Director: Amando de Ossorio
Writers: Amando de Ossorio
Stars: Maria Persc
hy, Jack Taylor, Bárbara Rey
1 Hour, 30 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2Qmz6FX
These films are getting very formulaic.
Kathy’s roommate Noemi goes to see Kathy’s boss Lillian, because she hasn’t heard from her in days. Lillian says she’s on special assignment and tells Noemi to be at the pier tomorrow morning to find out what the story is.
She meets Howard Tucker, a sporting goods magnate, and he explains that Kathy and Lorena are on a boat in the middle of the ocean. It’s part of a publicity stunt; they’re out there alone and helpless.
We see them, and it’s a tiny little boat surrounded by fog. Suddenly, they see a huge galleon heading toward them. The galleon and the tiny motorboat collide. Lorena boards the ship, but no one else is on board.
Tucker’s goon Sergio takes Noemi prisoner, and she tries to escape, so we get the rape scene that now seems obligatory for the series. Meanwhile, Tucker goes to see the obligatory professor, who wants to know all about the galleon. He says the girls won’t return; the galleon has been seen before, but no one has ever seen it and survived.
Something we don’t see “got” Lorena during the night, and in the morning, Kathy’s little boat is filling with water, so she goes aboard, looking for Lorena.
Tucker, Noemi, Lillian, the professor, and Sergio travel to the galleon on a yacht.
On the galleon, the crates in the hold open and guess what’s inside? The blind dead Templars! Kathy has fallen asleep, and when she wakes up, she hears them. She finds them soon enough, and there’s nowhere to run. They catch her and drop her in a hole.
The yacht comes up beside the galleon, and they board it. The professor thinks they’ve entered another dimension entirely. Sergio starts back-talking to Howard almost immediately. Noemi smells a scarf she finds and we get the obligatory lesbian flashback involving her and Kathy.
There are several long scenes of Noemi exploring the deserted ship alone. It’s a galleon; the whole group could have explored it together as a group in a few minutes. She doesn’t find Kathy, but she does find the dead. It’s the slowest, most pathetic, most agonizingly drawn-out chase scene ever, as she crawls away from them desperately even though nothing is wrong with her legs.
The professor notices that they’ve all been asleep for fourteen hours. The four of them split up and search the ship. They find the treasure that was part of the cargo. The dead get up and attack immediately.
The professor tries to do an exorcism and they all retreat and go back where they came from… until tomorrow night. They decide to throw the boxes with the dead overboard before they wake up again, but they only have half an hour to do it. Before long, the sea floor is littered with coffins.
They see the stars come out and they try to swim to their yacht. The professor can’t swim and stays behind. Sergio tries to carry a bag full of jewels and drowns. The demon skull on the ship activates and starts a fire. The professor is overcome by smoke and the ship burns up.
Howard and Lillian make it to shore, where the dead also rise up out of the water. The dead walked to shore.
Commentary
The mythology of the Templars is stretched pretty thin now. In the first film, they rose from the dead and killed people hanging out in the monastery after dark. In the second, they got revenge 500 years later for their punishment. Now they’re all just asleep on a ghost ship for some reason. Other than the cool costumes/makeup/puppets, there’s not much holding the three stories together.
There’s no indication that these zombies are even blind; considering the lore of the first two stories and the fact that these guys were said to be on their way back from the orient, they wouldn’t have been in the group that were blinded, so these particular zombies shouldn’t be blind. By putting the dead on a ship, they lose the ability to ride horses, which was one of the things that made the series unique. The model ship in the bathtub was really cheap, and looked even worse when it was on fire.
You just know someone read the outline of the first movie and decided to replicate the success of the first movie by incorporating many of the same scenes here. The rape scene, the professor, the lesbian flashback are all directly from the first movie. The location shoots in the first one were a highlight, and I think they tried to replicate that here, but the old wooden set wasn’t very interesting compared to the ruins in the first film.
The story here is pretty dumb; why any businessman would come up with this publicity scheme is beyond belief. And we did notice that the rescue helicopter has only one empty seat when they go to rescue two girls on the boat.