First off, I’d like to note that it took me almost a year to wade through Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies. Why? Well, they’re kinda boring.

What’s interesting about the series, though, is the fact that the disparate films don’t have any connection to one another apart from the appearance of the slow moving Templars. Yeah, there’s ritual killing and all its trappings in each of these efforts, but no recurring characters, no references to earlier plots. Nothing. Of course, seeing as the films were all released within five years might have meant the filmmakers didn’t have too much time to belabor a proper narrative development.

Whatever the case, Night of the Seagulls gets to the nitty gritty, as it were, much more quickly than de Ossorio’s earlier efforts. In fact, the film begins with the Templars dispatching some denuded town’s women. And while that most likely was meant to grab viewer’s attention – and it does – revealing the Templars, even if its in flashback form and they’re not yet ghouls, so early on seems odd.

There’s some theater adage about showing a gun in scene one necessitating it to go off not to soon thereafter. Applying that to Night of the Seagulls, there’s a problem, since the opening scenes of the film find that gun going off, so to speak. Where to go after that?

Enter a new doctor and his sometimes skittish wife.

The pair arrives in the God-foresaken water front town to replace a doctor who’s clearly ready to leave. His swift exit doesn’t lend viewers too good of a reason. But after watching is replacement attempt to coax directions out of a town’s person, it makes a bit of sense.

Either way, the tension between the locales and the new settlers is basically the only major sub-plot within the film. The most amusing reference to the chasm comes when the doctor’s wife attempts to make a purchase at the dry goods store. She’s passed over by the clerk after waiting in line, which prompts an excoriating speech on manners. The irony of that probably lost on the script writers.

Regardless of the paper thin plot – pervasive in this type of film – Night of the Seagulls should surely sate any number of horror movie aficionados and Templars’ fans. Figuring a best film from the series, though, seems a bit daffy. That’d probably just be like a ‘best of the worst’ award.