It’s got the flesh-eating dead, but this time they’re the blind mummies of knights who had their eyes eaten out by birds centuries ago. Now they putter around the Spanish countryside at night and wait for jealous girls to escape their problems by throwing themselves off of passing trains in the middle of nowhere and then have to go looking for a place to sleep. It’s not long before necks get bitten, arms come off and blood flies. There’s a little George Romero influence, but director Amando de Ossorio claims the zombie movie for the Europeans here with lush landscapes, old castles and a quick lesbian scene that happens for the best reason, which is no reason. It’s good stuff.
The story of one of the American re-edits is pretty rich. There’s an altered cut of this called Revenge From Planet Ape. There are no apes anywhere in the film, but one US distributor at the time thought that the burly, smelly-looking zombie knights here kinda sorta looked like apes if you squint and are really desperate to cash in on the Planet of the Apes movies, which were popular at the time. So—what the hell, why not?—the Americans added narration at the beginning (cutting out the original version’s great opening scene of a ritual sacrifice) that set up the zombies as super-smart apes who tried to take over the world three thousand years ago, but lost the war against the humans. Now, they’re back from the grave and they want blood. And maybe bananas.