Of the many characters and creatures in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of Lord of the Rings, my favorite may be the Nazgul, the nine former human kings who have been transformed by Sauron into wraiths. When we first see them, they are riding what appear to be undead horses. They are entirely badass, and, in the third film, we see they have an awesome castle that emanates a beautiful dark green glow. I like to ponder what the nine might have done in all that time the one ring wasn’t in play and commanding their attention. My vote is Scrabble tournaments.
Instead, they may have been occupying graves at a former priory in Spain, popping up from time to time to kill horny young people. At least, what rises out of the ground in Amando de Ossorio’s 1972 horror film Tombs of the Blind Dead sure look like Nazgul to me. They even ride zombie horses, though those sure looked to me like very healthy specimens. I also was left wondering where on earth the horses stay when they’re not needed.
The audience and our heroes (Lone Fleming and César Burner) will eventually learn from a professor (Francisco Sanz) these are actually Knights Templar who had a priory at what is now ruins. Not sure why these soldiers of the crusades were engaging in ritual Satanic sacrifices, but that’s what we see in a flashback to that era, which feels like it is going to become a missing scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail at any moment.
Their ritual when they were fully alive was very weird, as they secure a woman in the middle of a large room, ride around her on their horses and flail at her with their swords. When enough wounds are open, they jump off their steeds and suck the blood from her wounds. In their present, undead incarnation, they just get straight to the blood-sucking. Their victims also become undead bloodsuckers, so what we have here is a bizarre combination of zombie and vampire of the likes I’m not sure I’ve encountered before.
As for the titular visual impairment of these monsters, I also found that a tad confusing. Per the professor’s lesson, history documented crows eating the eyes from the corpses of the knights after the pope had them executed by hanging. Well, hey, that’s what crows do. Also, it’s my understanding the eyes, being the softest tissue in the body, are the first thing to go in the decomposition process. So, wouldn’t all undead persons be the “blind dead”?
Perhaps the cleverest thing this picture does is make the zombie knights find their victims through sound and feel only. Never mind how illogical it also would be to assume the inner working of the ear would still be there after enough time has passed for them to become fully skeletonized. Still, if you’re going to roll with a zombie movie, you’re going to have to turn part of your brain off and stop scrutinizing everything. Besides, if you don’t do that, you’ll miss out on a pretty great scene of suspense near the end where somebody realizes their own heartbeat has betrayed their location. This is communicated to us through a great shot that starts wide and then pushes in on that person’s chest with each beat we hear.
I want to circle back to Fleming and Burner, our alleged heroes. He’s a total asshat, but she’s not completely without blame, either. When we first see them, he’s the boyfriend of María Elena Arpón. She sees Fleming, a friend from school with which we see about to get down to some ”experimenting” in a brief flashback. Burner is instantly drooling over Fleming, who invites her to join them on a weekend mini-vacation they’re about to take. Fleming is very receptive to his advances, until she is damn near straddling him once all three are on the train. Quite rightly, Arpón is pissed about this. Why she didn’t leave them at the train station is beyond me. Of course, then there wouldn’t be a movie.
Instead, she decides to leap from the train in transit, apparently thinking the desolate area with spooky-ass old ruins in the distance would be a good place to bail. Admittedly, this old steam-engine train seems to move about as slowly as those trains they have as attractions at zoos and similar places. One thing I found funny is how the train engineer seems to be a massive jerk, ignoring the emergency stop alarm sounded by Fleming. Later, he will ignore a person laying in a field who appears to be dead or injured. It will turn out he has good reason to not stop the engine. That said, it moves so slowly I’m not sure what couldn’t overtake it if it wanted to.
I was hoping Arpón would go on to be the world’s first high-fashion hobo. Instead, she walks to the ruins and starts pounding on exterior doors of the various structures, yelling out for anybody who might live there. Now, these are genuinely ancient structures, the vast majority of which are roofless. If somebody was inhabiting such an area, would you want to draw their attention? This doesn’t stop her from breaking into one of the still-roofed parts and starting a massive fire in the fireplace. The last time I tried to start a fire, I was embarrassed by how inept I was, so I’m hoping I can ring her up and see if she would help the next time I try to do that.
Come nighttime, the undead crawl out of their tombs and are soon pursuing Arpón. Mind you, they move very slowly; however, like the zombies from the original Night of the Living Dead, they compensate for this in their numbers. Arpón almost gets away, actually riding off on one of their zombie steeds. Just imagine a scene from any of the LOTR films if any character had managed to carjack (horsejack?) a Nazgul’s mount. That would have been sooo awesome.
Instead, she’s soon undead herself, and trying to attack Fleming’s assistant (Veronica Llimera) at the mannequin factory she owns. Arpón stands stock-still at the end of a long row of mannequins, all of which we see in a lengthy tracking shot. It makes for a great moment of suspense, and is a good jump scare if you’re not paying adequate attention.
Curiously, Arpón’s corpse is wrapped in a small amount of bandage, as if somebody started to mummify her before losing interest. The naughty bits are all that are concealed, and this is yet another surprising bit of chastity in the type of film that would normally be boobs-a-go-go. There is also a surprising restraint on the gore up until the scene with the knights shown torturing a woman back in medieval times. Then we see her breasts openly displayed until replaced by fake ones we see being sliced open and bleeding. Honestly, the movie was more powerful when it exercised more restraint.
Any concerns for taste and tact and tossed aside in the film’s absolute worst scene, where José Thelman rapes Fleming amongst the graves of the templars. There is no reason for this development. Even worse, it scans like this is to “cure” her of the bisexual or lesbian leanings we saw in an earlier flashback.
Thelman, a notorious smuggler, is only there because Burner thought he and Fleming would need a guide who knows the area. The reason for this eludes me, as Burner and Fleming had already been to the ruins once before. Also along on this trip is María Silva, as Thelman’s girlfriend. While Fleming is being raped, Burner is making smoochy faces with Silva, which only reinforces how lousy of a human being I thought he was since the first time we saw him.
Even considering the film’s downsides, there’s no denying the power of the long climactic sequence, which is very well-composed. There are elements of it which were genuinely unnerving, and it may be what puts the movie somewhat hesitantly in the “win” column for me. Overall, the film has good photography and shot composition, which surprised me, as Ossorio would go on to make The Loreley’s Grasp and Night of the Sorcerers, two very bad films, the latter of which is deeply awful.
Tombs of the Blind Dead is clearly the work of somebody operating on a shoestring who suddenly had access to some key locations and realized they should shape a horror film around these. The result is a fairly weak story, but with some very good scenes, drafted by somebody who I’m guessing lucked into access to a mannequin factory, a steam train operation and some naturally creepy old ruins, and decided to incorporate those into a script.
Dir: Armando de Ossorio
Starring Lone Fleming, César Burner
Watched on Shudder