Tombs Of The Blinddead
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This rare and rather obscure, seminal 1971 Spanish zombie movie from Amando De Ossorio, opens with a scene set in the 12th or 13th century. A group of Templar Knights tie an attractive blonde peasant woman to a wooden cross and, as they ride past on horses, slash at her shoulders, face and breasts with swords. The grisly ordeal culminates with the knights gathering around her to feast upon her blood... (Historically, the Knights Templar were originally an order of christian soldiers who waged war against the muslim world during the Crusades; in the early 14th Century, however, they were tried, disbanded and executed for heresy and satanism.)
Fast forward to the 'present day' (well, the early 70s), and we meet a woman called Virginia, who is on a backpacking holiday in Spain. She meets up with her old friend, Elizabeth and her companion, Roger. After a brief lesbian encounter with Elizabeth on a train, Virginia suddenly abandons her acquaintances to go and explore a derelict monastery in the middle of the countryside... Finding the crumbling ruins uninhabited, she starts a campfire and settles into her sleeping bag for the night. Once darkness falls, however, the eponymous Blind Dead rise from their dusty graves. Resembling skeleton-monks, with rotting skull-faces, mouldy hooded cloaks caked in filth and withered, skeletalised hands and fingers, these shuffling zombiefied knights look superb (no doubt influencing the 'ghosts' of John Carpenter's 1979 The Fog). When they find Virginia, she flees in terror, though with the blind dead chasing her on horseback, she is soon captured and killed.
As Elizabeth and Roger begin investigating their friend's disappearance, they find the locals reluctant to talk about the mysteriously alluring monastery (a familiar plot twist that inevitably tempts the protagonists of any story to their doom!). They meet up with the local police detectives who take them to a mortuary to see Virginia's body. The 'local' mortician (a strange, brooding character who would not look out of place presenting/narrating the Faces of Death shockumentaries!) gleefully shows them the wrong mutilated cadaver before unveiling Virginia's rather 'fresh' body. He explains that her many wounds are bite-marks, symptomatic of her being killed in a violent 'death ritual'...
Left alone in the morgue with his pet canary and pet frog, the mortician soon falls prey to Virginia's cannibalistic reanimated corpse. After she bites into his neck, we see his frog escaping to freedom, hopping away through a puddle of his master's gore.
Roger and Elizabeth visit a nutty history professor who explains to them the Knights Templar, their misdeeds and how they were all tried for satanism and subsequently hung. As they swung from the gibbet (or rather a tree), crows devoured their eyes. Every so often these sightless monsters rise from their tombs to feast on human prey.
The zombie Virginia meanwhile tries to claim another victim, though is ultimately consigned to a fiery end (the rather neat FX shots of her immolation are very similar to the graphic burning woman scene in the under-rated 1980 video nasty, 'Don't Go In The House'). Beside her, mannequins melt in the heat (another of Ossorio's quirkily-directed camera shots ably demonstrating what is happening to the burning zombie).
Roger and Elizabeth team up with local rascal, Pedro and his amorous female sidekick and head to the monastery to unravel its riddles. As night inevitably falls, bells chime ominously, signalling the dead to emerge. Pedro is the first to be cornered and eaten alive in a zombie-chow-down scene reminiscent of - and pre-dating - both Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead and Fulci's 1979 Zombie [Flesh Eaters]. With the quartet despatched one-by-one, only Elizabeth survives the zombie holocaust. Realising that these blind dead hunt by sound, she desperately stifles her cries. When the screaming stops, the ravenous corpses instead track Elizabeth by the sound of her heartbeat and her terrified whimpers. With dawn approaching, she runs for her life, chased, rather dramatically, by horseriding, skeletal zombies. She almost reaches a passing train, but as it makes an unscheduled stop to rescue her, the blind dead attack, butchering the train drivers and passengers...
