Tombs of the Blind Dead

About a month ago, we had a meeting of Zombie Club. It had been a while, but, since Cris was in the process of moving, we didn't have access to any of his zombie movies. That left us scrounging around for a movie at the last minute. We settled on Tombs of the Blind Dead, which I had picked up a couple of years ago on the recommendation of a zombie-loving coworker.

The story centered around a man, a woman, and the female friend that the woman had "experimented with" from many years ago. By "experimented with", I mean, "Sat around and lightly touched each others arms," (according to the flashbacks, anyway). The woman gets upset when her boyfriend starts hitting on her girlfriend in a train, so she jumps out and runs to a deserted castle to sleep for the night.

This castle is the resting place of the Satanic wing of the Knights Templar. These were the knights who thought it would be fun to strip women naked and sacrifice them to Satan. They were killed somehow, but still reside in the castle area. Apparently they come out at night to hunt for flesh. Or something of that sort.
The knights were less zombies and more skeletons. They had no eyes, which seems like a disadvantage, until you realize that they can hear a human's heartbeat. There's no way to stop that, and so they killed the woman that ran into the castle (after a very long and slow chase). There was a chase scene with the knights riding on horses...but the horses moved in slow motion. The maker of this movie didn't bother trying to make the horses look slow...he just made the film go in slow motion. This is kind of forgivable (it was made in the 70s on a small budget, after all), but it made no sense when the woman found a non-zombie horse and began to ride away from the knights, only to find that her horse also moved in slow motion. What?

(At this point most of these details are a bit fuzzy, and for that I [kind of] apologize. The movie was so dull [there was a span of 20 minutes with no dialogue] that, at the halfway point, we fast-forwarded the to the end [x4 speed]. I don't think we missed too much.)

Here is what I remember from the last half of the movie.

The woman who ran into the castle was bitten by the knights, and became a zombie. She walked around like Frankenstein's monster for a while, then got set on fire. Tragic, really.

For a zombie, she didn't look half bad.

The man and woman who were still on the train try to find her. They find some sleezy looking guy from town to find him, and he brings along his whore. The woman from the train and the sleezy guy go into the castle together, while the man from the train and the whore go together. While sitting in the graveyard (at night...good idea, kids), the woman tells Captain Sleeze that she doesn't really like men because of an incident from her childhood. He responds to this statement by raping her on a tomb. Pure class, this guy.

If I remember correctly, the woman makes it out of the castle without being eaten, and makes it on to a train. Blah blah blah. I won't tell you how it ends, but the woman makes this face:

Yay!

The end.

In case you couldn't tell, this movie was terrible. It wasn't even funny bad (although we did laugh at a couple parts). Please don't watch this movie. I beg of you.

After this debacle, we decided to watch Diary of the Dead directly afterwards. I won't do a big review right now, but it was not universally loved. I liked it, but not everyone else agreed with me. Perhaps I'll do a review of that one within the next couple of weeks.

We have not had the best track record lately of watching good movies. We've watched a number of movies that we didn't know too much about, and it has come back to bite us. However, our luck may be changing.


Scott bought this book for me for my birthday. I've gone through it, and it seems to agree with our thoughts on the movies that we have watched. It likes the movies that we have liked and hates the movies that we have hated. For the next Zombie Club meeting, we will consult with this fabulous book before deciding on a movie. In doing this, we hope to be able to find some good zombie movies.