THE BLIND DEAD COLLECTION

Okay, sorry I've been absent. In the middle of all the school stuff, I got WAY sick, and there's been all kinds of crazy crap happening this week on top of all this that I can't even START to get into. Plus, today's my birthday! And it's Halloween! TIME CRUNCH!

But anyway, here's what I've been trying to put together lately. As you probably remember (and if you don't, just look a couple of posts down), I picked up the Blue Underground BLIND DEAD DVD box set for CHEEEEAP a little bit ago, and decided to put together a post about all of these movies.

For those of you not in the know, the box set contains all of the movies in this series made by Spanish director Amando de Ossorio. All of them are about the undead, mummified corpses of the Knights Templar, who rise from their tombs for the same reasons most undead corpses come to life – to seek revenge on the descendents of the people who killed them, to sacrifice people to Satan, to look cool riding around on undead horses…you know, the standard. The kinda cool thing about these flicks is that none of them are really sequels to any of the other movies. They all sort of do their own thing.

So we start off with TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1972). This is full of some seriously cool atmosphere, with a lot of great-looking crumbling old buildings and a monastery and graveyards and stuff. The setup is this: these three people meet up on vacation in Portugal: two girls and a guy. Because this is 1972 and Europe, there's of course going to be some lesbian overtones to this setup, and in this case, it's in a flashback to the time the two girls spent at school together. Now, because one of the girls is uncomfortable with this being brought back into her life, and because the guy she's with keeps making eyes at her old flame, she gets pissed and jumps off the train they're on and wanders into this abandoned part of town that everybody's afraid of. Why are they afraid of the place? Because this is where the Knights Templar were executed for their crimes (trying to achieve immortality by drinking human blood and sacrificing people). Their bodies were left out for the crows to peck out their eyes, so they're the BLIND DEAD! They operate completely on SOUND! So they can hear you breathe, hear your heart beat, etc., to track you as you try to escape them. Because our guilt-ridden heroine is making all kinds of racket as she camps out for the night in their old monastery, they rise from their eternal slumber to get her to shut up. And while they're at it, they wreak all kinds of crazy havoc. Guilty Gal gets turned into a zombie for some reason (this NEVER happens in any other of these movies), and between all of these undead folks running around, plenty of people get offed, and it ends on a pretty sweet "we're all gonna die!" note. It moves a little slowly, but there's enough atmosphere and Scooby-Doings going on to keep things interesting.

RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD (1973) (which has NOTHING to do with any Sam Raimi movies) is the next one up, and it's a lot more action-packed, but not quite as atmospheric. It's a trade-off, but both work out to be equally entertaining. In this one, the Templars were executed for being the same kind of jerks they were in the previous movie, but in this case, the citizens of the Portuguese town killed them and burned out their eyes so that their spirits could never find their way back from Hell to seek revenge. They shoulda done something to their ears, though, because 500 years later, they're back to kill everybody. There's not a whole lot of plot going on in this, but that's actually kind of okay, because it's full-on Templar massacre time. Everybody involved winds up holed up in a church, and from there, they get picked off one-by-one and it's like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD all over again. The only real disappointing thing about this is the ending, which just sort of…happens. It just ends. Like they realized that there wasn't anywhere to go from this, and said, "well, let's just let the survivors walk away like nothing's happened." This isn't really spoiling anything (because generally speaking, there's gonna be survivors), so don't get mad that I ruined the ending. There's not one to ruin!

Then there's THE GHOST GALLEON (1974), and it BLOWS. You'd think that this would be great – in this one, the Templars are on a ghost ship which is in some ghostly dimension that you get to by going through some ghostly mist. I LOVE the idea of a ghost ship picking off unsuspecting seagoers. That's all kinds of spooky! But man, this thing moves like a concrete block. It just sits there like a lump. A couple of models wind up being stranded on their boat, and get picked up by the Ghost Galleon, and are never heard from. Some folks head out to find them, and find the ship, and the Templars wake up, and not a lot else happens. Total yawnfest.

And it wraps up with NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, which has one of the most WTF? titles I can imagine. But the movie is probably as good as the first one, which surprised me! This time, things take place in a small fishing village, where some newcomers discover that every seven years, the townspeople must offer up seven local virgins for sacrifice to the Templars (who feed the girls' hearts to some stone statue of a monster demon thing they worship) or else the Templars will kill everybody. Of course, things don't go as planned, and people have to die. Amando de Ossorio seems to be trying to get back to the feel of the first movie here, as it's a lot more atmospheric than the two middle ones, and feels a lot like an HP Lovecraft kind of story, what with seaside setting and the tight-lipped locals trying to hide some ghoulish secret of the supernatural. I liked it a lot.

There's a great little booklet about the movies included in the box set, and a bonus DVD with interviews and DVD-ROM stuff, but the best bonus feature is on the first disc. Some idiots tried to market TOMBS in the US as a PLANET OF THE APES movie! So they slapped on some footage of ruins at the beginning with a voice-over saying that before human civilization came around, intelligent apes practiced occult rituals and sacrificed humans, and there was a huge war that wiped out the intelligent apes who threatened to come back and reclaim this world. Or something. And then, the title comes on screen: REVENGE OF THE PLANET APE!!! That doesn't even make any SENSE!

Anyway, aside from THE GHOST GALLEON, you could spend your time a lot worse than by sitting back with the Templars for some good old-fashioned slow-motion slaughter.

Just so you guys know...

I'm trying to get through all of the Blind Dead movies before I put up another review, and school has been a PAIN. So I'm hoping to plow through the rest of them this weekend. I just watched TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD and its GREAT. Holy crap, what a movie! Mummified Templars riding Horses of the Blind Dead! In slow motion! But more later!

SCORE! SCORE! SCORE!!!!

Today while we were running around downtown, I stopped in the used game/dvd/cd store. Sometimes you can find some decent stuff in there, especially out-of-print DVDs. But anyway, somebody too dumb to live sold the Blue Underground BLIND DEAD box set back to the store! And the best part is the store didn't know what they had and had it marked at $30!!! Man, I've been hearing about these movies for forever. In case you haven't, they're all about the undead corpses of the Templars who have had their eyes burned out, so they can't see, but rely on hearing their victims. I know what we're gonna be watching all next week!

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)

Any movie that starts out with a hot-air balloon crash is just asking for trouble.

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND was supposedly made in 1981, looks like it was made in 1972, and feels like it was made in 1957. It's all kinds of messed up. If it wasn't so stoopidly fun, I'd say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I mean, it's bad. There's nothing really good about it. But none of it is boring, and being boring is the biggest sin a movie can commit. Every five minutes, it's like it's a whole other movie. You never know what's gonna hit you.

Anyway, four idiots and a dog crash into the ocean in their beautiful balloon, and life-raft their way to lovely Frankenstein Island. There's a bunch of annoying old guys (one of them is Robert Clarke, who's been in TONS better movies than this!) and an annoying Peter Brady-looking tool named Dino. Seriously. And a dog named Melvin. Seriously. You know what you're in for when one of the guys leans onto their life raft -- which there's nothing wrong with -- and says that they need to gather wood to build a raft. SERIOUSLY.

So they wander into a cliffside cave for no good reason, there's a split-second shot of the Floating Head of John Carradine, and they wind up on the main part of the island, which is lucky for them. They could have gotten killed in that cave, and nobody would ever have found them.

Then they find Amazons. Yep, there's a tribe of jungle ladies living on Frankenstein Island, and they all use human skulls as bongs, wear leopard-print bikinis, and are suspiciously white. (Really, you know? Every movie I see where there's a tribe of Amazon jungle babes, they're all white girls. I don't know if there's any science backing this up, but something tells me that isn't accurate.) And the four idiots discover that if you try to say the name of any place that ISN'T Frankenstein Island, something that's "like telepathy" makes your arm hurt really bad. SERIOUSLY. Then there's night-time snake dancing and another appearance by the Floating Head of John Carradine who spouts off about "The Power!!!!" I think they shot all of his appearances in a half hour.

So then there's some zombie dressed up kinda like the Hamburglar that nabs one of the jungle girls, and some grizzled old guys from a pirate movie show up and laugh a lot and say that they should all be friends, and then invite the team of idiots up to "where the valleys rise to the sun." They get there and wait around at a camp outside the main house on the island, and there's a bunch more zombie guys, and then Cameron Mitchell is in a jail cell and believes he's in an Edgar Allan Poe movie, and the whole shooting match is being run by Sheila Van Helsing who's the great-granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein, and the zombie guys wave around plastic Halloween pitchforks and turn an 8x10" glossy headshot of John Carradine into an 8x10" headshot of a SKULL, and there's a zombie fight where we cut to reaction shots FROM THE ZOMBIES (who don't have emotions), and there's a weird electronic thing that gives Sheila Frankenstein the albino white zombie eyes that the zombies have, but only for a second and it's never referred to again, and the Floating Head of John Carradine who is playing the Ghost of Dr. Frankenstein pops up and says "The Power! The Golden Thread!" a lot, and Sheila's husband is a MILLION YEARS OLD and is in bed and doesn't amount to much, and Cameron Mitchell is the dad of one of the jungle girls, and then the Frankenstein Monster shows up and waves his arms around and everyone escapes, and it was all just a dream OR WAS IT?

See? You get ALL THIS for less than the price of most other movies. Nothing in the movie is related to anything else that happens in the movie, and nothing makes any sense, but I COULDN'T STOP WATCHING. Sometimes just knowing that a movie like this exists makes you glad to be alive.