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| Courtesy: Synapse Films |
The cult-horror community was thrown into a frenzy in early April when Synapse Films surprise-released an unannounced 2k-restored steelbook blu-ray of Tombs of the Blind Dead at the Cinema Wasteland convention. The 1971 Spanish horror film by Amando de Ossorio has long been a cult classic of the 70s Eurohorror movement; its legacy burned into the brains of horror fans everywhere thanks to the genuinely chilling image of its eyeless, skeletal, robe-wearing zombie Knights Templar. And yet the film has only occasionally been easy to see: it was famously tricky to get during the VHS days, when it floated around under different titles and in different cuts from various small labels, and while it received two pretty solid-for-their-time DVD releases from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground, both are long out-of-print and have been very rare and sought-after for years. This is the first time the film has received an English-friendly blu-ray anywhere in the world, after being a much-requested title for all the various boutique labels, but one that was deemed unreleasable for a long time due to a tangle of rights issues (Scream Factory was able to sort out the rights for the fourth film in the series, Night of the Seagulls, but that's all). With that tortured history of being a very difficult film to actually watch without going to a lot of trouble, it's safe to say that Tombs of the Blind Dead holds its cult-legend reputation based significantly on its notorious hard-to-find status, and on the iconic images of the blind dead themselves, which have surely been seen by way more people than have actually seen the movie, especially in recent years. So now that people actually have a chance to see the film for themselves in a readily-available modern format, the question is... does it live up to the hype?
Well... yes and no. The blind dead themselves are without a doubt some of 70s Eurohorror's creepiest and most well-designed creatures; absolute nightmare fuel of the highest order. The scenes when they first ride out into the night on their zombie horses to unleash their vengeance... great stuff. However, as someone who was late to the party with Tombs of the Blind Dead, and only saw it for the first time in 2020 after hearing of its lofty reputation for two decades... I found the film itself to be a bit of a letdown which does not live up to the hype, and a wildly uneven experience on several levels. Certainly not the Spanish masterpiece that, say, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue/Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is. However, the film's sequel, Return of the Blind Dead (aka Return of the Evil Dead), I found to be a far superior film, and pretty much what I had hoped the first film would be. So I'm taking the release of this new Synapse blu-ray as an opportunity to look back at both films: the original that doesn't quite convince me of its enduring legacy, and the sequel which changed my mind.
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| Courtesy: Synapse Films |
Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)
In Medieval Spain, an order of Knights Templar turned to witchcraft and ritual sacrifice in hopes of making themselves immortal, but once their murderous ways were discovered, the local villagers stormed their fortress and executed them, leaving their corpses out so that vultures would peck out their eyes. But now, in the present day, the village of Berzano where the knights ruled is long-abandoned, due to legends that the eyeless zombie knights, immortal after all, rise from the grave each night to find fresh sacrifices to sustain themselves. When a young woman disappears after trying to spend the night in the ruins, her boyfriend and friend set out to discover what happened, and face the myth of the knights. While certainly not the most original premise for the most part, the grisly gothic myth of the blind dead's origin story is a strong one, as is the concept of how they don't have eyes, and thus must hunt by sound. It certainly is a good hook to hang a cult-classic zombie film on, with a lot of possibility. Tombs of the Blind Dead only makes good on those possibilities sometimes, and falls totally flat other times, but when it's good, it's extremely effective, delivering at least a couple truly great horror sequences which many horror fans will find worth the journey, even if the whole experience is not nearly as strong.
After an eerie opening sequence consisting of beautiful but ominous shots of Spanish ruins, Tombs of the Blind Dead gets off to a very awkward start, spending its first 15 minutes establishing a very stiff, unconvincing, poorly-written love triangle which gives us absolutely no reason to care about any of these characters. Unfortunately this establishes a trend for the rest of the film: too much runtime spent with poorly-written characters who are not particularly likable. However, the film improves immediately when one of the three splits off from the others and finds herself exploring the creepy and otherworldly ruins of Berzano alone. The location is a character in its own right: a beautiful, dreamlike, and genuinely spooky locale which oozes foreboding even as you can see how beautiful the architecture must once have been. They obviously are real ruins, and not a constructed set, and the quality of this location does more to elevate the film than any other element besides the blind dead themselves. If the film had as good a screenwriter as it did a location scout or makeup designer, it would be a much better movie.
