LA NOCHE DEL TERROR CIEGO/Tombs of the Blind Dead(1971)

This film has a pretty good reputation but I fully expected to be disappointed by it. I wasn't. To be honest, it's pretty lightweight on content - it's more just an idea; vampire knights rise from the dead in an old ruined Abbey and kill people and that's about it but despite the main characters wandering endlessly around the ruins it works rather well and the boredom that, for me, usually accompanies 1970's films of this kind never set in. Certainly I was in the right mood for it having watched, earlier in the evening, a documentary about the Knight Templars (in the film the vampire knights are identified as Templars although it seems that in the original Spanish version this is not so, they are only refered to as Knights from the Orient). Probably, the reason the film works so well is that once they appear the Knights are pretty impressively eerie, mould covered rotting sons of bitches. The finale where the Knights massacre a train and then ride it back into the centre of the town is a terrific nightmare concept. Yes, TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD fully deserves its reputation as a classic, albeit a minor one. Rating ***

My thanks to Cerpts for making this available to view. I now look forward to the sequel (s)