The third member of Amando de Ossorio’s Blind quartet gives their famous horses a breather, placing the Templars in wooden caskets onboard a galleon. A couple of models out on a publicity stunt – ‘Operation Atlantic’ – end up onboard, and their subsequent radio silence prompts organiser Howard Tucker (Jack Taylor) to launch a search party. Tucker is joined by a trio of associates, along with Professor Gruber (Carlos Lemos) whose stories concerning the ghost galleon (“Those who see the galleon never survive”) are dismissed as “twilight zone tales” by a scoffing Tucker.
When the party catch sight of the vessel and climb onboard, Gruber’s theories really do enter Rod Serling territory, offering the possibility that the galleon and its accompanying mist are not for real; a time and space proposition that possibly nods to de Ossorio’s merging of night and day in the previous films. His daylight and dusk shots may suggest a clumsy approach to continuity, but the overall theme of the past invading the present inspires the thought that de Ossorio’s lighting techniques were well thought out.
Unfortunately, The Ghost Galleon turns out to be easily the least of his four Blind Dead films. The sightless ghouls are conspicuous by their absence for much of the running time, only rising from their caskets on a few occasions to despatch screaming models before re-grouping for a too-little-too-late final attack.
The galleon itself does make for a suitably spooky location, but the whole thing is somewhat akin to the idea and execution of Hellraiser in space, and merely makes one yearn to see the Blind Dead back on dry land where they belong.
Still, it’s good to see this film on DVD at long last, via a nice transfer that once again captures the Blind Dead’s devilishly impressive features which still send shivers down the spine. And thankfully, Ossorio returned to form with Night of the Seagulls; his final Blind Dead film which can also be enjoyed as part of the Region 2 boxset from Anchor Bay Entertainment UK.