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| Courtesy: Synapse Films |
The first scene in which the blind dead emerge and stalk their first victim is incredible: the buildup of atmosphere is great, and the images of the blind dead emerging from their graves, prying open coffins with skeletal hands, are superbly spooky. There really are no other cinematic zombies like them. When the first of the dead rides into frame on his zombie horse, it is a moment horror fans will remember. The movie basically earns its cult-classic reputation with this one sequence alone, and it is no surprise that it captured the imaginations of so many; it really is that strong.
A couple more very strong, well-shot zombie sequences follow, including a particularly good one in a neon-lit mannequin factory that looks like something out of the gorgeously-shot Messiah of Evil. But unfortunately after that first sequence with the blind dead the film returns to being a very uneven experience. Too much time is spent with characters who are neither particularly well-developed nor likable, and it drags the movie down. And crucially, after that stunning first sequence we really don't see the blind dead again until the climax of the film; there just is not enough of the blind dead in a film called Tombs of the Blind Dead, and to a degree they are wasted as villains in their own movie. The movie also does weirdly little with the whole concept of them being blind and hunting by sound; especially after A Quiet Place mined that concept for suspense so effectively, it feels bizarre that this film does almost nothing with it, to the point that things would barely be different if they could see.
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| Courtesy: Synapse Films |
Tombs of the Blind Dead also suffers from a couple real weird tonal shifts that I found very off-putting. It feels sometimes like de Ossorio wasn't quite sure what type of horror film he wanted to make, or was trying to make it every type of horror film for every type of horror audience, in a way that doesn't work. In its best moments - that first sequence of the blind dead rising, the moody morgue and mannequin factory sequences - it feels like a slow-burn gothic mood-piece with touches of surrealism (the type of thing that Messiah of Evil did so brilliantly around the same time). But at other times the movie veers off into full-blown exploitation mode, which feels very jarring because the rest of the movie doesn't feel like an exploitation film. This is particularly true of the third act's entirely gratuitous, completely out of nowhere, unexpectedly brutal rape scene, which feels like it was spliced in from a different, much sleazier movie and doesn't belong here. It is very off-putting, especially since it so shamelessly feels like it was added for absolutely no reason except to up the shock/sleaze factor, and it detracted from the film for me, more or less derailing it before a zombie-filled climax which isn't as good as the first blind dead sequence anyway. Tolerance for that type of gratuitous sleaze content certainly varies among horror fans, but for me Tombs of the Blind Dead takes a sharp nose-dive in its last act and loses me, which is unfortunate, because as uneven as I found the whole film to be, its first two thirds have some undeniably compelling strong points.
Honestly, if I hadn't watched the film on its Anchor Bay double-feature DVD with Return of the Blind Dead on the other side of the flip-disc, Tombs might have been the only film in the series that I watched, after how much I felt it went off the rails in its last third, between the unexpected shift into brutal sleaze territory that turned it into a fundamentally different movie, and the long stretch of bad, dull character scenes that preceded that shift. But since I was watching it on the double-feature disc, I decided to give the sequel a chance to see if it would correct what I felt were the first film's mistakes - and I'm glad I did, because it actually did. Return of the Blind Dead was almost everything that I wanted Tombs of the Blind Dead to be, but found that it mostly wasn't. The first film is worth a look for fans of 70s Eurohorror who don't mind an uneven movie with erratic pacing and weak characters, and who don't mind the shift into exploitation territory in the last act. At the very least, that first sequence where the blind dead rise is absolutely worth watching as an excellently-crafted 15 minutes of horror cinema, even if most of the rest of the film doesn't live up to it. But that is a tepid endorsement, and I would not advocate blind-buying the Synapse steelbook for its extravagant price. But now, onto the film in the series which I would recommend more enthusiastically, and that I wish Synapse had done as well.
