Director: Amando de Ossorio
Writers: Amando de Ossorio
Stars: Víctor Petit, María Kosty, Sandra Mozarowsky
1 Hour, 29 minutes
Synopsis
At some point in the distant past, a young couple is traveling by night to their new home, but they get lost. The husband goes to the nearby house to ask directions, but nobody’s home. He hears horses coming, and sees that a group of men in white templar’s robes approaches. They stab him to death. They grab the wife and take her to their temple, where they ritually stab her and remove her heart, which they place in the mouth of the statue of the frog-god. The men then lick all the blood from the corpse and feed what’s left to the crabs.
Modern Day.
A young couple, Henry and Joan, moves to a very primitive town, and he’s going to be the new town doctor. They go into a shop, but not one of the villagers will speak to them. Finally, they get to the doctor’s home, inside a boarded-up old building. The old doctor is leaving town and suggests that Henry and Joan do the same. He’s terrified.
As Joan unpacks that night, a man with a bloody face watches her from outside the window. The man, Teddy, comes inside and says the people outside beat him in the street. He’s terrified, as if tonight was something special.
Meanwhile, Henry and the old doctor talk. The doctor says there’s no danger inland. He says that they shouldn’t go out at night, and don’t ask anyone any questions. The old man eagerly heads away on his donkey.
The hear a bell at midnight. Henry says it’s coming from the sea. The seagulls go crazy. The re-usable wobbling tombstone footage gets dragged out again, and the dead rise from the ruins and mount their horses once more.
Henry and Joan go out for a walk to see what’s going on outside. They see the villagers down by the water, and then the two head home. The villagers, in the meantime, chain a woman to a big rock as a sacrifice. The dead head down the hill to the water’s edge and kill the girl.
Joan hears the girl scream. Or was it a seagull?
The next day, the shopkeeper still ignores Joan. Lucy, a girl from town, comes to work for them. That night, a girl named Tilda beats on their door. “They want to take me away!” She screams. Her father comes and takes her home. The procession of villagers immediately heads her out to the beach just like the previous night. It goes just like the previous night and the sacrifice from the opening scene. At first, they can’t find her, but once she starts crying, they zoom in on her. There’s a really long scene of a crab crawling on the body.
The next morning, the doctor goes looking for Tilda, and her father says she’s gone to the city for treatment. Some of the villagers go hunting for Teddy the hunchback, and he falls off a cliff.
That evening, the villagers come for Lucy; she’s to be tonight’s sacrifice. Teddy wakes up at the bottom of a cliff. Joan once again asks Henry to leave town, and he finally agrees. Teddy stumbles in, and Henry operates on him. They can’t leave tonight after all.
Teddy explains that they take away one girl each night for seven nights, every seven years. The dead girls become the seagulls that fly at night. Suddenly, the seagulls go silent. Henry rushes out to save Lucy. He unties Lucy, and they run away.
The next morning, all the villagers leave town, since they know what’s coming. Henry, Joan, Lucy, and Teddy remain behind; they can’t move Teddy.
That night, the dead ride through town, looking for the last sacrifice that they were cheated out of. Someone steals their car, so they have to stay. Henry barricades the house, and finishes just before the dead arrive.
They force their way inside, but Henry sets one of them on fire. They drag Teddy outside and kill him. Henry, Joan, and Lucy head out through a window and steal the undead horses. Lucy falls off her horse, and the dead get her. The horses take Henry and Joan right to the sacrificial temple.
Henry finds the frog-god statue and decides that’s the root of all the problems and needs to be destroyed. More dead start rising to protect it, but they manage to destroy the statue. The dead fall back into their crypts as their “eyes” bleed gushers of blood.
Commentary
The village was creepy and old enough. It was another real location. The story was pretty weak and predictable, and more than that, the whole thing is starting to feel a little too stretched out. Other than the dead men on horseback, this didn’t have much in common with the other movies, not even the “obligatory” stuff I mentioned in the third movie. It was almost as if they were trying to get away from the formula, but it failed.
The sound effects are loud and annoying. The echoing sounds the horses make, the screeching of the seagulls, and the so-called musical cues are grating, to put it nicely.
There were long stretches of moody images and old buildings here, and I was bored through a lot of it. It could easily have been half as long. I think with this series, the first movie was the best, followed by the second, third, and this one.