Return of the Blind Dead

Return of the Blind Dead (1973)

Dir. Amando de Ossorio

Written by Amando de Ossorio

Starring Tony Kendall, Fernando Sancho, Esperanza Roy

As was well known in Spain in 1973, the Knights Templars were an evil group of blasphemers against the Church who were rightly slaughtered by God-fearing Christians everywhere for the crime of cutting women’s boobs off and drinking the blood while worshipping Satan. I don’t remember any of that from THE DA VINCI CODE, but I guess I just don’t know my history as well as Spanish horror auteur and amaurophiliac Amando de Ossorio, who made a career out of the four “BLIND DEAD” movies which are only related to each other through their meticulously researched gimmick of blind Templar zombies. Why blind? Well, because (as this movie retcons from the previous explanation in part I) when the villagers decided they’d had enough titty-stabbing and tied the Templars up before burning them alive, the lead Templar insisted they’d come back for some revenge from beyond the grave. As you can see by his expression, the lead villager hadn’t considered this eventuality, and, concerned about the possibility, nay probability of undead Templar revenge, he takes the precaution of burning the Templars’ eyes out so that in the event that they do return, they’ll just stumble around blindly and not cause any trouble. Then he burns the rest of their bodies, just to be sure. Well, I guess although they are nefarious blasphemous devil-worshiping nipple-punishers, they’re still serious about keeping their promises, so indeed, they do return. But the double-burning of their eyes did seem to take (maybe they should have just double-burned their whole bodies?) and voila, blind Templars, or more generically Blind Dead, the title isn’t lying.

Unfortunately, it turns out that undead Templars spend a lot of time on horseback, and since the villagers didn’t think to burn out the horses’ eyes, the whole blindness thing doesn’t end up much of an impediment. So when the village idiot resurrects the whole lot of them via their favorite pastime (boob cutting) the small town of Bouzano, Portugal (where everyone speaks Spanish) is in trouble. Templar trouble. No boob is safe this night.

Even this kind of infallible planning won't save you!

Into this powderkeg waiting to explode into an inferno of horse-mounted boob-stabbing steps Captain Jack Marlowe (Tony Kendall) who is obviously the coolest person in the world, what with his dapper beige peacoat, mirrored aviators, and Kurt-Russel-esque mane. He’s such a fuckin boss that the minute he steps into town, the dipshit Mayor’s wife wants to jump his bones just because years ago (and judging from her face, it was a lot of years) they fucked on a boat somewhere, or something like that. In fact, she had the mayor hire him to create the town’s annual firework display just so she can lure him into the Templar ruins and bone him (unfortunately that creepy village idiot guy had the same idea, and that pretty much kills the mood). That’s the kind of guy Captain Jack Marlow is, he’s so fuckin badass that even though he’s a Captain he also has a side gig as a fireworks expert, and in fact is so god damn good at that that he doesn’t even need to be present during the actual, you know, fireworks show. He’s in it for a different kind of fireworks, Jack Marlowe is.  

You’d feel a little bad for the mayor, except that he’s a total dickweed who, in classic horror movie fashion, fails to heed the warnings of dead templars hacking their beloved citizenry to death. This is especially hard to understand, because the fireworks show being catered by Jack Marlowe is in celebration of their annual festival recognizing that it’s been exactly 500 years and so far, no dead templars have yet materialized. Another year safe from the lurking undead menace! They celebrate with fireworks and by burning effigies of the templars in the city square, so it’s especially awkward once the zombies ride into town. Good thing they’re blind, huh?

Holy shit, it just occurred to me that maybe Jack Marlowe is the Most Interesting Man In the World, and this experience is one of the many interesting things about him. You'd think he'd mention it in the commercials, though.

I’ve got to be honest with you, this movie is pretty much an unwatchable piece of shit. Blind Templar Zombies are, at least, a novel idea, but other than a few cool day-for-(k)night scenes of eyeless templars riding horses in slow motion, nothing much comes of it. Presumably, the fact that they’re blind means that they can only get you if they hear you scream, but in practice it doesn’t really seem to work out that way, they just seem to know where people are so they can slowly walk up and strangle them. There is a funny scene where one of them gets knocked off his horse by running into a wagon, though, not sure if that’s because he’s blind or if the actor just didn’t see it and they kept the footage, like that part from A NEW HOPE where the stormtrooper bonks his head on the door. Could be either, but if it’s because of blindness then it’s pretty much the only reference to the Templars’ disability in the whole thing. Which I guess is kind of progressive, but still, you sold me on Blind Dead, pal, I want some mileage from the gimmick.

