Santo Gold Is Pretty Much The Best Thing Ever: The Daily Nooner (EST)!
Santo Gold Infomercial
I don’t even know where to start with this one. Big shoutout to The Virtual Santo Gold Museum for gathering all the great information that I’ve liberally paraphrased below.
Back in the 1980s, a successful businessman named Santo Rigatuso decided to create a film. Through his “Santo Gold” mail-order fake jewelry business, Santo had racked up a considerable amount of cash - more than enough to fund his first feature film. The result? Blood Circus, a “science-fiction wrestling movie” featuring cannibals, washed-up professional wrestlers, aliens from the planet Zoran and, naturally, lots of Santo Gold mail-order jewelry.
Strangely enough, Santo had a hard time finding distribution for his creative masterpiece. His solution? Promote it through his Santo Gold infomercials and rent out a few theaters in Baltimore to show it in. Sadly, only three people showed up for the premiere - not quite enough to make up for the film’s $2 million budget. Perhaps out of desperation, Santo moved on to crazier money-making schemes: selling credit cards to people with bad credit for $49.95 (redeemable only for Santo Gold merchandise), and offering $2000 blocks of an unnamed millionaire’s fortune for the low, low price of $52 a pop. The law eventually caught up with Santo and he ended up indicted on twelve counts of mail fraud, and sadly, his film lives on today only in the memories of those (un)fortunate enough to have seen it: there are allegedly no copies remaining in circulation.
You can read more about Santo Rigatuso (that’s him screaming in the white suit and sunglasses FYI), his films, and his legal troubles here. There is also a longer clip from his infomercial available here, and a completely baffling, typo-riddled, barely-functional website promising sundry goods at SantoGold.com. It has pictures of office buildings on it, so I’m pretty sure it’s legit.
March 10th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Hey, Brian Lynch: If you’re reading this, why don’t you write a movie about this guy instead of The Sims?
March 10th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I tried to some up with something funny to say, but Blood Circus frightens me too much.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Phenomenom?
March 10th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
“Blood Circus” is one of my three favorite films of all time (the other two are “Special Forces” and Star Wars Episode II).
And Santo Gold is the best! The plate in my head is made of Santo Gold!
March 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I don’t know. Blood Circus still looks better than Evil Altar. Or maybe I’m just goin’ vex.
March 10th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Oh, man….
“Explore Your Dreams and most importantly, ‘Learn from your mistakes and get passed them like I have!” Santo Gold
Re: “The Making of Blood Circus”
Rated: N&E (for Nuts and Everybody)
March 10th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
“The most Incomprehensable, Bazaar, funniest, Wrestling movie ever made”
That sentence alone is pretty incomprehensible. Bazaar?
March 10th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Most… funniest?
March 10th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Wow. So Santo Gold sings Santo Gold in a movie where the prize for the champion wrestler is a belt made of Santo Gold. That’s the best example of product placement since… ever. I think the Matrix Reloaded’s heavyhanded Cadillac use was a close second, followed by Tomb Raider (maybe the 2nd one, they all sucked titty and were interchangeable) and its obvious Jeep fetish.
I still think Evil Altar makes it onto my short list of movies to watch before Blood Circus… and both look hugely better than Midnight Mass was.
Thanks, film industry, for annihilating my dreams. Blood Circus could only look worse if Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler starred in it and it ran for 4 hours, and the bad guys were Nazis.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
firstly phenomenom?
Secondly, that is so shit it must be a spoof.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:55 am
You have to be careful at incomprehensible bazaars. I once purchased a t-shirt at one, but when I got it home, it turned out to be a gas-powered imitation kumquat juicer. Caveat emptor.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Are you looking to sell, Stiles? I have an expensive hat I’d be willing to trade.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Hrm…. I might be inclined… Is said expensive hat a jewel-encrusted pith hat? Or an anodized aircraft aluminum fedora? Because either would round out my collection quite nicely.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Damn, this is just an average, ordinary teflon disco shovel hat (with rotating blinders) and a little propeller on top.
Yeah, I think we were at the same incomprehensible bazaar.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Is the hat made out of Santo gold at all?
March 12th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Santo iron pyrite.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I HEAR SANTOGOLD IS PLAYING A SECRET SHOW IN LOS ANGELES ON APRIL 22ND AT BORDELLO BAR http://www.bordellobar.com/, MORE INFO AT SWINDLE MAGAZINE. I HEAR SHE WILL GO ON AT 11PM. ANYONE KNOW IF THIS IS TRUE?