TUBI CONTINUED… SCREAM OF THE BLIND DEAD (2021) **

Scream of the Blind Dead is Full Moon’s reboot of Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series.  As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the OTHER Blind Dead reboot, 2020’s Curse of the Blind Dead.  As a die-hard Blind Dead fan, all I can say is the more the merrier (or scarier).  

We begin with a cool scene where a woman is chased through a field by an undead Templar knight and killed.  Then, the focus switches to a woman who seems to be in a daze when she steps off the train.  She wanders around for a little while before she stumbles into a church where she plays the organ, masturbates, and falls asleep.  When she awakes, she too is menaced by the Templar knight.  

I’ve seen some short Full Moon movies over the course of this column.  This is the shortest one yet.  It’s only thirty-nine minutes long.  I know what you’re asking:  If it’s so short, does it really count as a movie?  Well, if you’re like me and you’re trying to watch 365 movies on Tubi in 365 days, then the answer is a resounding, “Hell yeah.”

Scream of the Blind Dead FEELS like a short.  It’s often experimental, dreamlike, and surreal.  Some sequences look like something out of a silent movie.  Some of the extreme lighting resembles a giallo.  The resurrection of the zombie knight would right look at home in a heavy metal music video.  Most viewers will probably be confounded by it.  Speaking as a fan of the original series, I’m not sure I liked it, but I know at the very least I didn’t not like it.  

There’s a lot of stuff here that will please fans of de Ossorio’s original series.  There are slow-motion attack scenes (in fact, if it wasn’t for all the slow motion, the movie would probably be twenty-five minutes instead of thirty-nine), a gory heart-ripping, and suspense sequences where the heroine must remain perfectly quiet so the Blind Dead (who hunt by sound) won’t find her.  Unfortunately, there are no slow-motion horse riding scenes, which is a bit of a bummer.  Also, the budget was so low they could only afford ONE Templar knight instead of a whole platoon of them.  If only writer/director Chris (Necropolis:  Legion) Alexander gave us a third act (or at least another twenty minutes or so of footage), this might have felt like an honest to goodness continuation of the Blind Dead legacy.  As it is, it just feels like a slightly more expensive fan film.