NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (1976)

In the final installment of the BLIND DEAD series, the action returns to dry land, meaning (YES!) more zombies on horses.

NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is a rehash of everything that's gone before but in doing so it returns the film to its roots and serves up plenty of what made it so enjoyable to begin with.

The plot, such as it is this time, concerns a doctor and his wife who move to a small seaside village where it just so happens that every seven years they sacrifice seven virgins in order to appease those nasty knights. And wouldn't you know it, just as sure as I always manage to arrive at the station in the morning just as my train is departing, so these poor folks have arrived just as the latest round of murders is hitting its stride.

Naturally, being a fine pair of horror cliches, er, sorry, I mean a fine pair of upstanding citizens, the couple do their best to figure out what's going on and save the next poor sacrificial girl. This of course upsets the locals, meaning we now have angry locals and horse-riding zombies after them. Some mornings you just wish you'd never got out of bed.

Although it a mish-mash of previously used plot elements (including another disfigured outcast picked on by the locals) and the ending is a bit contrived, it delivers everything you expect and provides a far more fitting conclusion to the series than GHOST GALLEON would have done. It still can't quite match the first two films, but at least it has slow-motion horse-riding zombies, and there's nothing cooler than that in the history of cinema. Well, except maybe that scene in ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS where a semi-naked woman watches in terror while a zombie wrestles a shark. They don't make them like that anymore. With good reason, the cynics might say.

That concludes my look at these wonderful films. If you've made it all the way through this series of blog entries then you probably either already know these films or else you're just one of my colleagues from work who only reads this crap to humour me.

If however you're a casual horror fan who was thinking about investigating these films then I urge you to do so, as they can be picked up pretty cheaply (the set is currently retailing for £23 at play.com as I type this).

A word of warning for the purists though - aside from the UK set being missing a couple of features that are in the US box set, the BBFC demanded several seconds of cuts to the first film for its UK release, the objection being to one particular scene in which one of the nastier characters forces himself on a woman. You can argue about whether the BBFC are right to make these cuts (they're not) but then again you can also argue about whether such a scene was required in the first place (equally doubtful). But at the end of the day it's only a few seconds and it's still a bargain buy for a bunch of horse-riding zombies.

Oh yeah, did I mention the horse-riding zombies at all?