Curse of The Blind Dead
Overall Recommendation
Recommendation?
Well, this is true to the originals. A boring, overly simplistic plot has shuffling black skeletal figures wandering through it and eventually the Templar Zombies kill everyone slower and more graphically the longer the movie goes on. It drones on and on, like the groaning of the Templars themselves, as they, well, grimace their way down hallways and covertly and impotently handle corpse intestines… which they never actually eat, since they’re all as clean in each scene as they were when they came out of the discount prosthetics shop. I’m saying this isn’t really a zombie movie, it’s a movie about crazy idiots and screaming pregnant women, with random cameos by plastic faced robes. There is nothing of value to be had here, except maybe the insane pirate Santa Claus preacher dude. That said, the dad actually could act. I think. But he just didn’t have shit to work with here. That sums it up nicely. Since this is a remake or “in the spirit of” movie that’s based on desiccated shits walking slowly after people who sit still for their ritualistic dismemberment, what nice do you really hope for me to say? That I thought that the constant groaning was interesting? That using your uncle’s metal band for the credits was a good idea? That you should NEVER “Make” your “set” out of hung-up bedsheets. The best thing about this movie was the novel approach that they took to showing the initial burning of the templars. From that point on, you could sit by yourself in the forest with your eyes squenched shut and knocking two sticks together while screaming for 90 minutes and you’d have achieved the intellectual equivalent to the plot to this film. I call that the director of this movie has watched the Saw series too many times. It’s time for an Intervention before they’re allowed anywhere near a camera in the future. In fact, scrub all this rubbish and just banish them to a Siberian corn farm. Much better use of their time than making this crap.
Plot Autopsy
Plot Autopsy
- The Templar knights look like good guys, but act like bad guys!
- The villagers act like good guys, but then act like bad guys!
- Either way, a baby getting stabbed tonight!
- Screaming and corpses in black hoods wandering around stabbing people
- Screaming and corpses in black hoods wandering around stabbing people
- Wowie, that ending… Something about a baby floating up in the sky. WTF?
Zombie Description
Zombie Description
The zombies are the corpses of some Templar Knights from way back in the dying of dysentery days who were in the middle of a baby-murdering ritual before the villagers burst in, dragged the Templars off to die, and then murdered the baby the way THEY thought it best ought be done. So, now, women get pregnant and the Templars come to collect the babies. And the apocalypse has happened, so people are acting weirder than normal. So much so that they’re at least one cult and possibly an off-shoot cult devoted to trying to give a baby to the Templars. Super not sure why though. The zombies, if we’re gonna call them that, look like Ents with dentures. Seriously. It looks like someone stuffed Groot in a robe and then a grill in his mouth. There is exactly one zombie biting scene, most of their killing occurs with swords. They look like inanimate plastic masks. ‘cause that’s probably what they were.
Where the money went
Where the money went
Gore. Wait. I don’t think I emphasized that enough. GORE!! This movie sacrifices all for the sake of one- nothing else is as important as getting those close-ups of the red stuff. Which, for some reason, is black in this movie. So… Yeah. You wanna see thumbs cut off? You wanna see disembowelments? You wanna see umbilical cords getting cut? Heads getting squished? (I’m not sure about that last one, I might just be caffeinated and running with the theme.) But that’s where ALL the money went. They didn’t even shell out for catering. All the money went into gory special effects. Which still kinda sucked.
Best Weapon
Best Weapon
There are really no weapons here except ignorance and stupidity, mostly on my part though, for thinking that this could be anything of value. I don’t want my two hours back, I’ll just settle for forgetting what I just sat though. I have to share a silly moment of the review though, from much earlier. I’d just finished ripping and was super high when the villagers broke in to stop and then restart the baby murder, I kept thinking that the guy with the pitch fork looked like… Is it Eric Idle? From Monty Python? Definitely reminded me of one of them, and I hope I got the name right. But… Through the stupidity of the templars and all that, I kept thinking “What if Monty Python had gotten a hold of this idea?”
Can I get a hand?
Can I get a hand?
