Sleazewax

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)
directed by Amando de Ossorio
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Syl and I joke that when Richard Linklater says, "Slacker was inspired by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio" (that is, multiple perspectives on the same place), he really means, "Slacker was inspired by Meatballs" (the Winesburg, Ohio of summer camps in the country). Time and again, self-conscious artists revert to the most critically-acclaimed bibliography they can think of in order to assert the importance of their own creative output.

When Peter Jackson adapted The Lord of the Rings, everyone heard the words "John Ford" every time a horse trotted across the frame (if I wasn't so lazy, I might even make dig up a quote). My bet is that Jackson, a big fan of bad horror films, got most of his equestrian inspiration from the zombie Templars of Tombs of the Blind Dead. When the Templars go riding, they ride in slow-motion, and every rapey Eurotrash cliche falls away for the sheer elegance of the knights' unholy hunt.

Otherwise, dialogue is a series of overstated excuses for dramatic lighting, and the rest of the production is a good example of the too-typical "she asked for it" narrative machismo that seemed to sweep a decade's worth of Europe's most marginal horror directors straight into Blue Underground's digital dustbin. When there's no more room in hell, there's always DVD.