💀 The Return of the Evil Dead (1973) — The Knights Templar Ride Again… Slowly, Aimlessly, and Repetitively

If Tombs of the Blind Dead was Amando de Ossorio’s attempt to give Spanish horror a unique identity—eerily atmospheric and rooted in esoteric lore—then The Return of the Evil Dead is his drunken stumble back to the well, only this time the bucket’s come up bone-dry and full of excuses.

This sequel to Tombs doubles down on everything that didn’t need doubling—more recycled lore, more pointless characters, and more zombies on horseback who still manage to move slower than your average infrastructure project. What could have been a macabre meditation on ritualistic evil is instead a festival of poor dubbing, misogyny, and shrieking villagers who make the cast of a Scooby-Doo episode seem composed under pressure.

🧟‍♂️ Old Knights, New Nonsense

The titular eyeless Templars are back, and they’re apparently so angry about being set on fire 500 years ago that they decide to ruin the town’s celebration by murdering everyone involved. Fair enough. Unfortunately, they do so in the slowest, most unthreatening manner possible—often appearing to ride in from off-screen like animatronic mall decorations on their way to a JCPenney clearance sale.

There’s no suspense, no mounting dread—just fog machines, horse hooves, and actors frozen in place until it’s their cue to scream. We’re told these undead knights are terrifying, but they’re about as menacing as a Ren Fair reenactment caught in the rain.

🎭 A Cast of Clueless Cowards

Tony Kendall’s Jack Marlowe is a classic Euro-horror protagonist: wooden, uncharismatic, and inexplicably irresistible to every woman in the film. The love triangle between Jack, Vivian (Esperanza Roy), and Fernando Sancho’s sleazebag mayor is less a romantic subplot and more a poorly written HR complaint with a body count.

Meanwhile, the villagers are either catatonic, shrieking, or sexually assaulting each other. The film’s idea of character development is having everyone scream each other’s names while hiding in increasingly smaller rooms. Murdo the village idiot is somehow both the summoner of evil and the comic relief—an uncomfortable balance that culminates in his head being separated from his body like a piñata at a satanic birthday party.

🧠 Lore and Logic: A Blood Sacrifice to Lazy Writing

Instead of deepening the Templars’ backstory, this installment gives us some vague nonsense about blood rituals, festivals, and medieval curses—all of which contradict the original film’s lore. Continuity? Who needs it when you’ve got recycled costumes and leftover horse stock footage?

The Templars can be stopped by daylight, which is treated like a stunning twist even though literally everyone should have realized that by now. You could nap through the entire film, wake up during the final five minutes, and not miss a single narrative beat.

☠️ Final Verdict: A Shuffling, Foggy Mess

The Return of the Evil Dead isn’t so much a horror film as it is an endurance test padded out with sleazy melodrama, loopy dubbing, and a finale that manages to be both anticlimactic and unintentionally hilarious. It wants to be Night of the Living Dead meets Black Sunday, but ends up closer to Medieval Times: The Motion Picture—only with less coherence and worse food.

The first film had a ghostly Gothic charm. This one has… smoke, horses, and a plot held together with medieval dental floss.

Rating: 1.5 eyeless zombies out of 5
Watch only if you enjoy slow-motion carnage, shameless padding, and knights who couldn’t chase down a parked car.