLANET?! She dissipates in a pink beam of light and he's left with his Milli Vanilli braids and vinyl jacket, arms wide-open like something out of a bad Creed video (as if there's any other kind?) as the credits start to roll and I'm left trying to coax my brain out from its hiding place behind the entertainment center. I hate it when he gets back there. It happens every time there's a thunderstorm or an Albert Pyun movie.

Vampiro is the cinematic equal of snake venom. Shortly after being subjected to its neuro-toxins, it will wreak havoc on your body, ravaging your central nervous system and melting your brain, leading to severe physical agony, convulsions, frothing at the mouth and respiratory failure before breaking down the cellular structure of your body and eventually turning you into a pile of primordial ooze resembling that translucent cock snot they pack inside those little cans of Vienna Sausages. I don't really need to explain it much further. Even if it were in English, it still wouldn't make any fucking sense. Our hero after whom the movie is named does NOTHING for the length of the movie with the exception of a few pieces of in-ring stock footage, and he spends most of his time on screen looking just as confused and disoriented as the audience. Just think, if Milli Vanilli had never been outed as lip synchers then Vampiro might've been able to keep his bodyguarding gig with them and never had to resort to this. Our leading man is far from being the only rectum clencher in these 75 minutes of searing gas pain though. The ghetto Ewok's costume is ragged and looks like it smells of ass and cat pee, and the only thing our villain looks like he could menace are a tube of Fixodent and a bag of Depends, and even then only in between episodes of “El Matlock”. On the scale of blind incoherent stupidity, Warrior of the Night is 69ing up there on the throne with Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare while Star Odyssey watches from the corner and tweaks its nipples violently.

I know the economy is swirling down the porcelain right now ladles and Germans, but movies like this can help us forget the pain until the shut-off notice from your electricity provider shows up in the mail. These are tough times folks, and it looks like they're only going to get tougher, so keep your chin up kids... you know, cuz most Johns like to look into the broken, miserable eyes of the people forced to suck their dicks for grocery money. That reminds me, I've got a “job interview” in 20 minutes and I need to go get my Marilyn Monroe wig from the dry cleaner. Keep on truckin' baby Noodles!