Return Of The Blind Dead

Former lovers Jack and Vivian are reunited when he is called upon to provide the fireworks for "Lakima," an event celebrating the 500th anniversary of the burning of the Knights. Both Vivian's employer, the town mayor, and his assistant, Howard, lust after Vivian and are infuriated when she falls back into Jack's arms. But are all forced to flee together to an old abbey when the undead Knights arrive and begin slaughtering the townfolk.

Also in the abbey are a misshapen caretaker, a beautiful woman, and a couple with their child; all of them except the child wind up dead following various escape attempts. The scheming mayor similarly becomes zombie food and Howard is killed in a fight with Jack after attempting to rape Vivian. The Knights then crumble in the light of dawn.

Anton Abril's moody music is but a pale shadow of his majestic score for the first film, and despite the picturesque ruined abbey and spectral predators, the eerie atmosphere that was so central to the first film is largely gone. In its stead, writer-director de Ossorio offers a more ambitious, more complicated, more insipid war-with-the-zombies plot heavily indebted to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). A group of contentious strangers are besieged in a remote building by stalking dead; among the survivors are a girl whose male partner has been murdered and a couple with a young child; a grouchy old conservative causes dissent in the ranks; a young man heads outside with burning torch to retrieve a car, only to be killed. In the film's meanest moment, the grouchy mayor sends the child alone into the night as a decoy, calling for her father amidst the blind zombies who locate their prey by sound. It's typical of the lazy plotting that the zombies ignore the sniveling girl, while the hero who has been watching out the window upstairs sees none of this. Not that it would matter, since earlier he saw the mayor send the child's father to his death and did nothing; prior to that the leads all stood together on a balcony bemoaning the fact that zombies were approaching the town, without warning the revelers below, who were promptly munched and trampled. Continuity is entirely absent (Vivian's shirt is torn open during the rape attempt, then is whole again in the next scene), as is logic. Everyone knows the undead hunt by sound, yet nobody has the sense to remain silent. The legend states that the Knights prowl only at night, but the dopey humans continue to dart outside rather than wait in the safe abbey for dawn. Which, when it comes, offers a thoroughly anticlimactic ending. De Ossorio followed this with two more Blind Dead films, HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES (aka THE CURSED SHIP/GHOST SHIPS OF THE BLIND DEAD, 1974), and NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (1975). (Graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity) leave a comment