20th April 2009

Modern exploitation audiences are well primed for the feast of arcane treasures laid on for them by the DVD market’s ever-engorged hard on for the neglected and nefarious of Euro-cult cinema. It’s a fact that continues to delight and surprise, not much more than a decade since shoddy VHS and pre-internet methods of tracking these things down made being an exploitation fan rather wearying.

Today, long out-of-print masterworks and curiosities alike have been unleashed to sully our grubby souls. Gem after gem now washes over willing consumers who, in the crazier days of VHS, were so used to scratchy, censored analogue, that the merest hint of widescreen was a thing as bright and blessed as the blazing sun on a Portuguese landscape. A landscape not too dissimilar to where just one of these delectable treasures, Armando Ossorio’s “Blind Dead” series, was dreamt up.

The “Blind Dead” films were a quartet of pictures falling foul not just of the BBFC (and not without reason -- more on that later) but also the limitations of video tape. As with many films low on budget, yet high on darkly delicious imagination and rich visual splendour, the digital age has reinvigorated their inherent glories for a new and rabidly appreciative generation of horror fans.

So what better way to celebrate the resurrection of a future flagellate this post-Easter week than to witness the philanderings of a peculiar thorn in the side of the Catholic Church -- the Knights Templar.

This week we look at “Tombs Of The Blind Dead”/“Noche del Terror Ciegio” (1971)

As Catholic assassins subjugated by the very higher powers whom they pillaged to protect all those centuries ago, director Armando De Ossorio’s gothic vision reanimates St John’s relentless (and eyeless) Crusades-era cult to pursue to the wanton and the wicked (not to mention the atrociously dressed) through the photogenic Portuguese desert plains.

The inaugural outing, 1971’s “Tombs Of The Blind”, sees a generic set up spun out in a most unusual manner: a gaggle of gadabouts, sunning themselves (presumably) in the Gulf Of Cadiz decide to take a trip. But resulting sexual tensions between the startlingly coiffured Roger and former schoolgirl lovers Virginia and Betty is cut short when Virginia, leaping off the train in an effort to escape her own rapidly reanimated personal demons, stumbles upon the real, decrepit and blood craving thing in the ruins of an ancient temple. The ensuing investigation into the discovery of Virginia’s blooded body by a cadre of colleagues and officials, provides intrigue, grand suspense and brooding atmosphere.

From frame one, the anchor of the picture’s proficiency is its striking sound design. Atmospherically persuasive, it’s a guttural cacophony, perched unsettlingly between chorale, Gregorian chant and music concrete. Passages of primal directness presage the great ‘Suspiria’, making it a wonder composer Anton Garcia Abril wasn’t launched like a Latin Goblin to stymie the airwaves of the early 1970s.

Though firmly rooted in the same cinematic niche, produced during the decline of the Franco regime that let a host of other artists loose on the world with little money but a wealth of ideas, Ossorio’s vital economy extends to his stylistic choices. Skillful composition and dextrous photography (here courtesy of Pablo Ripoll) are key to any picture unable to rely on the gluttonous, over-egged set pieces of today’s horror pictures. One extremely effective sequence in ‘Tombs...’ sees the incursion of a neon-glazed mannequin shop by the mummified Virginia, back from the dead and now terrorising a prey of her own. In a neat visual echo of her first scenes, undressing amid dancing flames from a campfire in the ancient ruins, Ossorio chooses to frame her fiery demise among the scalding, viscous faces of melted shop dummies: a symbolic urban sacrifice of a rural demon in factory of consumerism. Very Romero.

This attention to low-fi craftsmanship -- made readily apparent by a transfer free from the shackles of crappy VHS -- promotes an assured pace over the usual gore and guingol. Not to say that the picture isn't bloody. A deliciously grim flashback sequence allocates the Knights their latter day reputation as purveyors of sadistic, occult ritual. Then there are the potent images of the feasting dead, like oversized rats gnawing carrion, swarming with ghastly poise about their victims.

Such superlatives can’t hide all flaws, however. For all its abundance of character, it’s ironically the characters themselves who prove the weak sauce in such a piquant stew. As Nigel Burrell notes in ‘The Knights Of Terror’, his excellent 1995 monogram on the series, despite the moral abandon of the tale, the fascist leanings of Franco-era Spain are imprinted on the film. If not apparent in the previously censorable acts depicted -- violence, lesbianism, sexual deviance -- then certainly the characterisation of the acts’ perpetrators is “reactionary” at best, puerile and misogynistic at worst. Roger and jaunty bastard smuggler Pedro, who assists in the quest for Virginia’s killers are both horrendous incarnations of masculine brusqueness and smarm. The biggest loser, though, is Betty, whose “sapphic tendencies”, as Burrell calls them, could have been ripe for subverting the lazy shorthand of genre convention usually given to anyone not given to swooning over the manly heroics of the leading man. Instead Betty is treated as merely another deviant, befuddled and helpless. In an alarmingly reductive and tasteless move by Ossorio, the character of Pedro attempts to “cure” Betty of her lesbianism during a grim but thankfully minimally protracted and dispassionately shot rape sequence. This rather wretched attitude, while sadly not in anyway unique in an era rife with shoddy interpretations of gender politics, never the less dampens the picture’s considerable cumulative power. Side note: the UK edition of the film has had 16 seconds of Betty’s rape scene excised and while censorship is nothing one with advocate, in this instance it is to the detriment of perhaps extreme retentives only. Head for Region 1, if you simply must be that kind of completist.

The luminaries of the piece, however, were never going to be any other than the titular tomb dwellers themselves. Ossorio was at pains to point out they were ‘mummies’, despite a preponderance for both vampire-style blood supping and heavy allusions to Romero’s ‘undead’ creations (at this point, only “Night Of The Living Dead” had happened; they were not referred to as ‘zombies’ until later in the trilogy). Filth encrusted spectres, Ossorio’s ghouls are both striking and gracefully malevolent whether tramping ruthlessly over ruined tombstones or on horseback, galloping in temporally displaced slow motion across the rugged plains. It’s hard to imagine that Peter Jackson and Ralph Bakshi, while they were searching for a visual stamp for their Nazgûl, didn’t become familiar with Ossorio’s unique and terrifying foe. Or perhaps Ossorio had an illustrated “Lord Of The Rings” on his shelf? Either way, the similarities are eerie.

Unfolding with an elegantly apocalyptic air, the dread quietly expands beyond the parameters of isolationist horror that the genre knows so well, the ghastly tendrils of the Templars creeping beyond their dilapidated necropolis. It ensures that this gothic fantasy unhinges the nerves which many Euro potboilers might leave unscathed.

Anchor Bay’s disc itself is of note primarily because few have seen this ethereal dismemberment in as good condition as this, if ever at all. A welcome treat for fans of the series comes in the shape of not only the full and frenzied trailer package for the terrific quartet, but also the hyperbolic and utterly surreal US marketing pitch, which attempted to convince a cine-illiterate part of the audience that the film was in fact a belated sequel to none other than Franklin J Schaffner’s ‘Planet Of The Apes’.

*That’s* how they used to market exploitation pictures.