| I've never been to Spain. I don�t know very much about it. I know that many of my favorite movies have been shot on location there, from Richard Lester�s Musketeer films, to Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci�s �spaghetti� westerns. Many visitors to Texas have been shocked to find that it looks little like Spain, and even less like Arizona, where most of the John Wayne era westerns were shot. I digress. Spain, as far as I knew for many years, was the place that gives us angry Basque separatists, an Armada, some conquistadors, and Castillian accents. The rain falls mainly on the plains there. In the past year, after watching Sexy Beast, I once again said, �Wow, Spain is where all the great Euro-Westerns were shot!� due to all the emphasis on mountainous, scorched desert scenes. Watching Tombs of the Blind Dead, I was reminded that much like the real Texas, there is more to the landscape then sage brush and chaparral. Bettie was making pasta, and we had some frozen squid in the icebox. Now, fried calamari has been one of my favorite foods since I was 17 and went to New York City with my father. Down in Little Italy, on Mulberry Street, was a little eatery called Umberto�s Clam House, or Umberto�s Chop House, or maybe just plain Umberto�s, something like that. Some Mafioso or another was bumped off in the men�s room there back in the day. We had Calamari Fra Diavolo, which was, to my mind, just about the coolest combination of fried squid and red-sauce pasta ever. Bettie, being wonderful, found a Fra Diavolo sauce recipe on that world-wide-web, built it from scratch, fried some squid (first boiling it in milk the same way she does chicken, prior to the breading) and dumped the deep-fried cephalopod goodness on top of the hot spaghetti, and smothering it all in a very spicy red sauce. In honor of this culinary masterpiece, and in honor of the first Spanish language film to be reviewed for her site, we dubbed dinner Calamari Salsa Diablo. The movie begins with long tracking shots of a spooky ruined castle on a hill in a forest. Ominous music builds while the camera creeps about the overgrown stone buildings, all in bright daylight. Suddenly, a shriveled hand drops from the gap in a tomb! Suddenly, a woman with graying and disheveled hair screams at the camera! Suddenly, we�re at a coastal town and have no idea why we just saw what we saw! At a swimming pool, overlooking the ocean, a beautiful young brunette named Virginia is lounging about. Ah, 1971. When a woman with a little extra padding was considered a thing of great beauty. Don�t get me started on the whole heroin-chic waif look. Virginia is surprised when she is approached by a slightly older woman, a strawberry blond named Betty. They haven�t seen each other in years, and seem a bit awkward. �You taught me how to use mascara, remember?� Then: A Musical Sting! The two woman look somewhat uncomfortable! Ahhh, a mysterious and possibly Sapphic past! Virginia introduces Betty to her good friend Paul. Paul is big, beefy, and has some bad-ass sideburns. He and Virginia are going camping, and despite Virginia�s obvious discomfort, clueless Paul invites Betty to come along. Nice move Paul. They meet the next morning at the train station and board. Betty and Paul have some electricity, a little chemistry, which irks Virginia. She goes to the rear platform of the train, for a little air, and we get: oooh! Sapphic flashback! Yes indeed, it seems Betty instructed Virginia a bit in the ways of looove back in their school-girl days. Virginal Virginia is convincing (the actress looks to be 24, maybe) while be-wigged Betty seems a bit long in the tooth to be a youth but, hey! It was 1971, things were different then. Or something. Well, Virginia is still a bit hung up about their �innocent schoolgirl experimentation�, though her old friend seems well adjusted, and she grabs her bag and leaps off the (relatively) slow-moving choo-choo. The train�s fireman (or coal-shoveling-guy, if you will) sees Virginia walking off across a meadow towards the distant castle (and if alarm bells aren�t going off in your head, you haven�t seen enough movies), and tells the engineer (his father) to pull the brakes. �No!� says pops. It seems he never, never stops the train along this stretch of land. I�m pretty sure he crossed himself and spat next, or at least he should have. �She doesn�t know what she�s in for!� he exclaims. �What do you mean?� asks his son. �Nothing. Just shovel more coal.