Medieval knights executed for their black magic rituals come back as zombies to torment a group of vacationing college kids.
Synapse Films does a tremendous job restoring and releasing older cult horror films in 4K and on Blu-ray™. Titles such as Dario Argento’s “Phenomena,” “Suspiria,” and “Tenebrae,” “Living Dead at Manchester Morgue,” and “Street Trash.” But just because they have been restored in glorious 4K and HD doesn’t necessarily mean the films are good. Coined “classics” by some, that is a subjective term that differs from person to person.
“Tombs of the Blind Dead” feels like it was rushed into production to cash in on the zombie craze that was taking over the world at that time, thanks to George A. Romero’s seminal “Night of the Living Dead,” which came out four years earlier in 1968. While Romero at least tried to infuse NOTLD with a semblance of character exposition, TOTBD does the exact opposite; it feels superficial and depthless, with absolutely no screen time dedicated to fleshing out any of the characters or delivering any beneficial backstory; we are thrown in the deep end, just so people can be eaten onscreen but with no character development afforded any of them, we genuinely don’t care about them, or their inevitable demise.
What modicum of a story we are given revolves around two former college girlfriends, Betty (Lone Fleming) and Virginia (María Elena Arpón), who meet up several years later and who are joined by a male friend of Virginia’s, Roger (César Burner). While Virginia claims their friendship is strictly platonic, when he invites Betty along with Virginia and himself to a hotel in the country for the weekend, Betty agrees, but Virginia becomes resentful and jealous. On the trip, Virginia can’t stand to see Roger and Betty together so she decides to jump off the slow-moving train, landing in the foothills of a deserted monastery in the long-abandoned medieval town of Berzano at the border between Spain and Portugal.
The town was said to be home to a group of Knights Templar who worshipped Satan and offered virgin sacrifices to appease him. Virginia wanders the old ruins and finds a spot to settle down for the night, but later that evening, the knights rise from the dead and attack her, biting and ripping her flesh off. The next day, Roger and Betty borrow horses from their hotel and ride up to Berzano, looking for Virginia, but Roger succumbs to the knights’ appetite for human flesh. Betty manages to escape, and flags down a passing train, but the knights embark and kill everyone on board. The following day, the train slowly rolls into the station, unleashing the knights on an unwitting population.
“Tombs of the Blind Dead” is laughably bad. When Virginia first arrives at the abandoned monastery ruins in Berzano, it takes her over twenty minutes to scout her location and find nothing before settling down for the night. We watch her roam from empty room to empty room, obviously an attempt by director Amando de Ossorio to build suspense. However, this transpires during the day, with the sun beating down, so all efforts of imbuing fear and apprehension fall flat. Once the knights appear, we realize they are blind and move slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter, but our heroine emphatically insists on standing still, screaming and looking terrified, drawing as much attention to herself as possible, as the zombie knights, ever so leisurely, surround her and eat her.
I actually saw something in this film I had never seen before: zombies on zombie horses. You heard that correctly: zombie knights who can gallop at top speed, but once they catch up with their intended prey, they dismount and resort to moving slower than an octogenarian with ankle weights. “Tombs of the Blind Dead” is a Spanish production, and they join Italy as two of the most prominent countries that jumped on the zombie bandwagon throughout the ’70s and ’80s, with Lucio Fulci being one of my favorite horror directors and his “Zombi 2,” or simply “Zombi” as it was known in Italy, being my favorite foreign zombie movie.
Amando de Ossorio, who directed “Tombs of the Blind Dead” and its three sequels, “Return of the Blind Dead,” “The Ghost Galleon,” and “Night of the Seagulls,” obviously knew his way around a camera as the film employed some beautifully shot sequences, especially those that took place at the ruins of the fictional monastery, which were actually filmed at the Santa María la Real de Valdeiglesias monastery in Pelayos de la Presa, but he clearly didn’t know how to write believable dialogue or create, within the confines of a zombie story, a creditable narrative. Everything that occurs herein is preposterous and nonsensical. And I find it laughable that I am saying these things about a horror film. You need to be able to relate to the characters onscreen to care about them, but here, I was rooting for the lethargic zombie knights and their incredibly fast zombie horses.
Available on a 4000 Piece 3-Disc Limited Edition Blu-ray™ + Slipcover October 24th from Synapse Films