No. You can’t get anything resembling reverence for the old zombie movies, mainly ‘cause this isn’t a movie about zombies in the actual eating brains sense. This is a movie about magically reanimated shriveled up old monk dudes who see through some strange sense and never ever walk into walls even though they’ve been blinded for centuries. What you can get though, is Saw level bullshit self-mutilation, as well as a whole bunch of other spine-pulling-out and similar crap that makes you go “ewww”. I didn’t need to see a constant parade of severed umbilical cords, nor did I sign up to watch a dude cut his own thumb off. Does this sound like a fucking zombie movie to you?
That was new!
That was new!
The filmmakers’ obsession with umbilical cords. What the fuck? We know it’s part of a birth, it’s not like you’re producing a scientifically accurate depiction of actual birth, so why the fuck do you need to keep showing the umbilical cords? Stupid! Aside from that? New? (Asian voice from UHF) “NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! STUPID! YOU’RE SO STUPID!” In all seriousness, I think that this movie was an intentionally true homage piece to the original series, or even hopefully potentially optimistically at least by some people considered to be a continuation of the old series.
Review Notes
Review Notes
Opening up with a bunch of Latin…
Torches…
A woman with white eyes tied to a cross or something…
Knights in chainmail
A really bad drawing…
Oh, she’s pregnant. Really pregnant.
And… there’s a bloody scar around her belly? I’m confused.
Gave birth…
I didn’t need to see the umbilical cord.
Is she blind or a zombie?
The incantation he just said made no sense. He got his subjects wrong.
But that’s not going to stop him from daggering the baby.
YAY! The pitchfork mob has entered!
And… Oh, shit. They just killed the woman. Was she bad?
Baby still alive though… So, what? Now *he’s* gonna kill the baby? This makes no fucking sense. The peasants just attacked the Templars, dragged them all away, and then continued on where the Templars left off.
Nice eclipse thingy!
Bad dialogue. I can write better.
“Rapists! Sodomists! Alchemists!” Wow. Really going all out on the science denial thing, eh, Church?
Wowie. That was quite the speech, and then that was quite the blinding.
Throw a baby on the barbie…
We got 5 burning Templars. Yup.
I’ve got the urge to write a homo-erotic love story about two medieval torturers who fall in love, yet cannot acknowledge the other’s existence outside of the anonymously protective hoods they wear.
Whoah. More going on in the screen than I thought.
This world war one stuff is cool!
Fuck Hitler.
Well, fuck humanity, too.
Some 9/11 footage…
A voice over talking about the possibility of nuclear war.
So… sounds like the world has ended?
A couple walking around in the woods.
No obvious weapons.
She’s pregnant?
Apples? Seriously? That’s not a bad omen to eat. Nah.
Quick shot of destroyed skyscrapers.
Father and daughter sharing some banter.
A full moon?
Futzing with the radio.
She found red berries in the woods?
Did she already eat them?
“No junk food, just earthly goods, I ate weird berries in the woods–Now I’m seeing colors, I’m getting higher…I think I’ll start a forest fire!”
What? “If anyone tries to join our party, they get this for desert!” (brandishes handgun)
Guy is kinda a dick.
HAAA!!! Looters are going through their shit and have his gun! What a fucking idiot.
Are they getting robbed by mutes?
Dude. Don’t hit the girl! Especially in the head with a rock! Especially when she’s pregnant!
Oh. Saviors!
And that was a lot of arrow blood. Nice.
Guy doesn’t seem too grateful for being saved.
Looks like a sober Courtney Love nursing her to health. Is there such a thing? Jesus, it wasn’t destined for greatness to begin with, but she flat out RUINED Straight To Hell.
Cain? That’s a name to be afraid of! He’s a bad man!
This feels very much like a good episode of The Walking Dead.
Cain looks like he has a sheen of dirt on him.
Oh, Cain isn’t the head looney in charge? HLIC?
They have a Guide? I have a Guide!
The dad really reminds me of a friend of mine with PTSD.
“The Maestro? Jesus, this world has gone crazy.” What is the difference between that and “The Jesus? Maestro, This world has gone crazy.” It’s just a different color of sherbet in the multiverse’s cone!
Oh, shit, they think he got his daughter pregnant. And that he’s nuts.
