Tombs Of The Blind Dead

La Noche del Terror Ciego, or as we gringos like to call it, Tombs of the Blind Dead, is considered a small masterpiece in the horror genre.


Things begin normally enough with two old friends, Betty (Lone Fleming) and Virginia (Elena Arpón), meeting by chance at a pool in Lisbon.  Also turning up is Virginia's new love interest - who immediately takes a shine to Betty and invites her to join them on a camping trip.


On a train to their intended destination, an upset Virginia jumps off and heads for a ruined castle she has seen in the distance.  The engineer refuses to stop the train, stating ominously: "She doesn't know what she's in for."


Virginia tours the ruins, then bolts a door and beds down for the night.  

After nightfall,  creepy stuff stars to happen in the castle's graveyard, but Virginia is listening to generic jazz on her transistor radio, and thus doesn't hear the zombies rising from their graves. Now, director Amando del Ossorio has created here zombies that are quite outside the norm for these movies - they look genuinely dead, more at home in one of those grisly catacombs where they stack the dead up against the walls and just let them dry out. Clad in decaying medieval cerements, they truly are the inhabitants of somebody's nightmare. And oh, yeah, they ride horses. I can only assume that these are zombie horses, although they seem to be in much better shape than their riders.


Virginia finally gets curious about those noises outside her door. To her credit, she looks out the window first, but there is something rather disquieting about opening a shutter only to find a skeleton leering in at you... And one advantage to having skeletal hands, we discover, is that you can reach in between the rough hewn boards of a door and lift off the bar, allowing you and your fellow zombies entrance.  Virginia keeps retreating through the building, always pausing long enough for the zombies to break down a door before moving to the next room. Finally, she finds herself on the roof, and manages to climb down and actually steal one of the zombie horses. There is a brief chase, but Virginia doesn't handle her zombie horse at all well; she is pulled down and the zombies assemble around her...

The next day, the passing train spots her body in the clearing; once again Papa Engineer refuses to stop, saying, "Let the police handle it." Meanwhile, at the hotel, Betty and Roger are discussing Virginia's disappearance (Hotel? Weren't they going camping?). Their waitress identifies the building they saw Virginia walking toward as "Berzano" - a place none of the hotel employees are allowed to discuss, if they want to keep their jobs. So Betty and Roger rent horses and head out to this forbidden Berzano.  The horses bolt when the two are foolish enough to dismount in the middle of the castle's graveyard. Nevertheless, they press on, finding Virginia's abandoned sleeping bag and other effects, like the shoe she lost on a decaying staircase. They also find the cops, come to tell them that Virginia was murdered, and they are needed to identify the body.  The coroner later reveals that Virginia's body bears the bite marks of over a dozen individuals...


Betty reveals that her assistant Nina (Verónica Llimera) comes from a village perhaps 20 miles from Berzano; Nina relates a legend that Berzano contains the remains of the accursed Knights Templar, and they rise from the grave every night, seeking blood to drink.. Roger and Betty leave to pursue a lead.  Meanwhile, the coroner is killed by a now-undead Virginia, who goes on to attack Nina (who fortunately dispatches her with fire).  

Roger, Betty, and new friends Pedro and Maria spend the night in the ruins, where Pedro rapes Betty.  Soon the Templars start crawling out of their tombs.  Roger arrives just in time to see Pedro become zombie kibble and discovers that the bullets in his gun - all three of them - are useless against the Templars, and he runs back to the room, where the women have barred the door.  By the time Betty finally manages to open the door, he's messily lost an arm to the Templar swords; she drags him into the room, closely followed by the zombies. Maria obligingly starts screaming her head off, causing the Templars to concentrate on her for the moment. "If you stay quiet, you should be safe," Roger reminds Betty, then expires (Too bad you didn't remember that for yourself, eh Roger?). The Templars, finished with the Maria course, turn to Betty, but pause, puzzled, as she even holds her breath.... but there's one sound that seems to be getting louder and louder: her heartbeat.

So Betty has little choice but to run. She dodges between the slow-moving zombies and heads off toward the railroad, after (naturally) taking the time to twist her ankle. This time the engineer stops the train and runs to help her - at the cost of his life, and everyone on board the train, as the Templars dismount and invade the passenger cars. 


The final scene, the massacre aboard the train, is one of the few examples of a horror film's climax actually outdoing what comes before it; it is nightmarish in the extreme, yet accomplished mainly through sound; we don't see much of what's going on. 


The movie tends to rely on its considerable atmosphere more than an actual coherent story. De Ossorio's choice of setpieces is spot-on, from the long hallway in Betty's shop lined on either side by mannequins (and you just know that's prime zombie-hiding real estate) to those glorious Gaspar Friedrich ruins, a magnificent set that you could not build. The Templars themselves are a marvelous creation, and the scenes of them on horseback, shot in slow motion and almost completely silent, save for the occasional clip-clop of their mounts' hooves, are a bewildering blend of the beautiful and the horrific; they are Goya etchings come to life. Or un-life. Whatever.


So you really have to acquit Tombs of any wrongdoing of which it may be guilty; it provides not only a unique twist on the zombie story (and gives a reason for their predations.... why do Romero zombies crave living flesh, after all?). The films spawned four inferior sequels.   (Bad Movie Report)