Attack of the Blind Dead, aka Return of the Blind Dead (1973)
The town of Bouzano is preparing for its celebration of the blinding and burning of a group of satanic knights. Jack Marlowe (Tony Kendall) arrives to set up the fireworks show, and finds his ex-girlfriend, Vivian (Esther Roy), who is now the mafia-like mayor’s girl. The mayor (Fernando Sancho) sends his henchman to teach Marlowe to leave Vivian alone, but everything is interrupted by the blind dead templars, who have risen from their graves to seek revenge.
Those blind dead templars are back, sort of, in a misnamed film that is better made than its predecessor, but not as original. The Blind Dead first showed their skeletal faces in La Noche del Terror Ciego (inaccurately translated as Tombs of the Blind Dead), a low budget Spanish/Portuguese production memorable for introducing a new type of zombie, and for its weak script. The creatures were a hit, so with a higher budget, writer-director Amando de Ossorio made this semi-sequel, with a better script that still had enormous plot holes and bizarre characters.
While the makeup is the same, Ossorio has ignored the details of the origin of his monsters. A group of Satanic knights (many more than in the first film) are killed by peasants (no explanation is given on why the sword-wielding templars don’t cut down the villagers), and this time, have their eyes burned out. In modern day, a deformed and abused cemetery worker summons them from the grave with a sacrifice. No mention is made of their previous undead behavior in La Noche del Terror Ciego, where they rose on a nightly basis and bit into their victims, creating more zombies. There’s no biting in this one, nor additional zombies. It’s just a bunch of dead guys out for revenge. All this means the film fails as a sequel, and should be taken as a completely separate story, that just happens to have some similar elements.
Marlowe is another macho man common in ’70s Spanish cinema, and is as stupid as his counterparts. When any sane man would realize he was in trouble, this guy just hangs around enjoying the view. I think Marlowe is there simply to join in the “who’s got the biggest one” contest that this village is bound to have every few days. Most of the men have been bathing in large vats of testosterone nightly and are dying to show off their manhoods. It gets old quickly, and I was rooting for the zombies to take them all out. Only the local hot babe Amalia (Lone Fleming, who played a different character in the first film), and the mayor, who oozes evil, are of any interest.
So, that leaves the undead as the real virtue of the film, and they are a sight. Skeletons in rotting robes, these are great monsters still searching for a better movie. They are horrific enough to scare kids and cool enough to satisfy monster-movie fans. They spend more time walking slowly, riding their undead horses, and standing still than killing anyone, but they look good whatever they are doing (except when several die in scenes that needed more cash in the special effects bucket).
Return of the Evil Dead (1973)
The English dubbed version has been saddled with the title Return of the Evil Dead, which would have sounded better in the ’70s, before The Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead were made. It has also been trimmed by several minutes, removing some nudity and gore. While I recommend the Spanish language version, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. The cuts create another plot hole (the sacrifice is gone, so there’s no reason for the zombies to awaken), but in a film with so many holes, what’s one more? The acting is less than sterling in either version.
The blind dead appear again in The Ghost Galleon (1974), and Night of the Seagulls (1974).