Return of the Evil Dead (1973)

Here we have my favourite part, the second, in Amando de Ossorio's highly original Blind Dead-franchise, Return of the Evil Dead. Conservatives will always love and cherish the first movie, but you know how it is: hates gonna hate! ;) There's several reason why I love this part, even if it's not in the same league as the first one, and I will get to that very soon. With something that looks like a bigger budget de Ossorio tells us more about the eastern knights and their revenge!

Tony Kendall plays a pyrotechnics expert, dealing with fireworks and hired by a small town to help them with the annual celebration of how their forefathers killed the eastern knights. Well there he notices that the girlfriend of the greedy fat mayor is an ex-girlfriend, which causes some tension between him and the mayor's henchmen. But what's even worse, the local village idiot is a rapist and serial killer and manages to kill a young woman so violently that her dripping blood awakes the dead knights again and they (what else?) attack the festivities, demanding blood as revenge for those who killed them!

Return of the Evil Dead has everything in more does. More gore and blood, more blind zombie-knights, more extras, more action and just bigger feeling. And I love this. The originality from the first movie is lost, but the pacing is higher and de Ossorio splashers RED paint... uh, blood everywhere to make this bigger and bolder than the first one. He reuses some footage from the first movie, but it's mostly stuff when the knights are walking around, riding their horses and rises from their graves - the rest is new. And of course there's a scene when someone is hijacking a zombie-horse and rides away, but I'm not gonna comment on that right now...

Another fine part of the movie is the character played by Kendall, Fernando Sancho (the mayor) and the girl between them, Esperanza Roy. That little triangle brings some tension into the otherwise generic human drama that often populates movies like this. Here it brings some extra thrills because Experanza wants to leave the nasty mayor and run away with Kendall, and this is stopped by the blind dead, but that won't stop them from run away - or try to anyway. Kendall and Roy is a fine and sympathetic couple and the evil mayor is the perfect antagonist.

When watching this movie it's also very easy to see that this could be a perfect franchise for a reboot. Why hasn't that happen yet? I mean an official new Blind Dead movie would be extremely cool, and I think it would work very good even today. Shoot it in the same locations, in Portugal, as a tribute both to old-school horror and give Amando de Ossorio some love. I know there's been some unofficial versions of our dear knights, but we need the real deal! Maybe I'll give the not so official La Cruz del Diablo a spin later this week, just to get some more zombie-knights to hug.

Messy review, I agree. Not happy at all. But this is a movie you should see for real, and not read about it in another rambling, crappy review by me.