Instead, we’re left with a particularly dull zombie siege film, where a small band of survivors hides out in a church, and then because of good logic split off into groups who one by one sneak outside and get bumped off. Obviously not Jack Marlowe, you can’t kill Jack Marlowe, first off he’s unkillable due to being King Shit of Fuck Mountain and second, any audience you tired to pull that on would immediately rise to their feet as one and embark on a vicious riot until there was nothing left of the venue or filmmakers. So yeah, Marlowe’s probably gonna be OK. But the others, definitely expendable. So you do get a couple decently bloody deaths.

One of the things most people don't know about Skeletor is his lifelong passion for dressage.

Maybe because they’re blind, maybe because they’re a little stiff after 500 years, I don’t know, but even with the killing these Templars are a particularly docile lot, a lot of times you can kind of push your way through as they stumble around. When our motley band of heroes get inside the church, they don’t make any special effort to break in, they just listlessly stand idle in the street while one of them politely knocks on the door. And since all the characters are either helpless idiots or actively awful bastards (don’t worry, it’s a European horror film so you’ll get your requisite sexual assault, although you’ll have to wait awhile) it’s not like there’s a whole lot of tension about whether they’ll live or die. So there’s not a lot really going on here. 90 minutes is way too long for a film with absolutely no artistry, likeable characters, or even a consistent gimmick.

Director Ossorio went on to make two more BLIND DEAD movies (under the names THE GHOST GALLEON and NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS [?]) before resigning himself to making Spanish pornos in the 80’s. His wikipedia page -- written with breathlessly wistful adulation by what I assume to be a family member or close friend-- suggests a man of somewhat more artistic aspirations than you would guess from watching RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD: for example, he considered the film to have “political aspects,” apparently referring to the dipshit mayor who tries to save himself while the villagers get slaughtered, which seems pretty funny until you remember that Francisco Franco would still be dictator for two more years after this one came out, and maybe it genuinely was a little subversive to depict a public official as a selfish fucktard in fascist Spain (that probably explains the movie’s otherwise inexplicable Portuguese setting, too; Jesus Franco also had to set his films, [THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF, for example] in other countries so Spain wouldn’t look bad). There’s also a link between sex and death in the film, according to the “Themes” section on wikipedia, which is obviously a pretty bold and unique take on horror movies, so, you know, worth mentioning.

Confirmed: this movie has themes.

In general the wikipedia entry weaves a tragic tale of unmet ambitions and crushing disappointments*, so much so that when his final movie THE SEA SERPENT was ruined by a punishingly tiny budget, he quit the movie business forever and made a living selling “scary oil painting of his Templar Knights” to his fans. Well, at least he was trying, that makes me like him a little more, even if wikipedia seems a little confused as to his later exploits: “In the late 70's, de Ossorio's name strangely wound up on a couple of x-rated adult films.” Yeah, strange how that just happens to some people, isn’t it?

Anyway, RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD is pretty terrible and pointless, but his rosey wikipedia entry and the vague germ of a good idea with the blind templars is enough to make certain I’m not gonna entirely give up on the guy. They claim that his 1975 EXORCIST ripoff DEMON WITCH CHILD is “today regarded as an underrated must-see horror classic by most of his fans,” so maybe that’s the one to try for next year. In the meantime, I gotta get one of those zombie Templar oil paintings, that sounds amazing.

*From wikipedia: “He was interviewed for a 2001 documentary about his life entitled Amando de Ossorio: The Last Templar just a short time before he died. During the interview, De Ossorio complained about the pitifully tiny budgets he was always forced to work within, and he lamented that in almost every case, the finished project never came close to what he had envisioned when he first conceived each film. He cited his worst disappointment being the abysmal special effects that appeared at the climax of his Ghost Galleon (1974), wherein the producers actually used a folded piece of cardboard to represent the magnificent Spanish galleon that burns and sinks at the end of the film.” That does sound pretty disspiriting.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: Yes, to the beloved original classic TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD.
• REMAKE: No
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No, Spanish
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Ha.
• BOOBIES: Yeah, a couple
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: Yessir, head AND limb loss.
• ENTRAILS? No, these are not hungry zombies.
• CULTISTS: Templars? The do seem pretty culty.
• ZOMBIES: Yeah, I'd say these guys count.
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Yes indeedy.