None of this is going to end well.
I think we’re meeting the Maestro.
And he looks like a psychotic Santa Claus.
A psychotic Pirate Santa Claus. They’re the worst kind!
“So many words expressed that I have exhausted them all. Allow me to replenish them.” My spirit animal cat is glitching. Yours may not be. But mine is.
We’re 30 minutes in and no zombies. Not a bad movie, but no zombies.
The woman with Maestro has no tongue! WTF?
This is turning into a very creepy dinner conversation.
Less theology, more zombies!
Oh… they’ve been drugged! But that’d put the baby at risk.
The Maestro is a dick to his woman.
Lotta severed hands and legs here. The Maestro is nuts.
This is all about squabbling over a pregnant woman being the future of humanity. Children of Men did it so much better!
The dad’s doing his best crazy Nicholas Cage.
“Pretty soon I’ll take you inside me.” One hell of a weird threat.
This woman… is a mother… these two are crazy.
This is all yucky and strange. Like if you crossed the Saw series with a discount Lithuanian chain of maternity hospitals.
Eclipse coming soon.
Got some crazy speaking in tongues.
Oh. It’s the pregnant woman about to give birth. Chained up like the first woman.
We got another birth going on.
While the Maestro babbles on.
Something in the shadows…
Oh. We have our zombie Templars!
They all look quite… plastic.
Meanwhile, in the dungeon, dad is trying to get a knife off a table.
Back to the pregnant demon lady giving birth.
Back to the dad contemplating some very serious surgery.
WHF? Well, I didn’t need to see graphic thumb removal.
Nor do I need to see this close to a demon-birth, normal or not.
Yeah, not watching this dad removes thumb scene. Gross. Not realistic, either. Sorta a fail, there.
Is the baby still born?
Something appears wrong here.
Dad got out of the handcuffs. It’s hard to tie a knot with one thumb.
Templar zombies look like…
Oh, that dude just shrugged off the dad’s stab.
Well, they look like grinning turds.
The Templar zombie just ripped the baby in half. Now that’s wisdom!
I think the Templar zombies are going after the cult members?
While the dad is stabbing some other guy.
Templar just ripped some guy’s spine out.
Dad is still stabbing.
Dad won.
The Templars are slaughtering their cult.
And the pregnant girl is still screaming and chained to the wall.
The mute lady… oh, she’s coming to help!
And, we’re going to scream at her. This girl and her father are idiots.
None of the Templar Knights seem to be able to move their mouths.
And the Maestro gets disemboweled
And the Templars feed on his guts.
All the Templar’s mouths and teeth are clean when they look up from “feeding”
How is it these BLIND Templars aren’t walking into walls and falling down the stairs and crap?
God, this is bad.
30 minutes left. Less than that. I can make this.
Why do they want to punish them for a stillborn child?
The Templars look like a race of aliens from the Star Wars universe.
If I were a Knight Templar, I’d growl all the time, too.
I think the mute lady is dead.
Or maybe not. Jesus, I mean, Maestro… such plot twists.
Oh. That was unexpected. Kinda gross. And then completely unnecessary.
The daughter has been turned into a… I… she has the mark now?
Did Dad just kill a Templar?
Are Templars flammable?
Yes! And… uh… if one of them burns, they all writhe around as if they were burning too? Yeah. That’s it.
Trying to break out of the… Convent? Factory?
Templars on your Six!
Dude throws his pregnant daughter on the ground.
I mean, it’s better than the meat-hook-in-stomach death that he gets.
Oh, wow! A zombie bit someone! Fucking FINALLY.
Horses? Where did they come from?
What does an undead horse eat?
Slow motion running, slow motion being chased by the zombie Templars. Stupid boring choral sounds, too.
So, the Templar zombie finished his inscription on the pregnant ladies tummy and then they all looked at the sun and frizzle-fried.
And dad is quite dead. Like, graphically. Parts are outside that should be inside. Of his head.
Packing up the duffel. Looking at the pistol. Pretty sure it’s actually a starter pistol for races and stuff. A cap gun.
Back to walking around in the woods.
And hiding in the woods.
And walking around in the woods.
