It’s not a party until a Templar Knight beheads someone. For the Portuguese villagers holding their annual Burning Festival, it’s going to be a party. They just don’t know it yet.
Amando de Ossorio’s Return of the Evil Dead, a sequel to his Tombs of the Blind Dead of the previous year, revives those undead Knights Templar in more ways than one, starting with a 14th-century prologue that shows why and how those dastardly killers lost the gift of sight. Why? Human sacrifices in the name of God. How? Torches.
Their ancestors’ act of revenge is what the villagers commemorate at the Burning Festival, complete with effigies of the knights. Hired for the event is a fireworks specialist who chain-smokes — not the profession’s smartest of habits. His name is Jack (Tony Kendall, The Whip and the Body), and as luck would have it, the former love of his life (Esperanza Roy, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) not only lives there, but is engaged to the corrupt, repugnant mayor (Fernando Sancho, The Big Gundown).
However, the one dick Jack really needs to worry about is Murdo (José Canalejas, Horror Express), the village idiot whose mouth is a freakish diagonal rictus. When he’s not being pelted by rocks hurled by kids, Murdo longs for the resurrection of the Knights Templar; his bloody murder of a local lovely causes them to come a-crawling from their graves. It happens during the celebration, and as anyone who saw the previous movie knows, the horse-riding Blind Dead are attracted to noise.
Silence is golden for fans of Spanish horror who are likely to find their bodies clenched as terrified villagers do their best to pass through a gauntlet of zombie knights by remaining as quiet as possible. The very idea is chilling, and de Ossorio plays it to the hilt, bathing his film in eeriness that exists even in the obvious day-for-night shots. This is a strong sequel that extends a good idea, rather than just rehash it. —Rod Lott