The Thing (2011)

The Thing (2011)

Dir. by Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr [sic]

Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jørgen Langhelle, Joel Edgerton

Recently I’ve been watching a trend which seems to be developing. This trend is the creation of films which honestly have no legitimate reason to exist except that they are perceived to capitalize on name recognition which already exists for some other film --which originally did have some reason to exist—and yet are pretty good anyway. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE. THE MECHANIC REMAKE. THE GREEN HORNET. These films tend to either have awkwardly derivative titles (the firs two) or an identical title to the well-known original they’re trying to coast on (the rest). When you make a remake of things which obviously need no remake or extend a franchise where it clearly didn’t need to go, you know who you’re working for. It ain’t the audience. It’s the marketing department.

                So when these movies get made, the reason is obvious: the Dark One is trying to ruin everything cool. But there’s a second aspect here which is much harder to explain, and that is that some of the people making these films seem to be, against all reason, actually trying to make something good. I mean, not all of them, obviously. For every FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE which demonstrates some real hustle, you’ve got your STRAW DOGS REMAKEs, your GREEN LANTERNs, your CONAN THE 2011 BARBARIANs, your which range from the profoundly lazy to the profoundly ill-conceived. But that’s not news, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Studios and film types both know crap like that is the cinematic equivalent of a sidewalk shell game, a quick and dirty way to cash in on people’s ignorance and laziness and-- it goes without saying-- strictly for rubes. So why the spate of entries into this dismal cannon where people seem to be actually trying? Don’t they know? Didn’t anyone tell them? It hardly seems fair.

    
    THE THING PREMAKEQUEL (which as you can see requires an entirely new noun to properly describe) is at the shallower end of the trend, but I still admire its effort and its fitful successes. The premise is this: Mary Elizabeth Ramona Flowers Winstead is a scientist called down to Antarctica to a remote scientific outpost where they’ve discovered a frozen alien deep in the ice. They bring it back to the base, where the exact same stuff that happens in the original happens again, only not as good.

              I mean, come on, you weren’t seriously thinking this thing would be as good as the original, right? Do you also think that drinking coffee is going to be basically as fun as smoking crack? So no, it’s not as good, and it’s occasionally embarrassingly tone deaf to what makes the original work. Still, you get that distinct whiff of effort; that at least someone in there was trying to make something good. The biggest problem it has is that it’s basically recreating—in a sheepish, self-consciously slightly altered form-- most of the pieces of a much better movie. If you can get past that, though, you’ll see that unfortunately its second biggest problem is most of the new stuff it adds.

      
            Most of the film is pretty similar: group of scientists with beards, shape-changing monster infiltrates them, they’re slowly picked off as their paranoia increases, weird body horror, and did I mention beards? Though not as strong as the original, the premakequel does pretty well with this, at least at the beginning. Winstead is not as strong as Russell, but there’s a pretty engaging supporting cast of mostly Norwegian actors little known in the US. Winstead’s character is unimaginatively (and intentionally, if Wikipedia is to be believed) modeled after Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, just like every single female character in every single modern genre film. Winstead, however, downplays the flintiness of ALIENS Ripley and brings an interesting kind of sharp-eyed opaqueness to her role. She’s obviously smarter than most people around her, but she tends to be quiet when she doesn’t need to speak, and direct instead of aggressive. We get no backstory on her at all, so we’re never exactly sure what she’s thinking, although those big gorgeous eyes are constantly advertising that there’s a lot going on behind them. Kurt Russell – you know he’s a badass. You have to learn exactly what Winstead’s character is capable of, and you get the sense that she may be learning too. So while obviously you’re gonna be happier watching Kurt Russell than anyone the brain could halfway imagine could conceivably date Michael Cera, its still an interesting twist and much more subtle than it probably reads on the page.

,

The remaining cast of Norwegian actors acquit themselves nicely, too (it probably helps that they have a Norwegian director in Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. – this thing is practically a foreign film!). They manage to differentiate themselves enough that you can tell them apart, and work hard to sell the concept with sincerity (especially non-English-speaking Lars [Jørgen Langhelle], who manages to be overwhelmingly endearing even when we don’t always know what he’s saying, like Chewbacca). The fact that there’s a language barrier between American Winstead and several of her Norwegian peers adds an extremely effective layer to the increasing paranoia, as her ability to communicate with them makes it even more difficult to form a cohesive strategy. This one also cleverly exploits the cultural divide to splinter the group into distrustful factions, with the tension between human groups that can only imperfectly communicate creating an even more difficult situation. This change feels natural, works nicely into the existing mythology, and adds an interesting layer to a familiar situation.

