Return of the Evil Dead
(El ataque de los muertos sin ojos, 1973)

Amando de Ossorio

Spain

91 min, color, Spanish (English subtitles)

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

Also known as Return of the Blind Dead, this is the second installment in Ossorio's evil Templars resurrected to drink blood and inflict mostly physical but also psychological harm on any living human that passes their way. Even though chronologically it follows the excellent Tombs of the Blind Dead and despite setting their temporary resting quarters in the same abbey in Portuguese Bolzano, this film is not a sequel. If anything, it's an alternative take on the same basic premise. And I am happy to report that in many ways this is much more successful than its famous predecessor.

This time the peasants burned their eyes	Jack and Vivian's old passion resurrected too

No, the acting has not improved markedly, if at all. The special effects are the same, and this film even recycles plenty of footage from the first one, especially in the sequences involving the knights rising from their tombs, riding their ghastly stallions through the ruins, and even congregating outside the house of their first hapless victims. Heck, even the first female they attack basically attempts an escape very similar to what Virginia did before: after screaming her lungs out, she vaults onto one of their horses, and then gallops into the night, with the knights in hot pursuit. The only difference is that unlike Virginia, Moncha (Loli Tovar) actually manages to elude the riding dead and warn others of their impending doom. Not that it helps her much in the end.

Gratuitous reprise of the virgin sacrifice	The templars make their first centennial visit

Despite the enthusiastic plagiarism of his own previous work, Ossorio gives us a new take on the knights, complete with a somewhat different legend about their demise during the middle ages. Here, they are lynched by a mob of angry peasants armed with pitchforks (in the original they are sentenced to death and then hanged until birds ate their eyes). When the templar leader threatens to return to seek vengeance, the peasants burn out his (and his co-religionists') eyes to make sure that even if they return, they won't be able to find their way around the living. This is supposed to explain their blindness, which is fine as far as ridiculous explanations go. The peasants then burn the knights, which sort of leaves their present ragged clothes and not very ashen skeletons somewhat of a puzzle. In an additional problem with logic, the resurrected templars are deathly afraid of fire, presumably because that's what killed them in the first place, but why they burn like a dry Christmas tree in February now is sort of inexplicable given that they have apparently "survived" the earlier auto da fe intact enough to rise from the dead. Argh, my head hurts, so let's just accept everything at face value.

Jack intensely about to get his ass kicked	Typical modern peasants with pitchforks

In this installment, the blind dead are supposed to return on midnight of the day the village celebrates their earlier burning, right in the middle of festivities that will conveniently cause lots of people to be crammed into very tight spaces. The perfect spot for melee of the medieval kind. The keeper of the tombs is the deformed semi-idiot Murdo (José Canalejas) who sacrifices a girl in order to jump start the ceremony. He is apparently irked at the peasants who either ignore him or whose children mistreat him in that most cruel way that only children, unencumbered with social mores, can. Unfortunately, when the dead arise they make no distinction between sympathizer and foe (on account of being both blind, which means they can't tell them apart, and evil, which means that even if they could tell them apart, they would not care). So Murdo helps unleash the terror that will consume him as well.

Blind dead slicing, dicing, and julienning	Charge of the Blind Brigade

The first victims are people who have recently had sex. That's the sort of thing that gives horror films their bad name. Basically the only way to survive some of these films requires that the woman (less frequently, the man) be either a virgin, or if she has lost her chastity, then at least be raped in the recent past so that having sex is not her fault. This is why Bet survived until the very end of the first film, and that's why everybody who is not a man and who has consensual sex dies here as well. The lone female survivor Vivian (Esperanza Roy) turns out to have been betrothed to a man she abhors (any sex this fat and ugly dude is really a punishment, and so does not count), and even though she attempts to elope with Jack, they never consummate their renewed relationship. To cement her status as an honorary horror survivor, she is almost raped too. The misogyny in some of these films is beyond belief, so it's best not to dwell much on it.

The modern way to auto da fe	Treacherous Murdo and dumb Moncha

The backdrop to the inevitable slaughter of the not so innocents involves a love triangle, which is really a love line, and a point that's never going to get connected to it. Vivian is the willful strong woman with murky, but apparently turbulent, past who has decided to settle down with the village mayor by the name of Duncan (Fernando Sancho). This guy is nothing more than a cowardly local thug who probably embezzles village funds, rapes sheep, and fails to maintain proper personal hygiene. But, strangely enough for a supposedly liberated woman, Vivian can no longer live on her own, and even this brute is preferable to ageing alone. So much for her vaunted independence that is supposedly behind what happens next. And it is Jack (Tony Kendall) who happens next. It quickly becomes clear that there's prior history between the two, and that it involved strong mutual attraction, steamy sex, and it was Jack's unpredictability that had ended it all.

