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THE
LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE
7/10
alternative
titles include : No Profanar el Sueno de los Muertos (Spain) /
Non si Deve Profanare il Sonno dei Morti (Italy) / Don’t Open
the Window (USA) / Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Spain/Italy 1974 : Jorge Grau : 93 mins
ONE-LINE
REVIEW: Cheerfully brazen Euro-gore twist on Night of the Living Dead
makes the most of some remote English locations, but is let down
by a heavy-handed political subtext – not to mention the hero’s silly
dubbed voice.
Apparently
one of only three feature-films ever made with ‘Manchester’ in the title,
Grau’s grisly eco-fable is by far the best known (hands up anyone who’s
seen the silent Manchester Man adaptation or Malay comedy From
Jemapoh to Manchester.) Revered by cultists as the first horror movie
made in stereo sound, it was even banned for a time during the video-nasty
scare – though conspiracy theorists suspect this more to do with its presentation
of north-western cops as fascist brutes, than the brief interludes of
hard-core gore.
Sadly,
there’s no ‘Manchester Morgue’ in Manchester Morgue – in fact,
there’s hardly any Manchester at all. The first shots show our hippy-antique-dealer
hero George (Lovelock) in his boutique just around from the Cathedral,
then he roars off on his motorbike down what looks like John Dalton Street.
After this, we explore some obscure corners of Cumbria and Derbyshire.
The Peak District masquerades as the Lakes, which is where George discovers
a Ministry of Agriculture radio-wave experiment designed to eliminate
pesky crop-gnawing insects – with the unfortunate side-effect of reviving
recently deceased humans as cannibal zombies.
It’s
a brazen rip-off of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, of
course, but the Spanish director make effectively spooky use of some back-of-beyond
locales, and the zombie attacks are still pretty strong stuff. There’s
also an intriguing (if heavy-handed) political angle - Grau was working
under Franco’s dictatorship, which perhaps explains why the government
and police, not the hapless, flesh-tearing nosferatu, emerge as the real
villains of the piece.
click
here for a much longer look at The
Manchester Morgue
15th
July 2002
(seen on DVD, 9th July 2002)
by Neil
Young
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