Also known as. The Night of the Blind Terror and.. Revenge from Planet Ape??? This was apparently trying to cash in on the Planet of the Apes success and it sent me down a research hole trying to find if other movies did that and I couldn't find it and gave up.
The first of this foursome I've always wanted to see prompted a thought in my head. Could be that one of the reasons these movies remain is that they established a new "type" when it came to zombies. These are specifically undead templars, who ride horses and wear their cloaks and use swords. They are specifically blind too, and this puts them in a strange realm between mummy and the skeleton warriors from some of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad type movies.
Now, I loved Harryhausen as a kid and I love it now, even if these movies are not claymation, the movement and the style is probably directly in homage to those skeletons, and its like someone saw those movies and saw those skeletons and said "lets make a movie just based on these guys." Lets!
A long preamble has a budding lesbian relationship end when one of the women jumps off a train, escapes to a church way out in the middle of nowhere, and gets killed by the templars who raise from the grave. The group of friends she had go searching for her and get stalked by the templars themselves.
Again, the atmosphere of this thing is incredible. This has long scenes of slowly moving skeletal creatures with chanting songs and strange slowed down eeriness and its used often, but does not get old because FUCK does it work! It kicks ass, every moment you're watching that you're just in and there's no where else you'd rather be, nothing else you'd rather be watching.
Its a good intro to a series which I know gets better, so I'll give this one a 4.
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