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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.
“I
hope you get very scared and that you suffer profoundly” – Jorge Grau.
Trendy
antique-dealer George Meaning (Italian star “Ray Lovelock”) heads off
to the countryside for a quiet weekend. After a motorbike mishap, he falls
in with Edna (wooden Cristina Galbo), who’s travelling to visit relatives.
When Edna is attacked by a glassy-eyed tramp (striking Fernando Hilbeck),
it’s the first sign that something is very wrong – the tramp has been
dead and (supposedly) buried for a week. Investigating further, George
discovers that the government’s ‘Agricultural Department’ has been conducting
experimental ultrasound tests in the area designed “to destroy insects
and parasites” by messing up their nervous systems. But the tests have
the additional effect of bringing the recently dead to murderous life,
and the zombies soon leave a bloody path of havoc in their wake. The police
prefer a more rational explanation for the murders, however, and the hippyish
George appeals to the cop in charge (Arthur Kennedy) as a suitable suspect…
Like
every good Euro-horror, the breezily unapologetic Night of the Living
Dead rip-off known by its Spanish director as No Profanar el Sueno
de los Muertos (literally ‘Don’t Disturb the Dream of the Dead’) has
been released under a confusing plethora of different titles. But it’s
as The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue – memorably juxtaposing
the lurid and the mundane - that the film has attained cult status. So
it’s somewhat baffling to see the enterprising Anchor Bay company choosing
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie for the long-overdue DVD release, relegating
the better-known ‘Manchester Morgue’ tag to small print on the front of
the box.
Perhaps
it’s because, famously, there is no Manchester morgue in The
Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue – we see Manchester, and a morgue,
and a van marked ‘Manchester Mortuary’. But the re-animation is precisely
confined to a five-mile radius that includes the fictional backwater of
‘Southgate’. Then again, in a way it’s somehow appropriate that a Spanish-Italian
co-production, featuring an almost entirely Spanish and Italian cast and
crew, with most of its interiors shot in Madrid – but explicitly set and
largely filmed in the UK – should spawn decades of geographical confusion.
Some
commentators, for instance, think that the striking opening sequence –
showing a dystopian seventies inner-city Britain, choked with fumes, strewn
with litter, caked with grime – is set in London.
But
Grau’s shots of Manchester cathedral, Deansgate and John Dalton Street
(however fleeting) reveal the exact location of George’s trendy boutique.
We follow him as he takes off through the mean city streets – past a population
so desensitised they don’t bat an eyelid when a buxom streaker runs naked
in their midst – and out into the open countryside. But what countryside,
exactly?
Nearly
all sources routinely locate the film’s action in ‘The Lake District’.
And we see a road-sign indicating the junction of the A5075 and the A590
– just outside Levens, Cumbria, a county that is indeed dominated by the
Lakes’ picture-box scenery. But while Levens itself isn’t part of the
Lake District, it’s as close as the movie ever gets. The main action unfolds
in the much less tourist-infested Peak District – specifically
around Castleton, Hathersage and Dovedale, in Derbyshire.
Hathersage
is cited by Grau in the interview that’s part of the Anchor Bay DVD’s
extra features (the subtitle reads ‘Attersedge’) as the location for a
memorable sequence that foreshadows the climax of John Carpenter’s The
Fog (1979). Attacked by the living dead in a graveyard, George holes
himself up in the nearby church, along with a local bobby. When the cop
makes a desperate sortie for help, he’s soon downed by the zombies – who
proceed to disembowel him and devour his entrails in one of the film’s
numerous surprisingly hardcore moments of convincing gore.
But
while the sympathetic copper’s sacrifice is explicitly heroic, Grau’s
instincts – as he confesses in the DVD interview – are very much anti-authoritarian.
His “mistrust of men in uniform” is understandable given the fact that
he was living under General Franco’s Fascist dictatorship at the time.
On one level, Manchester Morgue is of course a sensationalist piece
of standard exploitation horror – but Grau’s political subtext is fairly
hard to miss. The disastrous pest-control scheme is a government initiative
(best of luck to them, incidentally, if they believe that insects even
have such a thing as a central nervous system) – and then there’s
the full-bore reactionary caricature that is Kennedy, who gets to snarl
more than his share of the script’s most heavy-handed dialogue.
Generally
fed up with modern society’s “permissive rot”, Kennedy’s cop sees George
as the epitome of all that’s wrong with the world, taking his “long hair
and faggot clothes” as a personal affront. As a sympathetic representative
of the swinging Seventies, however, George is no Peter Fonda. When first
glimpsed, he’s pottering around his antique shop, kitted out in tie and
cardigan. And though he soon takes to the highways on his motorbike, resplendent
in leather coat and shades, this Maurice Gibb lookalike blows his cool
as soon as he opens his mouth.
Dubbed
into English, George’s voice makes him sound like a camp, creepy square
– a sardonic mixture of Michael Caine, Kenneth Williams and Peter Cook’s
E L Wisty. He’s quite staggeringly unsympathetic towards Edna, and it’s
only when the even more unappealing the cop appears on the scene that
George emerges as any kind of likeable action hero – though this says
more about the cop than his bete noire – as he turns machine-breaking
Luddite.
George’s
voice manages to damagingly undercut the film’s more disturbing elements
– the zombie attack sequences may be unexpectedly extreme in their violence
and gore, but even more shocking is their aftermath, in which the hollow-eyed
nosferatu placidly munch on the internal organs of their victims. And
having them revive their fellow corpses by means of smearing blood on
the eyelids is a nice, quasi-religious touch (even if it isn’t developed
to any significant degree – though George does comment “it’s not my fault
if Christ and the saints aren’t in fashion!”) While the whole plot is
quite engagingly loopy, it does hang together more coherently than you’d
expect, given some of the wilder convolutions of Grau’s imagination.
There
may not be anything in his directorial contribution to match the striking
originality of his location choices, but the Peak District backgrounds
do ensure that Manchester Morgue is always interesting to look
at – and Grau, largely resisting the urge to indulge in then-trendy zooms,
does through in the odd effective arty touch, like a vicious nocturnal
murder illuminated by the intermittent glare of an automatic camera flashbulb.
But while it may be easy on the eye, the film is often tough on the ear
– supposedly this is the first horror film made in full stereo sound,
and Grau does his level best to push the new technology as far as it will
go. He crafts an elaborate cacophony of throbbing heart-beats, electrical
distortions, animal groans and corpse-rattle sighs – but, typically, can’t
resist padding out the score with a generous helping of standard-issue
seventies cheese.
15th
July 2002
(seen on DVD, 9th July 2002)
by Neil
Young
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