tombs of the blind dead

Sometimes my initial reaction to a movie we see in Keith's class can be a bad predictor of how I'll feel about it a few days, weeks or months later. For example, I laughed off I Drink Your Blood as silly drive-in faire, but it stayed in my mind, and I couldn't help but think about it. And now it remains as one of my favorites from the class.

So now I'm trying to figure out what it means that, a couple days after seeing Tombs of the Blind Dead, I haven;t really thought about it much.

I liked TotBD when we saw it. I think I gave it an 8. It was an original monster story, which gives it points. And the scenes of the blind dead, when they were on horseback, were really well done. They made the monsters seem ethereal and haunting. I also loved the ambiguous ending. Joe didn't like the ending for the prcisely the same reasons that I liked it. But I suppose  that's why Baskin Robbins has 31 flavors. The scenes with the monsters were suspenseful, without relying on jump scares -- I don't like jump scares. So there was a lot to like.

But there was also stuff to criticize. There were some sequences (between the action) that went on way too long. The whole scene when Virginia finds the old abbey is a good example. "Hello?" "Is there anyone here?" "Hello?" I kept wanting to scream at the screen "THERE'S NO ONE THERE YOU FRICKIN' MORON! GET A GODDAMN CLUE!"  Of course, Joe thought that extended scene was good in that it built tension. Maybe BR needs 32 flavors.

We, the class, were also trying to figure out the point behind the lesbian scene near the beginning -- though we could theorize that it tied into the rape scene late in the movie. But it really wasn't necessary. Keith had pointed out that de Ossorio seemed to work a lesbian scene and a rape scene into each of his movies. So maybe it's just that he has issues with women. That would also explain the torture scene where a woman (a virgin, natch!) gets tortured to death by the Templar Knights. But that's between him and his shrink. I guess.

As an added bonus, Keith told us about an attempt to use this film to capitalize on the Planet of the Apes movies. At some point, someone (I don't recall who) created a new edit of this. All the Templar Knight stuff was removed, some exposition was added to the beginning telling of how, centuries ago, humans and apes battled for supremacy. Humans won, but now the apes are coming back from the grave to take revenge. It was released with those changes and a new name: Revenge of Planet Ape. Catchy, no?

I'm still not sure where I'll land on this. But I do think it would have made a great episode of MST3K.

EDIT: I forgot to mention one weird thing about TotBD. MOst of the movie was dubbed into English. But there were a few sequences that weren't dubbed. In those, the audio was in Spanish, and there were English subtitles. My understanding is that those scenes were being left out of the American version, so there was no need to dub into English. Then, some years later when there was a new American version they wanted to add those scenes back in. It did make for an odd effect. Oh, and for some reason there were a couple sequences that were dubbed into English and had English subtitles. And the dubbing didn't match the subtitles. Now that I think of it, that would make for an interesting cinematic experiment. Make a movie. In English, that's fine. Then come up with completely different dialogue that tells a different story but makes sense with the images on the screen. Then add that dialogue as subtitles.