Score:
Return of the Blind Dead (aka Return of the Evil Dead) (1973)
The first thing to know about Return of the Blind Dead (also known as Return of the Evil Dead in some English-language releases, and Attack of the Blind Dead in its Spanish release) is that it isn't really a sequel at all; it's basically a reboot, long before that was a term, although still written and directed by Amando de Ossorio. It is not set in the same continuity as the first film, but instead tells the same basic story in a different way. Same backstory, more or less: in Medieval times in the Spanish village of Berzano (er, the Portuguese village of Bouzano this time? I'm not sure if the film itself changed country and spelling, or just this particular English translation), the Knights Templar turned to human sacrifices to try and unlock the secret of immortality, only to be burned to death and have their eyes seared out by vengeful villagers. But in this version of the story Berzano/Bouzano was never abandoned, and every year they celebrate the anniversary of when their ancestors rid their town of the Templars with a huge festival. But on this particular anniversary, while the town is partying, a would-be occultist offers a human sacrifice to raise the Templars from their graves to get revenge, and the townspeople find themselves under siege. The result is a film with a very different dynamic, with a much larger cast of characters, and with the blind dead getting a lot more to do, as they are no longer confined to a single location. Indeed, the zombie Templars get more than double the screen time that they did in Tombs, and no longer feel underutilized; they are a pretty constant presence after their initial awakening.
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| Courtesy: Blue Underground |
Gone is the erratic pacing and inconsistent tone of Tombs of the Blind Dead; Return of the Blind Dead commits to a tone and style (without the unexpected detour into sleaze territory) and sticks with it, pretty aggressively. The first few minutes are still the weakest part, as characterization is once again a bit broad and thin, and the character arcs once again focus on a somewhat improbable love triangle, but this time it has a bit more of a Spanish soap feel, and less of an exploitation feel, and the two main leads are pretty likable and sympathetic. But once the blind dead rise, the movie takes off and really never stops. We get a string of great blind dead attack sequences as they rise from their graves and advance on the town, and once they crash the party at the town's anniversary festival, it settles into a pretty tense and suspenseful siege-movie structure, along the lines of Night of the Living Dead and Assault on Precinct 13. The focus is definitely still on atmospheric horror and not action, but the movie also provides some pretty well-staged chaotic sequences of the blind dead on horseback going on their rampage (the novelty that these zombies ride zombie-horses really never gets old).
Viewers who watch Tombs and Return in close succession may notice that de Ossorio saves money by reusing some shots of the blind dead from the first film, particularly shots of the zombies rising from their graves and wide shots of the pack of the undead riding on horseback, but ultimately this cost-saving measure should be easily forgiven, as this film is clearly stretching its resources with a larger scale that requires both a lot of extras to play villagers, and a much larger number of zombies. In larger groups it is clear that money was saved on makeup by keeping some of the blind dead obscured under their hoods, but in close-up the effects for their skeletal faces are once again excellent, and very effectively creepy. It must be said that once again the film does very little with the idea that they are blind and hunt by sound, and once again it seems to forget this fact for long periods of time, only bringing it up when characters need to sneak past them. It mostly plays them as typical zombies whose vision or lack thereof isn't really considered; albeit cooler-looking zombies who use swords and ride horses. But after both films doing this, I wasn't particularly bothered anymore; if de Ossorio doesn't seem to care how the rules of his zombies' hunting works, why should we nit-pick it? Better to just accept it and have fun with the well-executed chills.
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| Courtesy: Blue Underground |
If there is an area where Tombs of the Blind Dead is superior to its sequel/reboot, it is that Return of the Blind Dead lacks the touch of dreamlike surrealism that Tombs selectively possesses in its best moments, like its sequence when the dead rise, and the neon-lit mannequin-factory zombie attack. This likely comes down to the two films having different directors of photography, and Tombs clearly having a more talented one. The first film is better-shot all around; Return is not poorly shot, but its cinematography and lighting are more practical than artful, and never really stand out in the way the first film's do. If Return of the Blind Dead was as well-shot as Tombs, there would really be no reason to bother with the first film at all; alas, it is not. However, this sequel/reboot is a better film in every other regard, so the weaker cinematography hardly tips the scale.
