The Blind Dead leave the sanctuary of the Templar's crumbling monastery for the third in the series, the floating fright-fest Horror of The Zombies (aka The Ghost Galleon). If there was ever a film that's rooted firmly in the decade from which it sprung, it's this one. Oh, and Saturday Night Fever, but this one's from 1974: pre-disco, and post-taste.
Now, if we've all forgotten just how senselessly ugly Seventies fashions were, the opener will bring it all kicking and screaming back to us. It's at a swim-wear photo shoot, where top model Noemi is looking for her missing girlfriend. She's taken to a secret location by photo-frau Lillian (Maria Perschy) where the great mystery is revealed her girlfriend Cathy and another model are out in the middle of the ocean as part of an elaborate publicity stunt to promote a weather-controlled boat, cooked up by cocky financier Howard Tucker (Jack Taylor).
Unfortunately for the girls, the fog rolls in (although, being the Seventies, everyone is huffing away on cigarettes and cigars, so how would you notice), and an ancient galleon, seemingly abandoned with rags for sails, floats into view. The girls radio the news of the Ghost Galleon back to base; the resident token egghead Professor Gruber goes a little strange, and despite his rigorous scientific training, suggests the legendary Ghost Galleon is from a another dimension outside of time and space. Clearly a huge fan of Eric von Daniken, Gruber seems to have read one too many supermarket paperbacks on the Bermuda Triangle, but, like I said, it's the Seventies we ALL read Von Daniken. The girl's are here, he reasons, but they're not, and they won't be coming back. Nothing is real the ship, the fog, you or I... A philosophical paradox, for sure, but the real mystery is this: how de Ossorio stretches such a flimsy premise to feature length truly defies all scientific explanation.
So of course they all go looking for the Galleon and the missing bikinis, or maybe Howard Tucker wants his speedboat back. Cue more fog, and the resurrected skeletons of the Knights Templar rising from their on-board coffins. We soon discover on a 16th Century boat, there really is nowhere to run. Or, you could swim, but wait for the water-logged ending to drown that theory. "Preposterous" is the key word here de Ossorio asks a great deal of his viewers to suspend belief when what amounts to little more than chicken bones drags a fully grown woman down a flight of stairs to her complete and utter dismemberment.
Horror Of The Zombies features the two most popular stars in Spanish horror. Austrian-born Maria Perschy, and American expatriate Jack Taylor who starred in a string of no-budget shockers for Jess Franco and decided he couldn't go home ever again. And yet Horror Of The Zombies was the least successful of the Blind Dead quartet. Perhaps the film strayed too far from the formula, although how could you go wrong: girls in bikinis on a boat with zombies? Despite its limited scope, micro-cast and tendency to be stage-bound, it's still an entertaining exercise in tension, atmospheric and illogic, and the empty eye sockets of the Knights Templar are always a welcome sight.
All I can say now is "Welcome aboard" for a cruise into another dimension
of TERROR!
with the 1974 Horror Of The Zombies.
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