With Halloween approaching, it’s time to look at a movie that’s been making the rounds online as of late. Like Nosferatu and Dracula before it, this movie features a vampire—a Canadian vampire, in fact!
The 1993 Mexican film, Vampiro, guerrero de la noche, dubbed into English alternately as Vampiro: Warrior of the Night and The Canadian Vampire in Night Warrior, is streaming for free on Tubi…
…and stars rookie lucha libre sensation Vampiro…
…plus a slew of other luchadores in cameos.
The film gets off to a great start with numerous translation errors. For example, Arturo Lucero is credited with “Argument”.
Next comes a wrestling match, which alternates between a shirtless Vampiro with minimal black paint in a trios match…
…and Vampiro with a shirt and full red paint, one-on-one with Pierroth Jr.
But in the crowd sits an evil genius—
—well, a villain named Lastre, who uses a special glove to paralyze Vampiro from afar.
The referee, following standard medical protocol, yanks Vampiro up by his dreads before medics perform CPR and stretcher him out.
Wanting a warrior to carry out his evil schemes (but mainly a boy toy for his henchwomen), Lastre freezes the EMTs with his glove and a bitchin’ LED belt.
He then kidnaps Vampiro, yelling at his smitten underlings to hurry up. “And remember, he has to fiiiiiiiiight!” he says, as if falling off a cliff.
Coming to the rescue is Larrosa de las Estrellas, an alien hero with both a perm and a pet named Pet…
…a grotesque animal that for some reason makes nothing but robot sounds the whole movie.
Larrosa blasts the ambulance with an invisible beam but fails to explode it—which, given that Vampiro is in there, is probably for the best.
Lastre gloats that he has “excaped”, but in his gloating he drops his glove. “I lost my gauntlet!” he yells hammily.
(So as not to overuse the word, I’ll just let you assume that everything Lastre says or does from now on is hammy, unless otherwise noted.)
Rather than Larrosa retrieving the glove, the powerful weapon lies on the ground of the arena parking lot for hours…
…until it’s discovered by a drunk in a trash pile in what’s clearly not the arena parking lot.
Soon after, luchador Pierroth Jr. shows up. The two have an argument—probably the work of Arturo Rivera—and Pierroth steals the glove (and blows the guy up).
He keeps the gauntlet (which serves mainly as an excuse to meet and flirt with Larrosa) for the rest of the movie.
Back at the villains’ hideout, Lastre is horny for the woman who tried to blast him…
…so he looks her up on one of the alien CD-ROMs that came with the weapons he’d found.
While Lastre pines for his intergalactic foe…
…Vampiro comes to, talks in this voice, and punches him.
In retaliation, Lastre paralyzes him with an invisible beam (all the beams in this movie are invisible) and gives him over to the ladies…
…who carry Vampiro, now a literal mannequin for one scene only, off to bed.
What could two women want with a strapping young wrestler entirely at their mercy? The script is not subtle about it, even using the words, “boy toy” repeatedly.
We are supposed to believe that Vampiro is some kind of heartthrob…
…a man whose posters decorate every other wall in the film…
…a man so irresistible to women that they call him “Casanova”.
And… he actually was. Despite being greener than mierda de ganso, Vampiro became an overnight sensation in Mexico.
Why else would Vampiro have gotten top billing, despite speaking Spanish so badly they had to dub him over even in the original release?
After waking up and crossfading, Vampiro tries to escape…
…but with the hideout surrounded by poison Zok gas, he stumbles back to his room and crossfades right back onto the bed.
“You can’t just really leave like that!”, says his captor ungrammatically.
It seems Lastre plans to use this poison gas (which is from the same planet as the weapons and the CD-ROMs) to kill all humanity.
To try to prevent millions dying by asphyxia (Lastre’s favorite phrase), Larrosa lets him find her, donning a mask and wrestling on TV.
Though the villains abduct her…
…Vampiro frees her…
…and tells her to take a pill.
Or, in his words, eat it. “Eat this pill so you will be able to breathe outside”, he explains. “Eat it! Eat it!”
Meanwhile, the henchwomen capture Pet, whom they recognize, naturally, as Larrosa’s mascot.
Lastre then catches Larrosa again, freezing her with—you guessed it—an invisible beam.
After turning his henchwomen into mannequins (so the producers didn’t have to pay the actresses for any more scenes)…
…Lastre uses one of them to create an evil Larrosa clone.
Even more dastardly, he gives the original Larrosa a cheap wig.
Vampiro, his memory having been wiped, goes right back to wrestling, teaming with King Haku and Último Dragón…
…against Norman “Black Magic” Smiley, Negro Casas, and Pierroth Jr. (who, in an uncharacteristic act of good sportsmanship, leaves his alien death glove at home).
Then a bunch of weird stuff happens, which nobody seems to notice.
First, Vampiro spontaneously starts bleeding as soon as Norman Smiley enters the ring…
…then beats him up so badly his trunks change color. Also, Pierroth is now Art Barr.
Norman’s trunks then turn red again, while Vampiro quickly cleans his face off.
When Vampiro heads backstage, now with his face paint back on, the fake Larrosa seduces him…
…then stabs him in the neck with a glow stick…
…which he helpfully catches and holds in place.
The real Larrosa arrives and kicks her own ass…
…then pulls the glowstick out of Vampiro’s neck.
Now it’s time to go to Lastre’s lair and destroy his Zok gas. There, Pet steals Lastre’s belt…
…which Larrosa throws into a vat, saving the day somehow.
She then blasts the bad guy into said vat.
Vampiro and Larrosa have one final tearful reunion before she has to return to her home planet. A beam (the only visible one in the entire film) slowly takes her away…
…leaving Vampiro heartbroken…
…but single. Ladies?
This ending is bittersweet, but also horrifying, once you realize the beam took only Larrosa away, leaving Pet to roam the earth.
All that’s left is to roll the credits, partially translated from the original Spanish.
