Friday, November 26, 2010

The Night of the Seagulls

This is another installation in the infamous Blind Dead series.  In case you have missed the other Blind Dead movies, these films chronicle the exploits of a group of Knights Templar who sacrificed buxom, scantily clad women to gain the wonderful opportunity to come back from the dead as zombies and sacrafice more buxom, scantily clad women.  The Blind Dead were Spainish films made by Amando de Ossorio.

In this installation of the series Ossorio gathers inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  I know many zombie fans love this movie, but I can't stand with them.  Despite the Lovecraft references, this movie was laughable.   This movie begins, after the obligatory Knights Templar killing a mostly naked woman scene, with a young doctor taking a new job in a village that I can't believe would have been realistic even in the 1970's.  The village looks like it fell out of the dark ages.  All the women cover their heads and wear black all the time.  There are no cars, no electricity, no phones, and the old doctor flees town on a donkey.  The locals are strange and hostile and their main activities seem to be beating up on the town idiot and sacrificing virgins.   This doesn't scare off the young doctor, however, who breezes into this archaic town in full 1970's bling.  He wears high heals and sweaters that are so 1970's I had to squint to see them.  His wife has similar fashion sense and is an utter, blithering idiot.  Together this couple take over a medical practice in what looks like a decrepit barn and wonder why they aren't getting any patients. 

Of course, the couple ignores the old doctor's advice to stay inside after dark and not ask questions and quickly find themselves fighting to save the lives of one town idiot and one victim meant to be sacrificed.   Zombie Knights Templar descend on them in full force moving about as quickly as an injured slug.  This doesn't stop the women from backing away from the zombies even more slowly while screaming.  Of course, if I had on platform shoes that high I might not be able to run or jump out of a window down five feet either, but that is another story.  After the town idiot is killed by the zombies, our heroes decide to take the zombie horses and run away.  Who would think the zombie horses might be bad?  Zombie creatures are usually so trustworthy. But these zombie horses are bad.  They are bad zombie horses.  The bad zombie horses take our little group of idiots back to the castle of the Knights Templar where the doctor finds a statue of a toad god and concludes that this statue must be the source of all their problems based on nothing but the ugliness of the toad god. The doctor pushes the toad god over and the zombie Templars explode in a bloody mess.  Of course, the villagers have spent centuries sacrificing virgins to the Templars and never figured this out.  I guess that explains why they are trapped in the dark ages and are too dumb to find any other occupation besides chasing the village idiot with sticks.

This movie is definitely worth seeing if only for a laugh.  It is silly without meaning to be and all its inconsistencies make it amazing to watch.   Watching a grown woman scream and lay in one place while a skeleton hand spends 2 minutes creeping towards always funny.  This movie is definitely in the so bad it is funny category.