In the Jungle, the Quiet Jungle, the Leopard Women Suck Tonight

The Night of the Sorcerers
Dir. Amando de Ossorio
1973
What the fuck was it with Africa and low budget Euro-sh(l)ockers in the 1970s? It’s like setting a film in Africa was fair game to just let every abhorrent, normally repressed racial stereotype about black people run rampant on celluloid. Granted, our Old World relations never really had to deal with the history of slavery and racial integration in quite the same way we did here in the U.S. of A, but even they should have paused at some point when filming a chiseled-chin white dude mowing down a horde of primitive black folks in grass skirts to ponder the racial implications. Films like The Night of the Sorcerers are enough to make The Birth of Nation look like a paragon of progressive racial tolerance.
Amando “Blind Dead” de Ossorio gets straight to the white women being menaced by leering black guys within the opening scenes of this 1973 zombie-voodoo-vampire-sexploitation failure. It seems 11 local magicians like to string up white women, rip their clothes off via bullwhip and decapitate them in order to turn them into vampiric “leopard women” who romp around the jungle in hilarious slow motion decked out in dime store vampire fangs and laughably lame animal print bikinis … for some reason. It’s kinda vague. Luckily a handful of British soldiers in khakis and natty pith helmets put a stop to that … at least for 60 years when a bunch of do-gooder endangered species researchers happen to drift across the forbidden altar.

Zombology: The Limeys may have smoked the local magicians, but thanks to voodoo their zombified bodies keep on trucking, just waiting for a new sacrifice to find its way to their altar to revive their manslaughtering ways. With the help of the blood-drinking leopard women, the magicians, who emerge from their stony cairns each night – and apparently neatly bury themselves again each morning – lure the braless free spirits accompanying the researchers to the altar one at a time to add them to their collection of pasty white servants.

Inverting the classic Scooby-Doo plot, the men immediately dismiss any talk of living dead sorcerers as a hoax to scare them away from their research only to later confront the zombified reality. Though they’re central to the film, the women in The Night of the Sorcerers have no personality development beyond casual nudity and insane jealously of each other. Though there’s decapitations galore, the film falls short on both gore and suspense. De Ossorio has never been a deft hand with pacing, and The Night of the Sorcerers lags even at 80 minutes. Racially insensitive, riding a ridiculous plot conceit and poorly executed, The Night of the Sorcerers sucks 92 percent as bad as Hell of the Living Dead.

Zombie or Wannabe: The Blind Dead

Now what did the poor titular Templars of Amando de Ossorio’s horror quartet ever do to deserve their murder at the hands of local peasants? Oh sure they were bowing down before the goat headed god of evil and the occasional “Beast of the Sea” and sacrificing a virgin or 12 in their pathological quest for immortality, but does that really deserve being murdered and having their eyes pecked out by birds or gored out by vengeful villagers (depending on the film)?
While the locals may not have shown the slooooooooooooooooooooowly creeping Blind Dead any love, the four film series has been a staple of low budget horror fiends and early-’80s VHS freaks since their inception. But the question remains: do the skeletal and hooded menace deserve a spot in the zombie cannon? Do the Blind Dead tick off enough zombie touchstones to enter into that unhallowed hall of undead immortality?

The case against: Beginning with their very appearance, the Blind Dead’s skeletal visage would certainly suggest they’ve decayed beyond what’s generally considered kosher for your USDA Grade A zombie and lurking about in coffins between attacks, as is their wont, certainly cribs from the playbook of a whole different creature feature.
Our plucky Templar revenants also demonstrate more, ahem, brains that one would expect from your run of the mill creepy corpse. The Blind Dead, while trapped in gratuitous slow motion through much of the series, are far more animated than their traditional zombie kin. Though they lack vision, we see the Templars heaving swords, using tools and clopping about on zombie steeds.
The most egregious violation of acceptable zombie mores, however, may be in their flouting of one of the genre’s most sacred tenets. In the third film, The Ghost Galleon (aka Ship of Zombies), we also see the Blind Dead violate one of the most basic rules of zombiedom: stalking their hapless quarry, one of the reanimated Templars takes a gunshot square to the face at near-point blank range and keeps on trucking. If there’s one constant to your modern zombie, it’s that a headshot always stops the menace. If we sacrifice that, what do we have left?

The case for: It says it right there in the alternate title of the third film: Ship of Zombies. Case closed? No? Ok, let’s continue.
In the second film, Return of the Blind Dead (aka Return of the Evil Dead), we see our erstwhile survivors hole up in the local church as they vainly try to stave off an assault by the walking dead. Trapped in close quarters the speedily dwindling cast begins to turn on each other – a zombie trope that’s as dated as those granny glasses Romero insists on sporting.
While they seem to have no interest in nibbling on the sweet, sweet brain meat, the Blind Dead are big into fresh blood. Even as run of the mill men in dresses we see them slurping down a cup of steaming corpuscles tapped from a fresh virgin sacrifice as part of that whole Satanic quest for immortality thing. Things get progressively zombie-er, however. In The Ghost Galleon we do finally see the Templars set to snacking on the dismembered corpse of a truly annoying model.
Even if the crabs of Night of the Seagulls spend more time chowing down on choice corpse bits, femur tartare is bound to weigh in their favor.

Verdict: Not zombies by reason of intelligence. Ultimately, the Blind Dead are just too canny, too coordinated and too good with tools to qualify as canonical zombies, but by all means invite them as long lost out of town relatives at your next undead BBQ.