Salvador Santos and Arturo Antares are best friends. They always have been. They grew up together, they played together, hell - they even share the same birthday, which they celebrate every year together. They are such good friends, in fact, that when they reach adulthood the wealthy and successful Antares agrees to finance Santos' comic book and the two go into business together. There's would be a perfect, geeky, heterosexual friendship if not for the fact that neither is what they appear though neither of them know it.

Santos? He's actually the human incarnation of a powerful being - a santos - from a parallel universe known as the Doubleverse, a world much like ours but one populated by both santos' - human appearing creature with superpowers - and hybrids - santos' fused to varying degrees with other creatures or objects - that exhibit both santos powers and creature powers to varying degree. The most powerful Hybrid is Nova - 80% santos, 20% star - a being driven mad in its quest to become fully santos. And if you know your astronomy at all you've no doubt just figured out what Antares' secret is: he has been possessed by Nova and the powerful being is now using his body to kill any santos' in the regular universe and collect their powers in a plot that threatens to destroy both the Universe and the Doubleverse in one fell blow. Only Santos, of course, has any chance of stopping Antares but only if he can learn to harness his powers, a task he attempts with the help of a santos-fly hybrid with an unfortunate addiction to human feces.

Got that? The surprising thing about Santos the film is that despite the goofy premise and the occasional running gag writer/director Lopez seems to have little interest in making his film into a comedy. What he does instead is build a fairly straight-faced comic-geek fantasy world. Rather than make fun of his inner child, the kid that adored reading as many comics as he could get his hands on, Lopez indulges him and allows him to take his love for broad action and camp into a remarkably well-realized world. The goal seems to have been to bring the world of those primary-colored panels to life and he's taken a pretty solid run at it.

The weaknesses of Santos are all fairly common to films of this type. It absolutely requires that you share Lopez's love of geek culture and also his particular sense of humor. Some gags work better than others and many will likely be confused by how straight faced he generally plays things, just as they were when Dick Tracy rolled around. This is not a broad slapstick comedy, a parody, a satire or any other sort of poking at the comic genre that many were expecting it to be and unmet expectations - even when the expectations were false in the first place - often lead to angry feelings. I consider that one a fault of the marketing, however, and not of the film itself. The edit could use a bit of judicious trimming to keep the pace up - particularly in the ending, which runs longer than need be - but things are generally solid.

The pluses? First is the world of the film, which is richly detailed and follows its own unique logic. A good deal of the special effects work for Santos was done at Robert Rodriguez' Troublemaker Studios and their unique style is a perfect fit for Lopez's designs. But sets mean nothing without good characters filling them and Lopez's cast is quite strong, particularly Javier Gutierrez in the lead and Guillermo Toledo as Santos' part-fly mentor. Perfect? Nah, but Santos is an entertaining ride that showcases the fairly unique style and force of vision of its creator.