Night of the Seagulls (1975)

Dr. Henry Stein and his wife Joan have been sent to a small village to provide medical services to the local community - however, they find the people very unresponsive and often actively hostile. Joan is disturbed on their first night by chants and bells, and the couple see a strange ceremony occuring on the beach. Later, they discover that the ceremony is not just harmless tradition, but the sacrifice of young women to the evil Blind Dead...

Amando de Ossorio tried to take his Blind Dead series in new directions with the third film Ghost Galleon (1974), but it was an abysmal failure, and for the forth (and ultimately final entry) he returned to the normal small-town setting, this time with a "virgin sacrifice" plot. Unfortunately the storyline fails to capture the interest of the first two films and comes off as rather poorly thought out - even the simplest observations (why have the people never moved away from the town in 300 years, especially if the entire town was massacred one year?) are liable to pick huge holes in the plot, and even the origin of the creatures (usually well explained in the earlier films) is brushed over in a few seconds. The thematic idea of souls of the dead being trapped in seagulls is quite interesting, but despite providing the film with its title, seems to have no part to play in the plot and is only briefly mentioned.

With the exception of Ghost Galleon, all of the Blind Dead films had hinted of their inspiration (George A. Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968)), but here de Ossorio goes into all out rip-off as the doctor and wife are beseiged in their house, having to board up the windows. The pacing in the series as a whole is generally slow, but Night of the Seagulls pushes the boundary into simply dull in many over-long and unnecessary sequences, especially the completely unnecessary shots of crabs crawling on the Knight's victims, and although they proved scary in Tombs and Attack, in Seagulls, even the attacks by the Knights themselves are dull here, making the idea that anyone could be afraid of these absurdly slow moving creatures seem daft. The ending is a poor and lazy anti-climax.


Direction by de Ossorio is average with some nice shots of the Knights riding along the beach, although he does seem to overuse the slow motion here, and the obviously tinted day-for-night photography leads to a lot of continuity problems. Although Antón García Abril is credited as providing the music, it all seems to be adaptations of his previous scores for the Blind Dead and some Paul Naschy films.

De Ossorio tries to return to the winning format of Attack of the Blind Dead but provides little more than a dull clone with a whole host of pacing and scripting problems. One for Blind Dead fans only and not a recommended place to start. 

All text in this review written by Timothy Young - 18th November 2006.
Text from this review not to be used without authorization.

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