Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!
At times it feels like there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to movies. Horror Rises from the Tomb (El espanto surge de la tumba in the original Spanish) is a good example of this. While this is its own movie in a lot of respects, there’s a great deal here that comes across as a Spanish version of Mario Bava’s classic Black Sunday. Even the opening sequence is kind of a low-rent version of the same thing. Honestly, I get the desire to crib from Bava’s masterwork, but not when the connections are this obvious.
In the 15th century, a warlock named Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) is captured alongside his equally evil companion Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line). The two are convicted of being followers of Satan, and as punishment, he is decapitated in a field, with his head buried separately from his body; Mabille is also decapitated, but for misogyny reasons of the previous century, she is tortured first. None of this happens before Alaric curses the descendants of the men killing him. This is straight out of Bava’s film, but without the spiked mask.
As you might expect, centuries pass until the point that all of this is going to come back to curse the modern world. A group of people go to the area with the intent of searching for Alaric’s grave. The group is headed by Hugo de Marnac (also Paul Naschy), a direct descendant of Alaric.
There is a local legend of a treasure buried in the area. As you likely (and correctly) suspect, the treasure is actually a chest containing the still-living head of Alaric. It is eventually discovered and dug up, but our group of treasure hunters decide to wait to open the chest. Some locals break into the chest and the head possesses them into murdering each other at the head’s command. Those that survive are forced to reunite the head with Alaric’s corpse, bringing him back to life. As you might expect, what follows is Alaric getting revenge on the families of those who killed him, usually through hypnotizing one person and causing them to murder people for him. He also uses the blood and body of one of his victims to bring Mabille back to life as well.
Honestly, all of this is pretty standard stuff for this kind of horror movie. The resurrected Alaric is going to use his fancy hypnotism powers to cause all sorts of murder and mayhem around the estate. In what looks like an attempt to capitalize on the success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, at one point all of the recently killed rise up and surround the house, marching through it on some errand. To be fair, they aren’t ghouls and aren’t looking to eat anyone, but they are clearly intended to recall Romero’s creatures.
The truth is that Horror Rises from the Tomb is ultimately a pretty standard horror movie of its time and place. Because this is a mid-‘70s European horror movie, we’re going to get a certain amount of nudity, most of it frank and not very sexual in nature—it’s just sort of there. There’s going to be a decent amount of extremely red and paint-like blood, but not much in the way of actual gore. It’s really about the idea of this sort of generational evil being brought back to life and stalking the modern day.
The issue is that there’s not a lot here that you haven’t seen before. It feels like a film that was in large part created by simply watching previous movies and grabbing anything that looked good and cobbling them into a coherent plot. That’s worth noting—the plot is actually coherent, which means that some work has been put into this. What hasn’t been put into this, though, is a great deal of creativity.
You could do a lot worse, honestly. It’s an entirely watchable film. It’s just not going to be anything that you haven’t see a couple of dozen times before. Modern people dig up an ancient evil and get destroyed by it in a pretty standard way, roll credits.
Why to watch Horror Rises from the Tomb: It’s a revamped version of Black Sunday in a lot of respects .
Why not to watch: Honestly, Black Sunday is better.
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