Duncan with the love of his life Vivian	Templar fixes short sleeve tailoring problem

The flames are quickly rekindled, much to the chagrin of the puffing mayor who has his minions rough Jack up. But just when things are starting to get ugly for Jack, everything goes to pieces. Moncha, who has escaped the knights on horseback, reaches a rail station and phones in to warn the villagers that the Spaniards are coming (bad thing in Portugal, I guess). Nobody would believe her wild story but when the mayor dispatches Dacosta (Frank Braña) and Beirao (Ramón Lillo) to relieve the obviously bottle-happy attendant, they spot the blind dead and return to report. What should have caused immediate panic does nothing of the sort, and even when the dead arrive and surround the festive villagers so that panic finally ensues, the mayor is content to stand on his terrace and watch the slaughter instead of doing anything. As I said, a coward.

The repellent scene with Duncan and the kid	Bring out your dead! Oh wait, we're here already... Hehehe!

Jack and Dacosta team up to mount resistance to the mounted knights. This is interesting for two reasons. First, Dacosta has the hots for Vivian himself and is none too happy about either her brusque dismissal of his charms or her equally rapid attraction to Jack. Dacosta is in fact Duncan's main henchman and as such was instrumental in Jack's getting his leather coated ass kicked earlier. Not a lot of mutual love lost between these two. Second, the mechanics of peasants attacking mounted knights are somewhat dim. If history is any guide, foot soldiers only have a prayer against knights if armed with pikes and trained like the Swiss. These guys are armed with pitchforks (man, I have not seen so many of these implements since the last film about brutish peasants), the occasional Molotov cocktail, and they are at best a mob. So it must come as quite a surprise when they manage to break out of the encirclement and, this is less surprising, run wildly for their lives. Horses being generally faster than people, none of them actually gets very far before the knights mow them down.

The art of the gruesome daisy	Amalia goes medieval on the Templars

The knights then methodically comb the village, going house to house, and doing a killing job as thorough as a marauding Mongol army. The entire cast of survivors at this point is reduced to Vivian, Jack, Dacosta, Duncan, Moncha, Murdo, and a family of three: Beirao, his wife Amalia (played by Lone Fleming who was the original survivor in the previous episode), and their little daughter. They barricade themselves in a church, hoping that help will arrive when the other villagers reach the next populated area. They have no idea that external succor will not be forthcoming because nobody else has survived. The knights surround the church and prepare to wait out the trapped people whose tempers soon become more perilous than either the walking dead or the threat of starvation.

This attempted rape will save her	Sneaking past the blind sentry

In a particularly repellent episode, Duncan tricks the small girl into going outside. His plan is to use her to distract the knights (who react to sound) and while they use her to make a pretty faithful imitation of chop liver, he can sneak to the car and then drive like mad out of there. Leaving aside the small problem with a similar driving mad plan utterly failing on a prior occasion, the horror of the child walking in the midst of silent, but very menacing, killers is palpable. And so is her mother's fury when she discovers that her daughter has gone outside. Amalia's sacrifice to save her child is among the most memorable scenes in the film. With all this drama (including Jack finally getting rid of Dacosta after the latter's attempted rape of Vivian), the ending is very anti-climactic in a War of the Worlds sort of fashion. Without a way to deal with these relentless undead murderers, the only way the characters can keep their lives is if some deus ex machina intervenes at the opportune moment, which is exactly what happens here.

Blind dead modeling for new line of cloaks	Nothing beats the look of dead in the morning

For such an excellent film, the Blue Underground DVD is a worthy medium. The anamorphic 1.66:1 picture simply looks gorgeous (I am talking about the full 91 minute Spanish version, not the butchered 87 minute English cut which I did not bother with). The Anchor Bay DVD that I still have just does not hold a candle to this release, so it has to be regarded as definitive. I doubt that anyone can come up with anything that will be a big improvement. The mono Spanish soundtrack is also without blemish (although I would have preferred heavier usage of the ominous chanting), and the English subtitles are bright and readable. Except a trailer and a few photos, there are no extras on this disc, but the full disc in the The Blind Dead Collection is crammed full of them. The whole thing comes attractively packaged in a sturdy cardboard coffin, with a booklet. It's a must have for any fan of the genre, and any viewer who appreciates original villains.

December 8, 2005