I didn’t plan this, but this update turns out to be heavily freighted with movies depicting real (or at least “real”) people in fairly fanciful ways, including a variety of kung fu founding fathers and a Catholic priest who isn’t nearly as crazy in the filmmakers’ telling as he was in actuality:
The Boxer from Shantung (1972), in which the 1930’s Warner Brothers gangster formula gets the Shaw Brothers chopsocky treatment…
Crash and Burn (1990), in which a post-apocalyptic slasher runs afoul of a Final Couple with a weapon that Laurie Strode sure would have found handy against Michael Myers…
The Day Time Ended (1979), in which that phrase doesn’t mean at all what you’d naturally expect it to…
Flesh and Fantasy (1943), in which there may or may not be such a thing as Destiny, and you may find it challenging to give a damn one way or the other…
Heroes Two (1974), which inaugurates a long-running cycle of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies concerning the Shaolin Temple and its disciples…
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), in which William Shatner plays a cowboy veterinarian facing an enemy even more terrifying than his toupe…
and…
The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), in which I learn to my astonished delight that they occasionally do make them like they used to after all!
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
You can’t judge a book by its cover, but this image from the DVD of 
If you remember how technology, the fantastic, and science fiction were, for the most part, depicted on American television in the mid-1970s, the feature length pilot movie for the short lived TV series 
Despite its title and poster art,