Horror Of The Zombies 2007 Horror Movie Review

This is the third in the Spanish “Blind Dead” series from Amando de Ossorio. This film has been released under a huge number of names, including “The Ghost Galleon”, “The Blind Dead 3”, “Ghost Ships of the Blind Dead”, “Zombie Flesh Eater”, and “El Buque Maldito”.


The acting is fairly wooden (the dubbing doesn’t help, of course), the premise is completely ludicrous, but the worst feature of the film is the pacing. Basically it comes down to this: an evil rich guy puts two swimsuit models in a boat for them to fake being stranded as a publicity stunt. I don’t know how great this stunt could have possibly been in the mind of the filmmakers, but they treat it like it’s as important as nuclear launch codes. The girls (of course) get lost in a mysterious fog, where a ghost ship intercepts them. The logical thing for them to do is to explore it, whereupon they promptly discover that it is full of lugubrious zombies which move so slowly that the girls could easily outrun them, but don’t.


The rest of the protagonists including the egomaniacal idiot who came up with the harebrained scheme (Howard Tucker), a peculiar doctor of some sort (Professor Grüber), and a model who is actually also a hostage show up at the ghost ship to rescue the girls. Professor Grüber immediately reveals “I’m certain that we’re immersed in another dimension, completely uncommon to us all.” The backstory is then revealed to have something to do with the “Templars” being banished by the Pope in the sixteenth century, so they now dwell on this ship with their treasure where they are subject to black magic rituals.


The cast gets thinned out one by one amongst lots of tramping around the creaky old ship. They decide to throw the zombies into the sea and then swim to a nearby island, although Professor Grüber, a nonswimmer, gets to remain on the ship which has now spontaneously combusted due to the red glowing eyes of a skull with horns.


I gave the film a second star for the conclusion on the island, which, while predictable, was still quite well done and creepy. I won’t reveal the resolution in case you haven’t guessed how it ends, but it was definitely the highlight of the movie.


I was disappointed in “Horror of the Zombies” because of both conception and execution. The film could have been a much more workable and plausible feature if Amando de Ossorio has given the characters more legitimate reasons for interacting the way they did and more reasonable premises for being in the situations they found themselves in. The pacing killed the suspense and reduced the film to the dustbin of zombie movie history. If you are a zombie fanatic, you may want to take a look at this one, otherwise, there are many more, and better, choices available to you.