One other very striking thing about Return of the Blind Dead is how much it uncannily feels like a predecessor to another beloved cult-horror classic of a few years later: John Carpenter's The Fog. The two films are VERY similar in several key ways. Both involve a town organizing a festival to celebrate their anniversary which is stained by the blood of a long-ago mass-murder, both involve the murdered people rising from the grave on the anniversary to get revenge on the town, and both come down to a climactic siege that sees our protagonists taking their stand in the town's church. The ghosts from The Fog even look a bit like the blind dead, with their tattered, rotting clothes. It certainly could be a coincidence, as both films draw heavily from the style of traditional ghost stories, but since the English-dubbed American release with the title Return of the Evil Dead definitely would have been playing in drive-ins and grindhouses when John Carpenter was a horror-film-loving twentysomething, one can't help but wonder if he was inspired by this movie when writing The Fog. It must be said that The Fog is a much better movie, and Return of the Blind Dead is on the less-flattering end on the comparison, but it is nonetheless a solid telling of a similar tale, and it's easy to imagine a young John Carpenter having a great time with it.
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| Courtesy: Synapse |
While it still has its issues related to weak characterization slowing its momentum, and rough edges and clunky moments (not to mention reused footage) due to its low-budget production, Return of the Blind Dead is a much more successful, much more even film than its deeply flawed predecessor. This is more or less the movie that I had wanted Tombs of the Blind Dead to be, and one that makes good on its solid premise and unique villains, rather than underutilizing them. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it is a very solid one that I thoroughly enjoyed and would happily revisit, while there are really only those two strong sequences in Tombs that I would ever want to re-watch on their own. If you only watch one of the Blind Dead movies, this is absolutely the one to watch; the one that successfully makes the argument for the series' enduring cult appeal.
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It should be noted that Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Blind (and/or Evil) Dead both exist in two versions: the original cuts of the film in Spanish, and American theatrical cuts that are somewhat altered, and dubbed in English. For these reviews I was speaking specifically about the original Spanish-language versions. The American cuts of the films in both cases are trimmed for gore to meet an R rating, and have scenes slightly rearranged. The American cut of the first film also cuts out the rape scene altogether, which I would say is an improvement, but the American cut of the second film makes the very strange decision to cut out the modern-day occultist's human sacrifice that brings the blind dead back to life in the first place, so that they instead come back to life for no clearly defined reason, except perhaps that it's the anniversary of their murder and they are still mad about it. The Synapse blu-ray of Tombs features both cuts, as did the 2006 Blue Underground DVDs of both films; the Anchor Bay double-feature flip-disc DVD oddly contains the Spanish-language uncut version of the first film, but the altered American version of the second.
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| Courtesy: Scream Factory |
Two more Blind Dead films by de Ossorio followed throughout the second half of the 70s: The Ghost Galleon, aka Horror of the Zombies, and Night of the Seagulls. Both films also got 2006 DVDs by Blue Underground, and Night of the Seagulls became the first Blind Dead film to get an English-friendly blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, who in their own release announcement acknowledged how weird it is that the fourth film in the series was the first to be released in HD due to the franchise's tangled rights issues. With Synapse's blu-ray of Tombs of the Blind Dead, it's nice to see the franchise get a bit more love in this modern era of boutique horror labels, but it's a shame that they could only release the first film, since while it is the original it certainly is not the best. If rights issues hadn't once again reared their ugly head, it would have been great for this release to be a double-feature of the first two films, following the lead of Anchor Bay's original DVD, since Return of the Blind Dead is definitely a better introduction to the series. Hopefully Return, as well as The Ghost Galleon, will find their way to blu-ray sooner or later. In the meanwhile, the old Anchor Bay double-feature disc has aged pretty poorly (it's a DVD from 1998, sporting non-anamorphic letterboxed laserdisc transfers that are still older), but it gets the job done, and the Blue Underground DVD, with very nice restorations of both cuts, is great if you can find it.
- Christopher S. Jordan