There's plenty of skullduggery in store for Serge Chekov when he travels to a gloomy estate to collect an inheritance bequeathed him by his late uncle. Not only does he have to contend with witchcraft, sexual seduction, and a séance upon his arrival, the guy also stumbles upon gratuitous necrophilia and just when you think the plot can't get any sillier, he's shown a laboratory where the dead are secretly reanimated...
Resembling an Italian horror film from the '60s (like the ones with Barbara Steele, only in color), TERROR OF THE LIVING DEAD is all about atmosphere even though there's an actual mystery (later explained through flashbacks) going on right under the nose of a none-too-bright police inspector puffing a Sherlock Holmes pipe. Like Amando de Ossorio's trilogy, the dead are blind here, too, and there's also bare breasts and a woman's heart removed but I don't know what (if anything) can be inferred about audience tastes at the time. Filmmaking in Franco-era Spain obviously didn't shrink from explicit gore (there's an autopsy and a nice beheading here) but they were rather squeamish about nudity, it seems. There's a spinning montage as our hero gets drugged and seduced by the femme fatale and they're in bed together but he's got his pants on while she's completely nude. That's not the only thing weird; the film is set in nineteenth-century Scotland but I'm not sure the filmmakers knew where that was since the characters all have names like Chekov and Nadia and the fine-looking locations resemble Eastern Europe. Genre icon Paul Naschy plays a gravedigger who likes his ladies ice cold and he looked a lot like John Belushi in some scenes. A WTF? film, for sure.
Resembling an Italian horror film from the '60s (like the ones with Barbara Steele, only in color), TERROR OF THE LIVING DEAD is all about atmosphere even though there's an actual mystery (later explained through flashbacks) going on right under the nose of a none-too-bright police inspector puffing a Sherlock Holmes pipe. Like Amando de Ossorio's trilogy, the dead are blind here, too, and there's also bare breasts and a woman's heart removed but I don't know what (if anything) can be inferred about audience tastes at the time. Filmmaking in Franco-era Spain obviously didn't shrink from explicit gore (there's an autopsy and a nice beheading here) but they were rather squeamish about nudity, it seems. There's a spinning montage as our hero gets drugged and seduced by the femme fatale and they're in bed together but he's got his pants on while she's completely nude. That's not the only thing weird; the film is set in nineteenth-century Scotland but I'm not sure the filmmakers knew where that was since the characters all have names like Chekov and Nadia and the fine-looking locations resemble Eastern Europe. Genre icon Paul Naschy plays a gravedigger who likes his ladies ice cold and he looked a lot like John Belushi in some scenes. A WTF? film, for sure.