The Revenant Review Extras: The one where sound wakes the dead

 

Title: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue

What Year?: 1974

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

With this review, I’m officially into overtime with this feature, and I’m also filling a time out from other projects. My overarching rationale has been that what I meant as the “bonus” reviews are already up, particularly my do-overs of the original Revenant Review. In the process, I hope to cover a few loose ends. I’m starting with the one that I gave the most thought to in the first run, a prominent if somewhat neglected zombie movie I never quite made up my mind about. With that, I introduce Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, a very British offering that just missed the 1970s zombie waves, and still doesn’t quite fit in.

Our story begins with a woman who accidentally strands a cyclist on the way to visit a family member. He ends up coming along for the ride, and on the way, they begin to encounter strange, silent lurkers who watch and stalk. The pair soon find themselves under official suspicion when the lady’s in-law is killed by one of the attackers. Meanwhile, the suspicious proto-hipster discovers a sonic machine in use to destroy pests. As the weirdos close in and claim more victims, he realizes that these are undead, somehow brought to life by the “radiation” from the machine. Their only chance is to destroy the machine, but first, he must free the lady from an infested hospital, and the cops still have a dimmer view of him than the undead!

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was an independent horror film directed by Jorge Grau. While the film was set in England, the production was a multinational collaboration, filmed mainly in Italy with additional shooting on location in Manchester and other locations in England. The film starred Spanish actress Cristina Galbo and Italian Ray Lovelock as George, with American character actor Arthur Kennedy as the otherwise unnamed inspector. The film was first released in Spain in 1974 and in the US the following year under the alternate title Don’t Open The Window. It was reportedly shown as a double bill with The Last House On The Left. In home video releases, it has been known either by its given title or as The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, the title used for its UK release. It was released on DVD in 2000 by Anchor Bay and in 2005 by Blue Underground. In 2019, it was released on Blu Ray by Synapse (see… The Deadly Spawn?). It has been released for digital rental, but is not currently available on US streaming platforms.

For my experiences, my strongest recollection is that I once watched this as a digital rental on a ride to work. (Not the worst thing I ever selected, see The Cemetery Man…) I’m not sure if that would have been my first viewing, but it made a good enough impression to keep this one on my good side. I’ve watched it a few times since, but I didn’t get to it in the course of this feature until I did a sweep of my most frequented second-hand store for titles I didn’t already have and found only this. I skipped over it in my countdown, but still felt that this was due for a rematch sooner or later. I watched it when I didn’t have anything else planned, within the normal time frame for a review, and what I quickly realized is that this is a movie with far more problems than people usually remember.

The two things front and center here are the wonky concept and the possibly more awkward casting. The pseudoscientific “explanation” is quite possibly the most brazenly preposterous on record, to the point that it would be convenient to disregard it. There is at least enough further humor to take the outlandish machine and its posited capabilities as tongue-in-cheek. What gets more awkward is the performances of the cast, who aren’t bad by any means but seem out to one-up each other at being more English than the actual English. Galbo stays with a somewhat generic accent that mostly emphasizes her passive damsel role. Lovelock is exaggerated but tolerable, playing the cheeky hippie to the hilt. Kennedy, however, just sounds like he’s trying to play Sean Connery drunk.

That brings us to the undead themselves, which go a long way toward making up for the movie’s considerable flaws. For the most part, they’re even more low-tech than Night of the Living Dead, set apart by their unsettling red eyes. They clearly demonstrate the ability to use tools and weapons, and for once, they are either timid or patient enough to wait to attack until they have a good chance of victory. Their finest hour is when they trap the protagonists in a crypt under a church, dispatching a luckless policeman in process. In the most curious moment, one of them reanimates several more corpses with its own blood, an unexplained anomaly that could have worked much better if the silliness with the machine had been left out entirely. What gets odd is that they remain oddly reserved even in victory, looking almost apologetic and very British as they munch on their victims. As an incidental result, the viewer will probably see less than there is on-screen.

What truly holds the movie back, however, isn’t the restraint but an overreaching ambition. This is a movie that clearly sets out to match or top the sharp political satire of Romero, as shown by this point not only in Night of the Living Dead but also The Crazies.  The painfully obvious problem is that the filmmakers fail to show any grasp of what made Romero effective (see Zombi/ Dawn of the Dead). Apart from anything else, Romero’s characters aren’t “dumb”, and usually, they aren’t willfully “evil” either. Here, on the other hand, every authority figure is rendered with less nuance and depth than a Soviet political cartoon, smugly oblivious at best and irrationally and pointlessly mean at worst. Then the real elephant not in the room is the racial angle, something Romero repeatedly dealt with powerfully without ever once having it mentioned explicitly. In this movie, everyone we’re supposed to root for is not only white but young and attractive in the bargain, missing an opportunity if not the entire point.

With all that out of the way, there’s still the “one scene”, and I’m going with a brief sequence that’s illogical and inexplicable even for this movie. Around the 40-minute mark, George is visiting a hospital where he gets in a conversation with a doctor about a futuristic-looking coffin. Suddenly, they’re interrupted by an injured nurse who cries that she has been maimed. George follows the doctor and finds the culprit… a baby. As in, an actual infant, still bloodstained. Pricelessly, the doctor merely remarks, “It’s happened again,” while the baby squirms inscrutably. Of course, it’s yet another effect of the machine, though it takes whatever George is self-medicating with to make a connection. Of course, this is vastly more intriguing than the undead, and of course, it ought to get the attention of the authorities much faster than a few roving zombies. So of course, we hear nothing more of it again.

In closing, the main thing that comes to my mind is that I’m genuinely surprised how quickly I’ve gotten through this one. For the movie itself, it may seem like I’m being too hard on this movie, and I will admit I’ close to second-guessing myself. In hindsight, what this is above all is a ‘70s horror movie, and as such, it’s well above average. It’s not up to the standards of Dawn of the Dead or Dead of Night (maybe the only movie I set aside as too good for this feature), but it’s a long way from the randomized editing and frivolous shocks that make far too many better-made films especially annoying to me. It’s by all means worth watching, at least once, and if you do, there’s still a good chance that you’ll want to watch it again. I, for one, count that as enough to pass on the curve.