Night of the Seagulls
(La noche de las gaviotas, 1976)

Amando de Ossorio

Spain

89 min, color, Spanish (English subtitles)

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

Widely considered the weakest of the Blind Dead quartet, Night of the Seagulls does seem to represent the decline of the Templar-zombies idea that looked so promising. Whether it is because the director could not get the funding to realize his vision properly (there is some evidence of that, especially considering the rather impressive drawings he made of what the film looked like in his head), or because he simply ran out of ideas for the Templars to do, or because he wanted to make a film of social and cultural criticism under the guise of a horror movie, I do not know. But this last entry in the Templar saga is a far cry from the best of them, Return of the Evil Dead.

Losing consciousness on cue	With a silly idol like this, who needs Satan?

In terms of a story, this one is perhaps the most logical. The film opens back in the middle ages with a hapless couple getting stranded at night in too close proximity to the knights' citadel. Of course, the woman is sacrificed to the ridiculous-looking sea creature statue that the knights worship. It is unclear whether the woman was properly chaste considering that she was married and all, but perhaps the virgin requirement evolved after the knights died.

Joan is not happy about creepy village	The village idiot in the window

How they died and why they are blind is left as a total mystery this time around. We are told, however, that these particular knights are French and that they should not be confused either with the Portuguese in Berzano who disintegrated one fine morning or with the Spaniards who had been condemned to roam the seas in a galleon but who are presently unaccounted for, presumably roaming some countryside. These Frenchies apparently have committed some unspeakable atrocities, and if the nipple incident with the first sacrificial victim is any indication, they would be easily condemned even today, at least by the FTC. My theory is that they died of embarrassment from having to worship an idol that would make Ishiro Honda weep with envy.

One of many sacrificial processions	We shall fight on the beaches...

As it turns out, the knights have apparently struck a decent deal with the local villagers. In return for not razing their homes and murdering them en masse, the knights are to receive seven virgins on seven consecutive nights every seven years. For some unfathomable reason, the peasants have agreed to that rather than either pulling their hoes and leaving (which they eventually did in the film) or at least calling the Ministry of Culture and having the citadel condemned and scheduled for demolition. It is also unclear how a village of what look like no more than fifty people can supply beautiful nubile virgins in such numbers for so long. At long it is indeed for it seems like the arrangement has persisted for centuries.

Yuppie horror: no organic produce	Please hold still while we sacrifice you

The knights are also quite picky about their victims. They should be young women, very attractive, scantily clad in some flimsy negligee, and should not squirm too much while being gored and having their heart ripped from their chests. Screaming optional. Like the good girls that they are, said victims usually lose consciousness on cue so that the rather sickly knights can carry them off to the altar, and then regain consciousness just in time after being pinned to it but before getting unauthorized surgery. It's all rather badly done, but in defense of the director, this time there is no gratuitous rape scene. In fact, for such an exploitative movie, there is very little sexual titillation. (Why people insist on combining sex with horror is a mystery to me.) There are some modest see-through night gowns and some breasts but nothing that would land the director in jail. Even these scenes appear to have been put strictly to pull in male audiences back then and are not necessary in any dramatic sense.

Oh, no! Not the unsterilized dagger!	Julia Saly gives up the virginal ghost

The two nice touches to this whole sacrifice bit have to do with the rare poetic license one sometimes unexpectedly stumbles across in these films. We have the sacrifice of the virgin to the sea, with all the mythological overtones that it invokes. More importantly, we have the central conceit of the seagulls flying at night. I did not know it, but apparently seagulls do not fly at night. Problems with aerial navigation perhaps. But the idea here is that the seagulls are actually the souls of the slain virgins who come back every seven years to preside over the sacrifice of one of their kind. It is unclear whether they approve of the practice but the implication is that they do, for I did not see even one of them drop some excrement on the knights on their way to the slaughter.

Village ableism	Doctor making unauthorized house calls

The knights riding to pick up the tethered virgin is the occasion of the numerous slow motion scenes that should have been menacing but are not. Part of the reason has to do with the budget limitations that have forced Ossorio to shoot nearly the entire film in day-for-night. This was not so bad in the previous installments that were either shot in a studio or on location but not with such a revealing background as the sea. In short, the beach scenes are so obvious that they actually interfere with the suspension of disbelief. Incidentally, the entire film looks very grainy and very soft because of the processing involved.

We totally did not sacrifice our daughter	Venceremos... NOT!