With a cracking, creepy soundtrack full of scary, morbid noises, infernal growls and guttural moans and groans, superb make up (crumbling, emaciated zombies!), cheesey (but gloriously wrought) gore, and perfectly creepy location work (in a real ruined monastery), Tombs of the Blind Dead is a minor classic. At times it has the Gothic feel of classic Hammer horror (but with a darker edge), and could be compared to fellow Spaniard Jorge Grau's 1974 masterpiece, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. The first film was succeeded by three sequels, including Return of the Evil Dead, and Night of the Seagulls...
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Fast forward to the 'present day' (well, the early 70s), and we meet a woman called Virginia, who is on a backpacking holiday in Spain. She meets up with her old friend, Elizabeth and her companion, Roger. After a brief lesbian encounter with Elizabeth on a train, Virginia suddenly abandons her acquaintances to go and explore a derelict monastery in the middle of the countryside... Finding the crumbling ruins uninhabited, she starts a campfire and settles into her sleeping bag for the night. Once darkness falls, however, the eponymous Blind Dead rise from their dusty graves. Resembling skeleton-monks, with rotting skull-faces, mouldy hooded cloaks caked in filth and withered, skeletalised hands and fingers, these shuffling zombiefied knights look superb (no doubt influencing the 'ghosts' of John Carpenter's 1979 The Fog). When they find Virginia, she flees in terror, though with the blind dead chasing her on horseback, she is soon captured and killed.
As Elizabeth and Roger begin investigating their friend's disappearance, they find the locals reluctant to talk about the mysteriously alluring monastery (a familiar plot twist that inevitably tempts the protagonists of any story to their doom!). They meet up with the local police detectives who take them to a mortuary to see Virginia's body. The 'local' mortician (a strange, brooding character who would not look out of place presenting/narrating the Faces of Death shockumentaries!) gleefully shows them the wrong mutilated cadaver before unveiling Virginia's rather 'fresh' body. He explains that her many wounds are bite-marks, symptomatic of her being killed in a violent 'death ritual'...
Left alone in the morgue with his pet canary and pet frog, the mortician soon falls prey to Virginia's cannibalistic reanimated corpse. After she bites into his neck, we see his frog escaping to freedom, hopping away through a puddle of his master's gore.
Roger and Elizabeth visit a nutty history professor who explains to them the Knights Templar, their misdeeds and how they were all tried for satanism and subsequently hung. As they swung from the gibbet (or rather a tree), crows devoured their eyes. Every so often these sightless monsters rise from their tombs to feast on human prey.
The zombie Virginia meanwhile tries to claim another victim, though is ultimately consigned to a fiery end (the rather neat FX shots of her immolation are very similar to the graphic burning woman scene in the under-rated 1980 video nasty, 'Don't Go In The House'). Beside her, mannequins melt in the heat (another of Ossorio's quirkily-directed camera shots ably demonstrating what is happening to the burning zombie).
Roger and Elizabeth team up with local rascal, Pedro and his amorous female sidekick and head to the monastery to unravel its riddles. As night inevitably falls, bells chime ominously, signalling the dead to emerge. Pedro is the first to be cornered and eaten alive in a zombie-chow-down scene reminiscent of - and pre-dating - both Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead and Fulci's 1979 Zombie [Flesh Eaters]. With the quartet despatched one-by-one, only Elizabeth survives the zombie holocaust. Realising that these blind dead hunt by sound, she desperately stifles her cries. When the screaming stops, the ravenous corpses instead track Elizabeth by the sound of her heartbeat and her terrified whimpers. With dawn approaching, she runs for her life, chased, rather dramatically, by horseriding, skeletal zombies. She almost reaches a passing train, but as it makes an unscheduled stop to rescue her, the blind dead attack, butchering the train drivers and passengers...
With a cracking, creepy soundtrack full of scary, morbid noises, infernal growls and guttural moans and groans, superb make up (crumbling, emaciated zombies!), cheesey (but gloriously wrought) gore, and perfectly creepy location work (in a real ruined monastery), Tombs of the Blind Dead is a minor classic. At times it has the Gothic feel of classic Hammer horror (but with a darker edge), and could be compared to fellow Spaniard Jorge Grau's 1974 masterpiece, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. The first film was succeeded by three sequels, including Return of the Evil Dead, and Night of the Seagulls...
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