The 1970s File Finale: The one that's the other worst zombie movie

 

Title: Horror of the Zombies aka The Ghost Galleon

What Year?: 1974

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

As I write this, I’m continuing a long, slow buildup to a new ebook. In the process, I’ve continued to go through material I hadn’t come up with a use for before. That brought me to yet another oddity I had already considered for the present feature, which happened to fit better still with the present 1970s lineup. As I have previously recounted here and elsewhere, the 1970s was a golden age of the zombie movie. Inevitably, some were good and some were bad, with many of the best and worse coming before the genre had quite emerged as its own thing. Here is a definitive case and point, an entry that might not even be counted as a zombie movie if certain parties hadn’t labeled it as such. Here is The Ghost Galleon, aka Horror of the Zombies, and on top of everything else, it’s the first appearance on this blog for the Blind Dead, a horror franchise that makes the worst excesses of the slasher boom (see Sleepaway Camp) look remotely sane.

Our story begins with two lovely models lost at sea who wouldn’t be qualified to operate a bumper boat. Per their desperate pleas, they have wandered into a warm, foggy sea that an all-purpose scientist insists shouldn’t exist at their latitude, where the only other ship in sight is a spooky derelict sailing ship they see absolutely no problem climbing aboard. Their fate must be decided by a crew of human traffickers and a woman who was more than friends with one of the damsels at sea. A ragtag expedition makes their way to their position, where they find only the ghost ship which they see no downside to boarding, even after the scientist asserts that they are really in another dimension.  The other shoe drops when they realize the ship belongs to the Templars, who in this loose retelling are Satan-worshippers summarily blinded and burned at the stake for human sacrifice and other unpleasantness. Now, they haunt the land and sea as skeletal undead who hunt their prey without sight, and this time, the idiots are on their turf!

The Horror of the Zombies was an American title of the Spanish film  El Buque Maldito (most literally “The Damned Vessel”) by the late Amando De Ossorio. The film was the second sequel to De Ossorio’s 1971 film Tombs of the Blind Dead, following The Return of the Evil Dead (the good/ tolerable one) in 1973. The film continued the series’ pattern of not directly referencing earlier entries, and sometimes contradicting them on various points concerning the backstory, powers and weaknesses of the Templar entities. The film starred Maria Perschy and Barbara Rey as the highest-billed damsels, with the American exploitation veteran Jack Taylor as the least expendable male. Perschy made the film after reportedly suffering burns on set in 1971. The film has been released both under its listed title and as The Ghost Galleon. The former title has appeared on copies of poor quality in public-domain combo packs. De Ossorio completed a fourth and final Blind Dead film Night of the Seagulls in 1975, and reportedly continued to feature the Templars in paintings. He died in 2001 at age 82. Perschy died of cancer in 2004.

For my experiences, what really led to this review was my own debate over the actual “worst” zombie movie. As I have regularly commented, the genre is distinctive for a wealth of movies that are “bad” by any technical or professional measure yet still “work” on their own and the genre’s terms. For the purposes of this feature, the “winner” hands down was Deadgirl, specifically because of issues that went far beyond objective quality, with The House By The Cemetery and perhaps Frankenstein’s Army as dishonorable mentions. That still left plenty more to consider on more objective grounds, and I narrowed it down to about three. Two that I will name-drop were The Alien Dead and The Chilling, both semi-amateur films from the 1980s, which I have written up in other formats. The present film was the one that stood out, again because it unquestionably reaches a minimum standard of competence. Why it went wrong was something I am still trying to comprehend and express.

Moving forward, there’s so much that can be said about the franchise that it’s easy to get bogged down. The Templars are quite possibly the strangest revenants on record, and from me, that is really saying something. The obvious problem is that it is virtually impossible to try to explain or describe them in cold blood without making them sound ludicrously unthreatening. Visually, they are a good example of the “skeleton” variant of the zombie/ revenant concept, and if things ended there, they would be unobjectionable. Things get weird with their posited handicaps. They really are supposed to be blind, a premise that is rarely if ever at odds with their portrayed behavior. On top of that, they are slower than usual, often advancing with what amounts to a back-and-forth wobble. On the other hand, they are clearly intelligent and very good at surrounding or cutting off their prey, especially in confined artificial spaces. At their best moments here and elsewhere, there is a sense of cat-and-mouse sadism in their slow and steady approach, often in far greater numbers than needed. Their real advantage is that the franchise features the dumbest, most amoral and outright irritating protagonists to be encountered in the genre, who in this case are too interchangeably unlikeable and dull for the viewer to get invested even in seeing them picked off.

That brings us to what is supposed to set this film apart from its predecessors, the ghost ship. From outside, shrouded in the equally mysterious fog, it would surely be credibly eerie on a good print, calling to mind the superb gothic horror of William Hope Hodgson. A bad copy, however, just seems to amplify what is cheap and wonky while obscuring what might have been effective. It’s boosted somewhat by the talk of interdimensional collisions from the simultaneously omnicompetent and utterly useless scientist, which culminates in the unsettling disappearance of the boat. The interior spaces provide some good moments, yet it gradually become frustrating. The dark, cramped chambers suit the Templars’ tactics better than usual, but after the first two or three kills, there’s no further tension nor anything to build up to. Obviously, these people have to get off the ship or they’re going to die, and nobody familiar with this franchise is going to bet against the Templars. The one source of residual interest is the strange horned skull that seems to serve as both an idol and nerve center. It’s a fascinating design that seems truly and fully pagan rather than Christianized shorthand for the Satanic, and again, it would surely be even more unsettling on a copy of quality. It still doesn’t really do anything except blaze in ineffectual rage when defeated. All in all, it’s just too little, mostly too late.

That already leaves me at the “one scene”. I’m going with the one that was baffling enough for me to go back and try to figure it out. As sometimes happens, it really turned out to be an extended sequence. A little ways in, one of the original damsels has survived long enough to explore the vessel. In the process, we get a good feel for the ship and its pervading atmosphere. At the point that I really wanted another look at, she actually settles down to sleep in the ship, listening to what looks for all the world like a Walkman. This is a distracting rabbit trail in itself, because while more or less portable cassette players would have existed by the 1960s, the Walkman didn’t make it a major “thing” until the early 1980s. The simplest explanation is that this is a vintage portable radio. (Never mind how it’s getting a signal…) Eventually, she wakes up and turns it off, by which time it’s very clear the Templars are active and aware of her presence. What makes this very brief and random moment strange even for this franchise is that this isn’t the first character in the series to survive quite inexplicably, at least for a while. Perhaps those without fear or guile have a certain protection against the Templars, perhaps this is another artifact of their apparent humor, or perhaps they haven’t been interested enough to respond until now. Alas, in this case, they are already closing in, confirming that even those who escape their attention usually don’t do so for long.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating. In honesty, this was one time I chose the rating ahead of a fresh viewing. I will freely admit that I came close to changing my mind. What held my resolve is just how much the whole series wastes its own potential. De Ossorio started with a singularly unnerving variation of the undead, and added the creative freedom of a franchise that effectively reboots itself with every movie. What he actually delivered was one decent-to-good movie and three more that range between mediocre, disappointing and completely intolerable. The present film may not even be the worst of the lot (I’m now inclined to give that distinction to Night of the Seagulls), but it is by all means an egregious showcase of everything wrong with the series. With that, I for one am happy to leave it in the rear view mirror.