The Ghost Galleon (1974)

Sports gear magnate Howard Tucker (Jack Taylor) decides to promote his new brand of sports boat with a crazy publicity stunt - he hires two models to sail deep into the Atlantic Ocean and wait to be rescued - their pictures appearing all over the world and his boat getting the praise for staying intact in the rough sea. However, when the model's boat encounters a mysterious galleon and contact is lost, Howard Tucker and his crew have to go out and discover what has happened - they discover a mysterious boat existing outside of our dimension, populated by the Blind Dead...

After the relatively similar first two Blind Dead films, writer and director Armando de Ossorio tried to take a completely new route here - creating a sea-bound horror film. Unfortunately, the rather original concept is the only interesting thing about Ghost Galleon which lumbers under a dull storyline with terrible plot holes apparent from the very start - Lillian, the friend of one of the models on the boat misses her (the operation has apparently taken 2 weeks to plan) and threatens to call the police, which Tucker is so desperate to prevent that he kidnaps her, yet his plan would surely have worked just fine if the police were searching for the girls? No real explanation is given for the appearance of the Blind Dead, and certainly not for the "dimension bending" existance of the ship, strong contrast to the other films - Attack of the Blind Dead (1973) especially made a strong point of explaining the mythology.

Characterisation is poor leaving the audience uncaring for their fates - we have a nautical navigation professor who is an expert on exorcism, and a swimsuit model manager who can identify the age of a galleon - while the attitude of all the cast on encountering a ghostly, seemingly abadoned galleon is absurdly understated. Of all the factors however, it is the incredibly slow pacing that makes the film most hard to watch - although the other films in the series are notably slow paced, here it seems merely padding to draw the film out to feature length, exemplified by two near-identical killings by the Blind Dead that take several minutes each and some long, pointless dialogue scenes - even the film's ending, which is quite good, is dragged out far too long. Unfortunately, while there are some interesting hints of deeper themes on display - the Howard Tucker character representing the lengths to which corporations will go to make money, even contemplating murder - it is not enough to make the film watchable.

De Ossorio's direction is decent and would surely have brought some scares were it not for the terrible script, and he is let down by a terrible looking boat model and generally poor looking effects (although the Blind Dead themselves look as good as normal). Antón García Abril reuses his score from the previous films, although its absence in many scenes leaves them without tension.


Frequent euro-cult star Jack Taylor takes the lead role of Howard Tucker, but doesn't get much opportunity to act thanks to the script. The rest of the cast, relative unknowns, give suitable but hardly impressive performances.

De Ossorio comes up with an interesting idea, but with very a poor script lacking characterisation or logic, and some obviously low budget effects, Ghost Galleon rates as a dull and generally worthless film without even any gore or nudity to appeal to exploitation audiences. Big fans of the series might be able to enjoy some elements of this - certainly not one for first time Blind Dead viewers. Not recommended. 

All text in this review written by Timothy Young - 17th November 2006.
Text from this review not to be used without authorization.

Please contact: