Tombs Of The Blind Dead

The more I dive into the realm of B and Cult horror, the more I find that I'm not nearly as smart as I thought I was. There's just too many movies out there for any one person to know them all! So, as knowledgeable as I am...which is often open to debate...I continue to find movies that I've either never heard of, or have never seen before. One of these is the Blind Dead series, from Armando De Ossorio, this four movie series is one that I had never heard of until about three monthes ago and now that I've seen the first one, I can't wait for the rest.



Here's the story: Centuries ago, the Templar Knights turned from God and began worshipping the Devil. To do so, they began sacrificing virgins and drinking their blood to stay alive, the Templars were eventually defeated and hung from a tree as a message to anyone that black magic wouldn't be allowed, as their bodies hung, the crows ate out their eyes, so, when they came back from the dead, you guessed it, they were the blind dead! Now, when people begin roaming around the ruins of the Templars castle, the Templars return from their tombs to drink the blood of the living to stay alive!

While this Spanish movie from 1971 is a bit slow in places, it's entertaining enough to keep me interested throughout...which can be hard with some of these older movies. I'm interested to see where the other three movies take this story, so I'm giving Tombs Of The Blind Dead three out of four cigars and it only lost one cigar because the dubbing is a bit strange (as all dubbing seemed to be at the time) and I'm pretty sure, from seeing the stills and lobby cards that were on the DVD that the version of the movie I saw was edited, there were a couple of places that seemed to be missing something and seeing stills filled in the gaps. The most amusing thing on the DVD version I had is the extra that shows how distributors at the time used a voice over announcer to tie Tombs Of The Blind Dead to the Planet Of The Apes movies, to draw people into the theatre, the movie was retitled Revenge Of Planet Ape and a whole back story is told before the opening titles that after the apes took over Earth, the humans rose up and killed them and cut out their eyes, and now the apes are rising from their graves to avenge themselves and retake the planet. This is typical drive in distributor stuff of the time, and it's very funny now, in our media savy world.

So, until next time, when I'm rewriting the opening of A Christmas Story to tie it into the Texas Chainsaw Massacre continuity, remember that the best movies are bad movies!