But when all is said and done, the knights are actually peripheral to the story which has to do with a city doctor's unwitting intrusion into conservative country life. Dr Stein (Victor Petit) and his wife Joan (Maria Kosti) arrive at the village to which he has been appointed as physician. To say that they are not welcomed would be an understatement. The reception is frosty, hostile, and quite menacing. Nobody wants them there, and it soon becomes obvious that the village harbors a terrible secret. The couple manages to befriend two locals: the retarded Teddy (Jose Antonio Calvo) and the pretty Lucy (Sandra Mozarowsky, who would commit suicide the very next year at age of eighteen), and it is through them that they will confront the awful reality of the Knights.

This dude botched up the ceremonial sacrifice	Well, he's almost dead already anyway

It is perhaps no coincidence that the peasants are mode odious than the blood-thirsty Templars. They abuse Teddy mercilessly, frequently beating him up, and in the end leaving him for dead in a field. But they are also rather inhuman toward each other: this business with offering their daughters as sacrificial virgins to the knights is quite bad in itself, but their rejection of any outside help is even worse. In the end, the knights are evil and sort of do what they have to do (one cannot really apply any moral standards to walking dead, for god's sake). But the peasants are supposedly human, they are certainly free to choose what to do. The fact that they do not leave until they are forced by events outside their control attests to their culpability in the crimes of the Templars.

Local Templar legend reenactment buffs	The Templar, the Victim, and the Wardrobe

That is why I said that perhaps Ossorio intended this film as a social and cultural criticism of backward peasant ways, of superstition that trumps morality, of conservatism that is incapable of doing anything worthwhile to protect even its own, of patient submission that makes the merely possible inevitable. It is certainly by design that the city couple rescues Teddy repeatedly and tends to his wounds, or that they will be the only ones to bother to intervene to save Lucy when her time comes. Lucy herself is rather curious for she is willing to offer herself for the good of the village but then does attempt to save her life when prodded by Henry.

Gratuitous shot of Sandra Mozarowsky	Have fear, the French are here!

Even if all of this is true and the knights are not that important, it was still incumbent upon the director to make them menacing and cool. But in this film, the only one of the four, the magic touch is nowhere to be seen. The knights are rather wimpy (at one point Henry and Lucy evade them by crawling between their legs), they can't really batter down an insubstantial barricade, they often seem confused and ineffective, they botch the simple job of overpowering a scared girl, and some of them even sleep while they are supposed to be on duty. Yep, that's true, there are some free-loaders among the Templars who snuggle down in their coffins while their brethren are out there attempting, not very successfully, to kick ass and impersonating Xerxes by whipping the waves with their swords. These deservedly perished when they were too lazy to get out in time to prevent Henry and Joan from knocking down their stupid idol.

Not helping while templars poke the idiot	Crouching Templar, Hidden Tile

All of this leads me to concur with the majority about this film, it just isn't as good as the others even if there are some very nice atmospheric shots and even if the knights occasionally look almost as cool as they used to previously. (Using the footage of them rising from their tombs from the first firm just underscores the fact that comparison between these films will not be kind to this one.) I also missed the effective aaaah-zoom (that is, the camera zooming in on the a knight's face and the male choir going 'Aaaaah!' at the same time). This was among my favorite special effects, and I only got a puny version of it when Joan managed to chop off a knights hand. The knights were as flammable as before (they really should come with a warning label) but for some odd reason the characters do not take advantage of it as they should. I was also unimpressed with the copious amounts of blood streaming from their eye sockets when the knights collapsed. And what, the heck, were all these scenes with crabs crawling all over recently dismembered corpses?

Lazy Templars napping while others sacrifice	Quite a bit of blood for a desiccated zombie

To be consistent with the quality of the film relative to the other three, the Blue Underground DVD is also the worst in the collection. As I said, the film is a challenge anyway because of all the graininess and soft focus inherent in day-for-night cinematography, but even allowing for this the picture was clearly in much worse shape than the others. It is presented in anamorphic widescreen at 1.85:1 but the colors seem rather flat. The Spanish mono soundtrack was fine (I did not listen to the English dub) but the music is quite sparse. There are some nicely done special sound effects (e.g., the grating of the tombs as the knights push away the lids) and the dialogue comes through just fine. The English subtitles are very good, however. Overall, an acceptable presentation of a passable film. Since it comes with the 5-disc The Blind Dead Collection (the fifth disc has a short interview with the director and a documentary about him), you will end up owning it just because you really want to have at least the first two of these classic horror films.

December 20, 2005