They’re at some destination that looks like a decommissioned hydraulic dam.
More marauder types doing marauder things.
And the pregnant girl shot them all.
The guy on the ground is explaining a lot of stuff that I can’t follow and doesn’t really make sense. I think he’s saying that it was all a ruse or an accident or something like that. Like, the bad people before were the real good people and these people are failures?
“So this is the dawning of a new humanity.”
The mute found some children… and then a guy hit her with a pole.
Random strangling and throat cutting…
Feral little children creeping about…
The pregnant woman is… giving birth… and screaming
Back in the temple… somehow everyone is evil except the pregnant woman, who is about to give birth.
I do not want to keep seeing umbillicals getting cut.
So, is this kid, like, the antichrist or not?
The mute is carrying it… over to the Templars.
And the Templars are walking backwards into the fog, taking their baby with them.
Baby floating way up in the sky….
And the cheesiest of metal starts the credits rolling.
————End Transmission——————–
Introduction
Introduction
So much has happened yet all I can think about is this flavor in my mouth. It’s a sensation as well as a flavor, a pain and sore sting reminiscent of, well, a pizza burn.
I was about to say “It’s been forever since I burned myself on pizza!” although, I did eat pizza a couple nights ago, so maybe I did burn myself and I didn’t know. But my mouth feels raw, like someone scraped the inside with a dirty bit of sandpaper, and then painted the wound with an automotive chemical that hasn’t been legal since the 1960’s.
The only time my mouth feels right is when I’m cleaning it with mouth wash. But then the flavor is off, and I’m aware that maybe I’ve simply masked the wounded feeling with an overwhelming and complete chemical peel of the softest of my mouth’s mucus membranes.
I can’t think of mucus membranes without remembering that I have a tattoo in my mouth. I believe, writing that recent acknowledgement, I might have felt for the first time a fleck of shame at that particular life choice. Well, to be honest, it’s at least choices, since I actually had the tattoo done twice.
It’s the only of my tattoos to get a second treatment, so I suppose some alien autopsy of my corpse would see that forensically the way we do trepanning in ancient civilizations. But I got it on a first date that most decidedly did not turn into a second, and then I got it redone again in a hazy hung-over blur of scratching that went particularly sideways.
If you keep shaking a bottle, eventually everything will fall out of it. I feel like that bottle, in a way, trying to write. I feel like Bukowski without his typewriter, drunkenly scrawling declarations onto whatever bits of paper I can find.
I got ripped off on a mushroom deal. My mouth is hurting. I’m scared shitless because I’m going to start counselling. The first counsellor I went to, I built model airplanes. The second counselor I went to, I threw a chair at my dad. I’m curiously looking forward to how this is going to change things, or change me.
I don’t know why a written diagnosis is so important to me, but I feel that I will continue to experience an incompleteness of self until I… I’m never going to find people like me. I’d hate them if I did.
I don’t hate myself though; outside of an abstract “and it’s all *your* fault!” sort of self-loathing that comes about from far too many drunken nights alone. I entertain myself, or I pretend to.
You’d think that writing about yourself would be the easiest thing to do. Objectively, considering this purpose in The Guide, I’m trying to entertain, sort out some journaling, stack the papers back up, hoping someday that I feel like finishing the novel.
On a cosmic, multiverse scale, I’m trying to find the right combination of words to smash together to create the singular object in essence. Doesn’t that sound like something a comic-hero villain would say? What the fuck does it even mean?
What I meant was, if I’ve babbled until empty about all the hopes and dreams that whirl through this mayhemian cocktail of Gonzolian spite, and it somehow finds the appropriate funnel tunnel into the earth, could it maybe with the Rains of Africa give birth to a trade of these keystrokes for dollars?
In other words, the biggest yet least important goal of this Guide is to get me a creative job of some sort. When I got my MBA, they hammered into us that any idiot can be taught any process, what makes a business successful is getting the right temperament idiots in the right process decision-making points. What I mean is that I’m not trying to sell my output. I’d like to sell my ideas. And to go back to the bottle analogy, I feel empty of ideas.
