In early 70’s horror there was a great alternative to Hammer’s endless parade of fainting aristo-ladies, somewhat camp Transylvanian counts and Peter Cushing’s permanently worried expression. Over in Spain, director Amando De Ossorio had begun a run of films that were and still are totally unique to the genre. Concerning themselves with The Knights Templar—or rather a slightly different Knights Templar. If you are familiar with all the religious hokum regarding their work as ‘The Militia of Christ’, then you’ll agree that Amando has a much different spin on it. These knights, on coming back from the East, have forgotten all about the ‘The Holy Grail’ and that guy in the sandals with the big mouth, and set about getting seriously friendly with the other guy. You know, the really cool one.

Yes, Amando’s makeover was radical indeed. Instead of standing around with both hands on their broadswords ready to knock fuck out of any enemies of Christ, they did a lot of satanic interior decorating in their once holy stronghold in Portugal and began combing the countryside for buxom wenches to torture and kill in the name of He Who Spoils Things For Christians. As in all good horror, they enjoyed plenty of blood drinking and chewing on hearts and pleased the boss so much they were rewarded with immortality. The Portuguese peasants were dismayed at best and stormed their fortress with the requisite flaming torches and bad attitudes.

The Templars, presumably too full of virginal viscera to fight back took a beating from these hick vigilantes and were rounded up to be put to death. When informed by the head Templar that their efforts were futile in the light of all that immortality business, the peasants hit on a seemingly brilliant method of curbing future undead attacks. By burning out the eyes of every poor Satanist, they reckoned they would ensure that whatever dark place these guys went to, they would not be able to find their way back. Dumbasses.

Amid pain-wracked oaths of revenge, the great unwashed of rural Portugal finished the job by fire and went home to enjoy a few pints and whatever fair maidens were left. Peasants will be peasants and almost always end up in bad shape for pulling moves against Satan. Personally speaking, I thought it a little high-handed of them to get involved with things they knew nothing about, and if you can’t hand over the odd virgin to your neighbour for the sake of harmony then you really only have yourself to blame.

Which brings us to “Tombs Of The Blind Dead”, the first outing in this great series.

A young couple and their pretty friend make a poolside decision to go exploring by train in the sticks. Now, the acting is as you would expect for the period, but who gives a fuck when you have a fair idea what is coming. A little way down the tracks and fresh from a frankly bizarre and pointless lesbian scene (ahem) the couple’s friends Nancy or Jane or somebody (who cares?) jumps off and goes to the creepiest monastery she can spot. She sets up camp and we watch the tombs. After a spot of jazz radio-station action she beds down and our heroes show up.

Yes, these guys are dead but Romero zombies they ain’t. Dressed in decaying Templar gear and moving their heads from side to side (remember the eyes thing) they track her down. The chase sequences that follow are an eerie repeating motif for all four films and consist of mist shrouded hills and forgotten roads with the Templars on dead horses hunting down their latest lucky lady in kick-ass slow motion.

Extra kudos must go to De Ossorio for the actual faces. There is no lousy putty and cottage cheese George A. stuff here. The Templars’ faces are brilliantly rendered skeleton masks, aged perfectly in greys and browns—with gaping eye sockets, patches of moss and wisps of beard all glimpsed under rotting hoods. When whatshername doesn’t show up for tea and cake the next day, an investigation begins and The Blind Dead shuffle, slaughter and horseback silently through a variety of settings until the end.

“The Return of The Evil Dead” (what’s with the Evil?, where’s the Blind?) is the second installment and concerns the village of the vigilantes in modernish times, preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of their victory over the Templars with a nice fiesta. Big fucking mistake. Aided by an outcast hunchback (who else?) and fresh virgin’s blood, the creepy, eyeless horde descends from the nearby ruins and stages the best party gate-crash ever—involving church lock-ins and all the troubling of the helpless a person could wish for. Moving swiftly on to “The Ghost Galleon”, I have to say that maybe Amando was struggling a little for inspiration here, although if, like me, at this stage in the films you have a serious Templar hard-on and a nice bag of green, it’s a worthy link to “The Night of The Seagulls” which is without doubt the best in the four.

Set in a primitive fishing village, a young doctor and his wife move in to set up a new practice among the various nasty-faced locals and are quickly made to feel very unwelcome. The old doctor can’t wait to get out and implores them to do likewise but it’s in our interest they stay. We have an unintentionally funny local idiot who gets roughed up by the locals and is befriended by the doc and his missus and a servant girl who looks a little scared.

As the couple settle in, weird chanting and singing disturbs them in the night and while they lay awake there is an endless cacophony of seagulls who should not be flying or crying this late. Nosey bastards that they are, they simply have to go down and have a look from the cliff top to the beach. Here, black-robed villagers move in single file along the shoreline toward a set of storm tossed rocks. It’s all quite unsettling but is laughed off by the good doctor as harmless pagan ritual. The man is a bit of a dick to be fair.

What neither of them see before they go home assured is that the villagers have a virgin with them and YES, those good old musty, creaking sons of Belial are involved again—their flapping vestments and dead horses coming down the beach in ultra slow motion from the ruined castle on the hill. The premise is slightly different here and it’s to some sort of sea daemon that the understandably put-out girl is offered. It was around here that De Ossorio’s debt to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” becomes very clear.

Over the days and with help from the local idiot the couple learn that those pesky Templars return for seven nights every seven years to sacrifice seven virgins and that their housekeeper is next. Housekeepers take note, stick with your job baking scones for Father Sullivan or Cleary and never go to coastal Portugal as a change of scene. Of course, the satanic dead must be stopped and all involved have a really terrible couple of days trying. As an antidote to the moaning supermarket-attacking zombie of subsequent films in the genre there is a haunting, resonant quality to The Knights Templar and a real directorial mastery within these low-budget underground classics. A later reliance on gore and a lack of atmosphere have left many an old school horror fan feeling short-changed from entries in the undead pantheon.

If you have an affinity for the crawling, hinted-at horrors of the aforementioned Lovecraft, some of the more eerie Hammer films and also to a certain extent the M.R. James Ghost Stories made by the BBC in the 70’s, these films are for you. If it’s all about the hot-panted hotty smashing skulls then they are not really.

I only had three major quibbles regarding these films:

Why were the subtitles jumping from the bottom of the screen to the top in two of them?

Why, if the Templars had their eyes burned out then the rest of them burned too, were they not invisible?

Why was it that not ONE of those girls looked like a virgin?

The boxset in question reviewed is the 2005 Anchor Bay five disk edition