Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Beyond Naschy #9 - RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD (1973)


Has it really been two years since we covered TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD? That is far too long! It is with great pleasure that we return to the land of the living dead Templar Knights! For the second of Ossorio's fantastic Blind Dead films we examine the two different cuts available on Region 1 DVD and then ponder the deeper social commentary buried within the story. Really? Only for a little while. We mostly chat about the casting choices, the relative beauty of the female actors, the story's odd love rectangle, the mechanics of the creeping living dead and the number of homages to (or steals from) other movies that Ossorio weaves into the story. I wish we had spent more time on how difficult it is to destroy these walking corpses but some things get lost in the stumble/shuffle.

Of course, this being the NaschyCast the show starts with some unrelated discussion of several monster related topics. I wax enthusiastic about Universal Horror novels and we discuss the joys of Shaun Hutson's horror epic 'Slugs', which leads us to the question of why we have yet to cover any examples of the cinema of Spain's Juan Piquer Simon. He certainly fits our criteria as he is Spanish and has directed plenty of Horror, so maybe a show on PIECES is in our future. That one won't be for the faint of heart! We also have an impromptu discussion of Lucio Fulci's tetralogy of gore films and - just for fun - rank them from best to worst. In the mailbag section we commiserate with a listener fresh from a viewing of FURY OF THE WOLFMAN and talk briefly about several worthy Jess Franco titles. How long before we just dive headlong into Uncle Jess' catalog and never look back?

We can be contacted at naschycast@gmail.com and the show can be downloaded at the link below, on the right side of the blog page or subscribed to in the iTunes store. Let us know what you think and if you want your comments to be a part of the podcast. Thanks for listening!