� Ah, I can�t wait till I have kids. Paul and Betty, relatively unconcerned, agree that they�ll come back for Virginia the next day, or maybe she�ll catch up with them. Virginia, meanwhile, walks and walks and walks, till she gets to the ruins. Then she explores, and it�s really cool how atmospheric the location is in broad daylight� ruined bell-tower and overgrown burial ground, ramparts and battlements� but then night falls. Needless to say, it�s a bit eerie, in the dark. Of course by this time Virginia, being slightly more intelligent than her American counterpart would be in a remake, has already barricaded herself inside a slightly less-ruined outbuilding, and even built a cozy little fire. There is, unsurprisingly enough, a spring-loaded-harmless-creature scare� a tail-less cat? Hell, it might have been a very large rodent, a mongoose or possum, I don�t know what sort of spring-loaded-animals they have in Spain� it doesn�t matter, since after providing a small jump from Virginia we never see the animal again. Once she�s bedded down, after showing her shapely posterior to the camera, while she is smoking a cigarette and listening to a light-jazz station on her transistor radio, the mist slowly rises, and the stone crucifixes in the eerie burial ground begin to sway gently. The ground bulges and cracks open, the tomb lids side back slowly and with a gentle rasping, cloaked figures begin to emerge from the shadows. Methinks the blind dead are showing. The Blind Dead are the best thing about this movie. They are photographed well, well-designed, and generally ookie. Their hands are skeletal with a dark brown covering of dried skin, their bony faces bear patches of intermittent beard, and their sockets are devoid of anything but shadow. Their cloaks are coarse and matted with stone-dust and grime. Some of the Blind Dead are evidently better supplied than the rest, and ride shrouded horses in slow-motion. I think Peter Jackson saw this movie and never forgot the imagery of the Blind Dead riding in slow motion through the misty ruins, almost silently except for the clip-clopping of their horses. Well Virginia either hears some horse hooves a-cloppin�, or some Blind Dead a-creepin�, and she sneaks over to the termite-eaten door she barricaded earlier (good instincts!) and then opens a little side window and� Virginia is a very good screamer. Right up there with Leanna Quigley. The Blind Dead come after her, slowly-slowly lifting the bar from the door� slowly-slowly creeping across the leaf-strewn floor� and Virginia keeps on slowly-slowly backing away and shrieking, and loosing a shoe to a rickety old wooden staircase� Well, the chase scene doesn�t exactly raise your pulse-rate, unless it�s from yelling at poor Virginia �stop screaming and start running, you silly bint!� I�m not exactly sure what a bint is, but I�m sure Virginia is one. She loses another shoe, and manages to hijack the mount of a Blind Dead, and rides off. Now comes a horseback chase, and at first I thought it was the single-worst day-for-night photography ever, but came to the conclusion that instead dawn came very quickly. Virginia is dragged from her horse by the slow-motion-galloping Ringwraiths�er, Blind Dead, and they� well, they gather around her and start nibbling. In the next town, Roger and Betty are breakfasting by the pool (I thought he said they were camping? I really approve of his camping methods!) and asking about the creepy ruins they passed in the train. A maid drops a tray, a bellhop wets himself (off-screen, and only in my imagination) and the maitre-D laughs at these silly peasant superstitions. After renting a pair of horses, they ride off to find their friend. Upon arriving at the ruins, they wander around for a bit and find that everything looks pretty normal, except Roger notices that instead of crosses, many of the graves bear Ankhs instead. Bum-bum-bum! Evil undead Goths? Then a pair of cops spring out! The Spanish versions of Christopher Lloyd and Flacco Jimenez (just making sure you�re still awake) inform them that they need to identify the body of their friend. Nice bedside manner, you flatfoots. Back in the town where everyone apparently lives, Virginia�s body is safely at the coroner�s office. The coroner�s bedside table is about as inappropriate as the detectives, happily informing Betty and Paul that Virginia�s blood was drained from her body� don�t they normally just tell you �She�s dead, we suspect foul play� unless you are family? The coroner�s assistant, some call him a dead ringer for Brazil�s Coffin Joe others call him Stephen King�s meaner lil� brother, grins like a loon when whipping the sheet off of corpses in the morgue� I think he enjoys his work a wee bit too much. Distraught, Betty returns to her work, which is conveniently located near the morgue (is it The Morgue District? Do town�s have those?). It seems more and more clear that, unlike Virginia, Betty has fully embraced her Early 70�s Male Fantasy Lesbianism. She even has a cutie-pie assistant that she verbally berates regularly, with some insinuation that they don�t just share the office. What does Betty do? She manufactures mannequins, which, as you can guess, makes her studio a rather creepy place, with rows and rows of flickering-neon-lit nekkid plastic people. Betty�s assistant (let�s call her Nina) grew up not far from the haunted castle of Berzano, and gives Paul and Betty a push in the right direction, a crotchety old professor who studies ancient undead things in a local book-lined room. The professor gets positively giddy at the news that Roger and Betty bring him. �The Templars have returned to Berzano? That�s wonderful!