The Ghost Galleon (1974)

I wonder what went on in the mind of Amando de Ossorio when he wrote The Ghost Galleon? I'm not sure he even wrote it properly, maybe just scribbled down a few notes on the back of a napkin and hired and old ship to shoot his third epos in the Blind Dead series. I refuse to say it's a bad or boring film, but it's INCREDIBLY stupid. It's the Dawn of the Mummy of the Blind Dead's or maybe more Bruno Mattei's Zombies: The Beginning. The set-up is extremely silly and doesn't work at all, the body count is low - but it has a few very redeeming factors.

In a not so smart PR-stunt the owner of a boat-factory hires two super models to be lost at sea for one month - we're talking two women with perfect make-up in an open boat here - in more than one day! After thirty days the plan for them is to be found by a ship, but they have drifted into a fog and the only ship they see is a weird, abandoned ghost ship. A friend of one of the models forces herself into the adventure and after a while she and the PR-staff is getting trapped on the ghost ship - exactly when our heroes, our friends and loved ones - the blind eastern knights - rises once more!

Somehow de Ossorio manages to pad out the whole movie with people walking around on the boat without getting killed and a very, very stupid sub-plot about another super model being held prisoner so she can't tell media about the PR-stunt. Yes, she's more or less kidnapped - like that would help the boat-manufacturer (played by the always fantastic Jack Taylor by the way) afterwards when the girls is supposed to be rescued from the boat. It's not much going on at all in The Ghost Galleon and most of the characters act like very slow redneck farmers.

Don't even mention the boat miniature used for the ghost ship. It looks like something like this...

...but less realistic.

So what's good about The Ghost Galleon? Well, first of all the cast is very nice - specially my favourite man Jack Taylor in an awesome striped polo. The ladies looks good and screams like a real scream queen should and everyone seems happy about their pay check. The blind knights looks better than ever, really. They are less stiff, have more thought-through movements and the hands is - for the first time in the series - convincing. Kinda anyway. Another fine detail is the ship - if it's a set or a real ship I don't know, but here de Ossorio uses the locations in an excellent way. Lots of atmosphere, smart directing and lots of fog. If he could have put the whole movie, every scene, on the boat and added a few more deaths this would have been a classic in it's own little way.

The deaths yeah. Not so much to talk about except one very graphic kill of one of the ladies. Cheap, but as usual very bloody and effective - and the scene when she's chased is the longest and slowest ever filmed, but it looks great and she makes fine job looking scared shitless!

The movie is saved by the stunning last scene, when... I'm not gonna tell you, but it looks great and powerful. I just wish the whole flick was better as a whole. There's certainly good things with it, but yeah, I need to come out from the closet to say it's the weakest of the Blind Dead films...

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.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

This co-production between Spain and Portugal might be one of the finest and original horror movies of the seventies, but it took me some time to realize that. The story is a bit confusing and to be honest, quite odd, but everything falls into place when I finally took the time to give a new spin. Why is it odd? Well, it refuses to follow the expected storyline and almost gives is a Psycho-twist, killing of a main character very early and also an interesting and unexpected lesbian intrigue that I totally forgot since last time. So what's Tombs of the Blind Dead about? Just continue to read...

Virginia (María Elena Arpón) accidentally meets her former classmate Betty (Lone Fleming) at a sea resort and they immediately decides to hook up again after all these years. But Virginia's male buddy Roger (César Burner) suggest to Betty that she should follow them to the countryside for a weekend of relaxation. Virginia gets jealous and when they're on the train she jumps of and takes shelter in an ancient, abandoned, city. But what she don't know is that it's curse and that a gang of blood-thirsty zombie knights comes out from their graves every night to kill and kill again!

That's the set-up of the movie, but it has a lot more and that makes it so much more interesting. It would be very easy for Amando de Ossorio to just make another Night of the Living Dead clone but he didn't, and we should be grateful for that - he used that concept in the second movie instead! The interesting storyline which is most of the time quite far from the cursed city keeps the movie entertaining and gives us a few goodies here and there until the great final when the living dead knights finally unleashes their power over our heroes and a train!

What's even more interesting is that Tombs of the Blind Dead isn't that gory. It has one very juicy scene, very graphic,  but that's about it. The rest is mostly blood coming out from mouths, simulating bites, and off-screen sword-hits. The atmosphere makes it work and it seems more violent and gory than it really is. But make no mistake, this is not a kids movie - this is vintage, high-quality Spanish horror. The knights themselves looks extremely cool and it's so effective to shoot them in slow-motion every time they ride their horses. It certainly brings a spookiness to those scenes and makes us forgive the not-so-good day for night-effects.

It goes into Mario Bava quality a couple of times, in the scene at the morgue and the classic sequence in the mannequin factory. These are also a welcome addition to what makes this movie a lot more fun to watch than letting the story be in the cursed city all the time. Here the colours comes and both morgues and mannequin's is scary by themselves. I heard that de Ossorio really wasn't fond of the Blind Dead movies, which is a pity. Maybe he had other dreams, something more "serious", but could only get financing to these ghost- and horror-stories. But every frame of Tombs of the Blind Dead shows what a fantastic talent he was and he clearly made his mark in movie history.

But... I've always wondered how one of the characters can steal an undead horse? In my imagination the horses is also evil spirits, damned monsters from hell - so how can they allow the character to take control of one of them and ride away?

But fuck that. Like Joachim said: "Do not question the gospel of De Ossorio!". And I guess I need to behave...