Likewise, the “alien test” devised in the remakequel at first feels like a half-thought-out attempt to replicate the famous blood test scene from the original without actively ripping it off… but then turns out to have an interesting wrinkle of its own. The fact that it’s able to clear some –but not not all-- of the scientists further splits the group and adds an unexpected element of moral ambiguity which pays off nicely at the end. Is it right to lock your colleagues up simply because they can’t prove they’re not trying to kill you? How far can you go in the name of pragmatic self-protection and when does that become calculating utilitarianism? It’s a nicely nebulous issue and –although I wouldn’t swear the filmmakers considered it—an apt metaphor for age of terrorism paranoia as well.
  

Unfortunately, that’s all in the middle section of the film. Things begin somewhat more clumsily, with a bunch of exposition stuffed up front, a silly introduction to the alien (ever wonder how it first escapes? It just jumps out of the ice all the sudden. Mystery solved!). By the middle, it finds its footing, creating an interesting tension and tweaking the good ideas of the original somewhat elegantly. But then it unwisely changes direction again, and ends up on pretty weak ground. After a great 20 minutes of paranoia, the monster comes back and then doesn’t bother hiding anymore. It flips out and pretty much eats all the remaining characters as a big jumbled blob of CG human features, crawling around and growling and pouncing on people. Which makes it unclear why it bothered to hide in the first place and changes the dynamic from an escalating tension to a more standard hide-from-the-dinosaur routine. It’s not a catastrophe, but it’s also nothing special. Despite the freedom CG affords, the filmmakers fail to create anything as imaginatively disturbing as Carpenter’s body dysmorphic nightmares from the original, and the CG effects make the monster look clean, weightless and, well, CG.

Then things get worse: our remaining heroes follow the thing back to its spaceship, and the film turns from a lesser but respectable version of THE THING into an embarrassing retread of ALIENS. The ship’s design is baldly derivative (except it seems to be powered by this cool 3D 8-bit Tetris game, that’s cool) and the monster which had fooled everyone into believing it was their colleague is demoted to a mindless, roaring beast (it can change shape, but it can’t figure out how to get at our protagonist when she hides in a narrow passage? Lame. ) The whole sequence is conceived and executed about as indifferently as possible, and would have been enough to turn me completely against the whole enterprise.

Except… it doesn’t quite end there. After the big, clumsy, expode-y Hollywood ending, there’s a little coda which finds some intriguing ambiguity. Spoilers follow!

See, Winstead and her surviving buddy (the other American, go figure) kill the crap out of the alien using the fine art of explosions, leaping away from explosions, etc. But then they get back to their vehicle and she suddenly notices that the guy’s earring is gone. When she mentions it, he casually touches the wrong ear. So what does she do? She torches the son of a bitch with a flamethrower. Pretty badass, but what makes the movie slightly badass is that the film doesn’t have him thing-out when he dies; it’s an entirely human scream as he burns to death.  Then the camera lingers on Winstead’s face as she contemplates what has just happened. She doesn’t look devastated or relieved, exactly, just deep in thought. Did she just burn her friend to death over an earring? Or is she pretty sure she was right, and is contemplating what it means about her that she has this kind of killer survival instinct? The film isn’t saying, but ending on a long, quiet, ambiguous note was pretty unexpected after all that trite monster bullshit on the spaceship. (actually in this light the monster parts feel suspiciously like the kind of concession a director might make to the aforementioned marketing department in order to keep the quiet, tense ending that you really want).

Sure, it might be a little more meaningful if her character was better developed, but it’s also kind of interesting to keep her a touch enigmatic. It very neatly but subtlety uses the ending to reinforce the film’s possible allusion to the age of terrorism, where fear of our hidden enemies keep us striking first and asking questions later. But what then, once we’ve killed the people we’re afraid of and are left with only ourselves and our thoughts. What do we think of ourselves? Have we become monsters hidden in human form too? Will we ever be able to feel safe again, ever trust our own eyes to see a world without hidden, lurking menace? Can the nightmare ever end once it’s begun? The film pauses long enough to let us ponder things a little, and that’s when you feel that genuine horror come back. The fear that goes beyond being eaten by monsters; the kind of fear that dances at the edge of consciousness, that can’t be relieved with something as concrete as an exploding spaceship.

This film only flirts with these ideas, but it’s bold enough in pursuing them that I have to give it credit for trying –on and off, anyway—when it obviously didn’t have to and no one besides me and maybe Vern was going to read into it at all or care even if they did.  So this one emerges as a win for me – generally competent, occasionally excellent, interesting enough to justify its own existence, particularly as a minor but respectable augmentation of an existing masterpiece. If they must go on making these unnecessary franchise rip-off movies, and insist on continuing to confuse us by making them decent, I guess we ought to at least appreciate it when someone puts in a little elbow grease. Maybe that makes them not so completely unnecessary after all.