� With no disbelief or need of convincing (useful trait for a horror pic, that) the Prof then explains the dark and twisted tale of the Templars. The first part is pretty accurate as to the historical facts, about these highly disciplined Christian knights who returned from the Crusades wealthy and war-torn, and with some strange new habits. We even get to see a creepy flashback wherein mounted Templars sacrifice a live girl to their �dark god� by slashing her naked body� Bettie didn�t like this scene very much. Actually, Bettie stopped liking the movie about the time Virginia died� not due to the horrific death or anything, Bettie just liked Virginia. Hmm, sort of the way that Betty just liked Virginia� does this mean I�m Paul? Argh! The flashback is interrupted by the detectives showing up at The Professor�s pad (huh?) to share their theory that the Prof�s son Pedro (a smuggler of some notoriety) is killing people and making it look like the Templars did it. While this is going on, the creepy morgue keeper is playing rough with his pet frog (which, Bettie notes, changes size and coloring twice in the following sequence) and then has his neck gnawed on by a zombi-fied/vampirized Virginia� wait a minute� If the Templar�s had to go through all this dark ritualistic sacrifice shit to gain evil power, how come� aw, never mind. At Betty�s mannequin warehouse, Evil Dead Virginia is stalking poor Nina� who manages at the last minute to alight her undead assailant with a fortuitously placed Bunsen burner. And the real tragedy is, no follow-up with Betty and Nina! That�s it, subplot exercised from the movie. Time to meet Pedro and his trashy gal-pal Maria. Why in God�s name are Paul and Betty going all the way to the middle of nowhere to meet a smuggler, his mol, and then drag them back to a different middle of nowhere to� to do what? Regardless, this very odd four-person posse ends up lurking about the ruins of Berzano. As midnight approaches the group splits up into an odd configuration: Paul with Maria and Betty with the machismo bristling shifty fella called Pedro. Maria hits on Paul, but he stands strong. Meanwhile, Pedro promptly rapes Betty (bleh) and is then cut to ribbons by the Templars, who somehow emerge right after the physical abuse. Lemme just say, if I�m gonna go investigate potential blood-sucking Templar zombie vampire wraiths, I�m not bringing a switchblade. I�m bringing a shotgun, an axe, and a hi-cap semi-auto. And maybe a switchblade. Anyway, after making short shrift of Pedro, the Templars follow the screaming and horrified Betty. A cat-fight ensues between Betty and Veroni�sorry, Maria, when Maria won�t let Paul into the keep. What a bitch. Paul�s arm ends up separated from his body, but as he dies he manages to whisper the secret of the Templars to Betty: keep quiet, they can�t see you, they can only hear you. Well! Maria is torn down and sucked dry pretty quick, and then Betty stands stock still, the swaying, grisly Templars lurking about the small room� and they hear her heartbeat. She takes off, is chased, (more pre-Nazgul footage) and eventually makes her way down to the narrow-gauge train tracks. This time the fireman isn�t having any of his father�s superstitious nonsense, he pulls the breaks and attempts to save Betty. Only, see, he moves slow, and next thing you know, the Templars have boarded the train. And this is where the movie is justifiably famous. The Templars kill every last man, woman, and child aboard the train (sans Betty who is sensibly hiding in the coal-tender), almost all of the violence happening off screen to choruses of screams and hacking sounds� and then we see the shot of the 2 year old child, held in his dead mothers arms, crying while blood dribbles on to it as one of the Templar�s slowly-slowly reaches for it� Brrrr. The train slowly pulls into the station, a stationmaster or porter leaps in to pull the brakes� and Betty, covered with coal dust and with white-hair (apparently from the shock) starts screaming� Fini. Well! An oddly refreshing little movie, the visuals are fantastic, but the plot occasionally meanders into odd corners, never to return. If the blood-slurping Templars kill regularly, and it seems that they somehow do, how come there aren�t hundreds of Virginia-style walking dead creeping around Spain�s mannequin warehouses and morgues? Did the police actually do anything in 1970s Spain, other than let people know that their friends or relatives were involved in possibly criminal plots? Sort of a free-range early-warning system for potential Fred, Wilma and Daphne types? Why Pedro? Why was the Prof so excited about the Templar�s returning to Berzano? The world may never know, for sadly, De Ossorio passed away in 2001. Three more Blind Dead films were made, and I�ve heard nary a good thing about 2 and 3. However the 4th (sadly, impossible to find) known as The Night of the Seagull (and about 5 other titles) sounds really kickass, and bizarre, so I�m keeping my eyes peeled. La Noche de las Gaviotas might have worked better than La Noche Del Teror Ciego with Bettie�s Calamari Salsa Diablo, since it is said to have a Lovecraftian undertone, and flesh-eating crabs (plus: the Templars are said to emerge from the waves in this one, which frankly sounds cool). [return] |
| La Noche Del Teror Ciego (Tombs of the Blind Dead) dir: Amandeo De Ossorio |