This is going to be a slightly different edition of FCCT, with a modified format. The film in question is a very well-made, straight-up modern horror film, and almost anyone who's ever seen a scary movie knows what's going to happen -- some people are going to go someplace they shouldn't, and those people are going to die horribly. Since this movie is all about the voyage rather than the destination, I'm going to eschew the usual plot synopsis and character descriptions.
The Film: La Noche del terror ciego (1971), literally The Night of the Blind Terror -- but in America we call it Tombs of the Blind Dead.
Planet of the Apes connection: Apparently because some of the baddies' beards make them look moderately simian, and because of the timeless popularity of movies about intelligent apes, American drive-in distributers changed the title to Revenge from Planet Ape and added a poorly-narrated prologue explaining that humans destroyed ape civilization centuries ago, and that the apes vowed to one day rise again. (Bonus promotional tidbit: some theaters required both a ticket and a free, Blind Dead-branded barf bag for entrance. Adorable.)
Background: Tombs is the first of a series of four films by Spanish writer/director Amando de Ossorio. I stumbled upon it recently, while thumbing through Jamie Russell's very informative Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, and as a fairly knowledgeable fan of living dead movies I was surprised to find a cult-favorite series I'd never heard of. Even more shocking, this first installment at least is very, very good. (I haven't gotten around to the other three yet, but I'll see them soon -- I got the DVD collection, which comes in its own coffin.)
Who are the Blind Dead?: Though it's not explicitly stated in the Spanish-language version of Tombs, their background makes it pretty clear that they're the Knights Templar, the same guys recently made somewhat more famous by the conspiracy theory presented in The Da Vinci Code. Apparently in their travels the Knights learned a thing or two about occultism, and specifically discovered the secret of eternal life. (Note: the secret is to visualize your goal and ask the universe for eternal life, and also to drink the blood of a virgin.)
The knights' misdeeds were full of graphic female nudity and gore, so they were excommunicated and hanged. They're blind because crows devoured their eyes while they hanged, as evidenced by this totally awesome medieval illustration.
What are the rules?: Every great horror film has rules. The rules in Tombs aren't specifically stated, but we can extrapolate a few important facts. First of all, the Blind Dead are blind (obviously). They're very slow-moving in close quarters, but that doesn't mean you'll get away; out in the open, they suddenly have phantom horses (and this is Europe, so you don't own a car). Bullets certainly don't do much, although -- in this installment, at least -- nobody appears to get a headshot, so it's impossible to say for sure. But again, you're in Europe and it's likely you don't own a gun. When they do catch you (and they will), they bite your skin and drink your blood until you die. Awesome.
Note that, with the blood drinking, the Egyptian origin of their occult doings, and their general sense of purpose, the Blind Dead are more like mummies than traditional zombies, which might explain why they seem to be totally unkillable. Meanwhile, at least some of their victims also come back to life to drink the blood of the living -- only one does in this film, but I anticipate more walking corpses in the sequels -- but at least they're vulnerable to fire, so they've got that going for them.
Selected Scenes: Like I said, there's no point in doing a detailed synopsis. But I would like to talk about some of the interesting choices de Ossorio uses, and how those choices set Tombs apart from lesser exploitative European horror of the 70s.
Let's start with a scene from near the beginning of the film. Here's the setup: poolside in Lisbon, Virginia bumps into her old boarding school friend Bet, and aside from a brief, weird moment, they seem very happy to reconnect -- until Virginia's friend Roger invites Bet to join them on a trip to the Portuguese countryside. Virginia is clearly irritated, but Bet pretends not to notice. (NOTE: In case you can't tell from the preview image, you might feel uncomfortable if coworkers see you're watching it. It doesn't have any nudity, though.)
There are so many things I love about that clip. I love how the smoke from the train becomes the mist in Bet and Virginia's surreal memory. I love that music cue, which comes up two other times in the film (once in the aforementioned awkward moment, and again when Virginia's body is discovered). I love the twist that Virginia wasn't unhappy for the reasons we assumed, and how skillfully that twist is delivered. For a low-budget sex-and-gore ultra-obscure 70s drive-in movie, this is really excellent filmmaking.
Like the blind dead themselves, the movie takes its time. I'm usually not a fan of slow-paced movies (I still can't get over the hour of footage that could be cut from Dr. Strangelove if only the establishing shots of the airplane could be cut down to a reasonable duration), but in Tombs every scene has a purpose. For example, Virginia spends a lot of time exploring Berzano, the abandoned medieval town she saw from the train. Those scenes serve to establish the setting, so that later, when the Blind Dead chase Virginia through the town, there's a great sense of space and everything feels more real. When Virginia's shoe gets stuck in a broken stairway, and she takes an impossibly long time to get free, the camera gets a chance to give us a really good, up-close look at the monsters as they slowly creep towards their victim.
In Eugene I worked with a kid who insisted the slow-moving zombies of yesteryear could never be as scary as the sprinters in 28 Days Later and the sub-par Dawn of the Dead remake. What a tool. The Blind Dead are not only slow, they're blind, and I submit to you that the following scene is scarier than anything either of those films presented.
You know I loved that heartbeat zoom at the end of that scene, too.
The last minutes of Tombs, when the creatures get on the train, are among the most shocking and terrifying I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure I actually had my hands over my face, and I may have said something to the effect of, "My god, when will it end??!?" I meant, when will the creeping terror end, not the movie. Anyway, I'm not going to show you the awesome scene I'm talking about. If you found the above clips entertaining, you really have to see this film, and it would be wrong for me to spoil all its major shocks. But I will show you the very end, after the carnage has subsided. Bet, riding on top of the coal, somehow managed to survive the ordeal. Note how the film ends on a couple of still pictures, in homage to the ending of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
I've typed a lot, and there's so much more to go over -- the weird morgue scenes, the lighting in Bet's mannequin manufacturing studio, the fact that the Blind Dead only seem to wake up when there's sex or nudity around...just, do me a favor and see the movie. There's no good reason for this one to be as obscure as it is.
The Female Perspectivetm with Julia Katz: Unfortunately there will be no Female Perspective today. Because I assumed this movie would be terrible (it's a European zombie movie I'd never heard of -- come on), when we originally watched it on Halloween we watched the American cut, reasoning that dubbed movies are always funnier. The American cut was good enough that I watched the Spanish cut within a week; however, it moves some scenes around and neuters the most shocking moments. Until Julia gets the authentic La noche del terror ciego experience, you'll just have to take my word for it.
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