Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti,1974) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Ideally, great horror movies begin with small quirks of the everyday slowly snowballing into scenes of unimaginable carnage. Jorge Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, undoubtedly the greatest Spanish-Italian-British eco-zombie film ever made, gains strength in a slowly mounting atmosphere of oppression and paranoia, taking it time to deliver the gory goods.

The opening sees a young hippie antiques dealer, George Meaning (Ray Lovelock), leaving a London which seems to be quietly rotting, littered with dead animal life, alienated commuters, and female streakers for peace (only in 1974!). George is heading to an area near Windermere, in Cumbria, where he and some friends keep a vacation house, and he’s glad to be escaping the rat race for a spell. But his motorcycle is damaged in an accident when Edna (Cristina Galbo), tired from driving from London, backs her Mini into it at a petrol station. George has to leave his bike to be repaired, so he takes over Edna’s car and drives them both north, as they’re heading for the same area.

When Edna is unable to remember the way to the property she’s heading for, George stops by a river and approaches a farmer who is aiding a Department of Agriculture experiment to ask for directions. The scientists working the experiment, which is designed to eliminate insect life by setting primitive nervous systems, disdain George’s environmentalist concerns.

Edna, alone in her Mini, is assaulted by a strange, gnarled figure, and she flees. Naturally, the figure disappears before she, George, and the farmer return, but the farmer comments that Edna’s description sounds like that of a tramp who drowned a week before.

Meanwhile, Edna’s sister, Katie (Jeannine Mestre), a drug addict whose photographer husband Martin (José Ruiz Lefante) has kept away from the city in a cottage, is soon assaulted in the course of procuring herself a fix in their cottage’s shed by the same dead tramp. He kills Martin, and Katie is only saved by Edna and George arriving. But the police investigator, the intolerant, reactionary Sergeant (Arthur Kennedy), would rather accuse these weirdo city types of murder.

The only person George gets to listen to his theories is Dr Duffield (Vicente Vega), who works at the local hospital, bewildered by the fact that the newborn babies there seem to have turned into blood-lusting savages too. Of course, it’s the experiment, which is sending out radioactive waves that drive primitive nervous systems to acts of crazed mutual destruction.

Sleeping Corpses bears the usual limitations of ‘70s European genre cinema, sporting some awful dubbing for the mostly Spanish cast, and fascinatingly dodgy northern county accents for others (Kennedy seems to think he’s somewhere in Ireland). Post-production interiors were shot at Cinecitta, which accounts for an hilarious goof where, in what’s supposed to be the inside of the Old Owl Hotel, a sign reads “Olw”. But if, like me, you’re long since immune to such quirks of the horror cinema, it’s easy to perceive what is actually a damn well done film.

Grau’s storytelling and pacing are exact and forceful, making effective use of some gorgeous locations, evoking an English landscape that’s grey, chilly, and foreboding, eventually employing classic genre flourishes like swirling fog, eerie graveyards, deserted hospitals, and chewed intestines.

The staging is impeccable, as Grau cranks his narrative up from the eerie early sequence when Edna is first attacked by the perpetually dripping-wet tramp (I would think he’d have dried off after a week), shot at dusk, to the nailbiting sequence in which George, Edna, and a policeman, Craig (Giorgio Trestini), are trapped in a church by a newly awoken horde of the dead. And, the gut-wrenching (literally) finale that sees all hell break loose in the county hospital.

Many years before Zack Snyder and Danny Boyle thought to have their zombies move quickly and powerfully, Grau’s zombies, if no faster on their feet than George Romero’s lurching brain-eaters, are rather stronger and more formidable, constantly entrapping characters who you expect to have a fighting chance and overwhelming them. They seem impervious to anything until George discovers a suitable home remedy: a large dose of fire.

The efforts to construct a countercultural genre film are cartoonish (“You come around here with your long hair and faggot clothes!” the Sergeant berates George), but likeable nonetheless, envisioning the self-impressed, pushy, but essentially decent George at first espousing to the heedless scientists the beauties of organic produce, and struggles with increasing desperation to prove that something beyond the ordinary is taking place, matched against the Sergeant’s growing certainty that he’s dealing with evil Satanist drug-crazed hippie scum.

The cop and greenie’s conflict has the appropriate ferocity to match and fuel the mounting violence. It’s particularly amusing when the Sergeant construes some of George’s antique statuettes for evidence of his Satanist practises. Chided by a pathologist for slapping George in the fact, the Sergeant insists police only need “a free hand” in dealing with criminals and later predicts his successes will empower the citizenry against this evil permissiveness. This leads to a splendidly cynical finale in which the policeman guns down our hero, only to later come face to face with an undead, and very pissed-off, George…