A few days ago I was driving and I began to intentionally speed. It’s not a rare occurrence for me, most anytime I’m driving I’m speeding, and it’s not accidental, I like driving fast.
But with white in the beard comes an appreciation for increased reaction times, meaning, as I’ve aged I’ve slowed down a bit so’s I’m not in constant pucker on the edge of my seat trying to see 360 without dropping either the blunt, phone, or gear.
Now I like to cruise along behind some other chap, right at the speed limit, letting all the punks and bucks and targets and younger versions of myself streak past across the double yellow with nothing to show for their passing except poorly tuned Honda smoke and the afterimage of a middle finger.
I was driving the agriculture way back to town; looping through fields and following the river. I thought about being a crazy person, sort of the way I’ve been lying particularly still and imagining I was dead, watching and seeing what the world does as it passes me by.
I logically thought about how much I used to enjoy speeding on my motorcycle, racing around the highway bridges through the tallest buildings of the city, twining with the trains of pubic transit, banking on concrete engineered to Nascar perfection, except for the places where it wasn’t and you had to lift your ass off the seat as the bike skipped and jumped through the broken asphalt below, intimate with each of 405’s expansion joints as if they were my wife’s curves.
I once wheelied up an on-ramp of the north bridge, hit traffic with a panic-stop, bouncing the front-end like a low-rider that’s taking incremental bites closer and closer to the edge of the pavement, 3 stories up- as I fight to reign it in and slow her down before I literally Superman to death. I’ve locked both brakes and stood, sliding through the rain and seeing only the ring of red rectangle brake lights all around me as my hips struggled to stop the rear wheel from overtaking the front.
Fuck, I screwed up my rear brake once when I was changing sprockets and didn’t bother to fix it until I’d done a 95mph front-wheelie on 84 stopping short to avoid a Saab my buddy had made the cut around that I wouldn’t make. The point is I knew I was riding a motorcycle with one brake, and I was still racing it like all the consequences of an immortal playing pinball applied. None. (Have I always just understood the dark math of “whatever is bad enough to make me wreck is going to bad enough to take me out”?)
I kinda don’t think that’s it. I used to love to take risks though. There’s something about the chill of a New England October morning, where you’re the only one out yet the pavement is still too cold to really push it, but then as you feel things heating up and you don’t go down, you start leaning more, and keeping the roll on longer and harder, and you’re the fucking alpha predator in a world of sleeping zebras.
I chased this feeling down the little ag roads leading into town, pushing my wife’s commuter like I used to push my chipped Jetta, carving the white lines clean, passing with a suave panache across those same double solid yellow lines that a younger me would have felt below worth noticing. I may have hit 95? Probably closer to say 90, and I’m not even sure that’d be rounding down.
I’ve achieved terminal velocity of around 135 skydiving in a head-first straight-down bullet-like free-fall, I’ve hit 153 on my motorcycle. In my wife’s car, I did not go fast. But I went much faster than I usually go, simply to see if I still like it. I do.
Since I live on Main Street of a very small one intersection town, I can’t get another motorcycle. Doing so would be the intellectual equivalent of taking polaroids of my own ass, autographing them, and then personally addressing each to a member of my local police department.
What I mean by that, is that me owning a motorcycle now is the same thing as the existence of a “When will he go to jail?” clock. I can’t really remember where I was going with this. But I think the main point was that I’ve taken some chosen risks here and there lately, things that I used to enjoy but that I learned my way out of, and now I’m trying them again, to see if they’re really me, or… not me. Or maybe I’m seeing if I’m really them.
What I am not is $400 dollars richer. What I am is $400 poorer. Or rather, as I must point out, my wife is now $400 poorer for my mistake. Yup. Mushrooms off of Facebook Market is a bad idea. And honestly, that’s not even the part that upsets me. I mean, yeah, I’m irked that I got took.
But I knew I was taking a silly risk with the money. The optimism I’m showing… The economies of scale, as presented, made my initial decision to purchase a couple grams quickly spiral to a quarter pound.
Which has not shown up, nor do I expect it to show up, since the day after I did the deal through all the various apps, I got an email purporting to be from the shipping company, which informed me that they were holding my package until I paid an 80% refundable $250 “Insurance stamps” fee.
The seller then started blowing up my phone about how this had never happened before but that the company was calling him and saying that if I didn’t buy the insurance stamps, the package would get turned over to the head of customs.
The head of customs? Yeah. The 4oz package of mushrooms accidently interdicted is going to be personally opened by the head of customs. Ok. Whatever. I told the seller that he better send me the $250 back out of what I’d paid him to cover the insurance stamps cost, and that I’d refund the 80% when it came back.
He countered with A: I obviously don’t know how the mail system works, and B: he was a licensed grower so he had nothing to lose, but I should be afraid because customs was going to probably arrest me. Especially if, as I suggested to confuse him, I go pick the package up in person at the shipping terminal.
By now I’d looked around a little and he’s routing his emails through some EU server, and the shipping company- which had emailed me in all caps except for the assessed insurance stamps fee of “250usd”, had a partially built 404-riddled website with a phone number that went to some Hispanic ladies personal voice mail.
I told the dude that I was out of patience and that I neither expected any mushrooms in the mail nor feds at my door. And the next morning the fucker spoofs the Hispanic ladies’ voice mail number to pretend to be customer service from this logistics company. Apparently though, the package with my quarter pound of mushrooms was handed to the head of customs at 2:30 this afternoon. I hope they enjoy it.
Why are people involved in drugs such fucking flakes? Quoting of the Buffalo, I am also a high-powered mutant, am I not? He disappeared into the night with an Uzi on a cigarette boat loaded with cocaine. How will I disappear?
Should that be a last goal? I’ve established that if I’m ever diagnosed terminal, I’ll shoot a bunch of puppy-kickers in the knees, flee the country, sell the rights to a ghost writer and then squirrel-suit every day until gravity draws down on the river and wins.
But, should I work to disappear? I… I just realized that planning to disappear is only enjoyable if you believe there will be someone looking for you. Maybe not looking for you, but aware that you’ve gone to shadow. A you-shaped hole has to exist in the world where you used to be.
I will not have that, unless there are major changes. If my wife is to remain alive past me, I don’t want to send her searching. The last thing I owe her is any more effort on my behalf. My dog is asleep next to me on the couch.
So in short, I’ve been driving like a maniac, attempting to purchase exorbitant amounts of psychedelics, and feeling like a clock is winding out. I need to fill up the bottle. I need to carbonate it. I need to add sugar and caffeine. I need to add strength. I feel like I’m too old and tired to be who I think I am; yet I cannot think of anything else I could be. Is my time better spent trying to find a new me, or straining to return to past glory?
I guess that’s a good question to note for my new counselor. He’s got the same name as my Brother in Law. I think that’s a good sign. Tonight we’re going to watch- and yes, I’m hella confuseded here, The Curse of The Blind Dead.
Now, this sounds like… a zombie movie, right? Well, there’s a whole plethora of “Blind Dead” movies, but they’re old, like, late 70’s I think. And one has a midget suckling on his mother, if I recall. Yes, they’re fucking weird. But then there’s also one about a ship, and I think the entire movie is just them slowly walking onto and off of the ship a half dozen times.
But anyway “When the Satan worshiping Knights Templar are brutally murdered during a ritual, they swear to return to take their revenge. Centuries later, a man and his daughter fight to survive against the undead Knights and a sect commanded by a mad preacher.” Ok. Maybe the series I’m thinking of is also about the Knights Templar, so… The point I’m making is that I think this is either a remake or even better, homage to one of the worst series in Zombie movie history.
If they happened to stray into such waters by unfortunate happenstance, all the more enjoyable for watching of the dashing. Also, this is a dumb point, but I really feel like they missed it on their own, in that I think coming back from the grave to commit, like, horrors and stuff on people is mandatory if you’re really a Satanic monk, or knight, or page, or whatever.
What I’m saying is this movie is essentially selling itself as “A bunch of people do what they’re supposed to do.” which, plot-wise, is kinda week. They follow and participate in their religion’s beliefs and rituals. That’s like “The eternal plumber continues wandering the lands and finds more pipes to unclog.” And we’re adding in a mad preacher? Oh, this should be good!