{"id":10472,"date":"2015-10-25T20:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T01:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=10472"},"modified":"2015-11-05T12:24:54","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T18:24:54","slug":"let-sleeping-corpses-lie-1974-jorge-grau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/10472","title":{"rendered":"Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974, Jorge Grau)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead<\/em>, or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue<\/em> – all good titles, but I’m going with the name on the Anchor Bay box that used to stare at me from the shelves, unenticing with its generic cover art. Turns out it’s quite a good zombie movie, tense and well-photographed. It’s just like Night of the Living Dead<\/em> but with a couple extra locations (incl. Manchester Morgue), but the hidden social message in this one is that cops are just the worst. They’re bad at their jobs, abusive, intolerant, and finally cold-blooded murderers.<\/p>\n

Zombie Prime:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

They stay at The Owl Hotel. Pet owl:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Shaky start as George (Ray Lovelock of Queens of Evil<\/em> and Oh, Grandmother’s Dead<\/em>) meets Edna (Cristina Galbo of The House That Screamed<\/em> and The School That Couldn’t Scream<\/em>) when she runs over his motorcycle, then they squabble over where she’s going to drive them. Good enough dubbing, better than any Italian movie. But these two aren’t very exciting. Fortunately, they agree to visit her sister Katie (Jeannine Mestre of Jesus Franco’s Dracula<\/em>) and Katie’s husband Martin (Jose Lifante, a desk clerk in Dagon<\/a><\/em>), who hate each other and live near the field where some jerk scientists are pumping radiation into the ground to keep pests away from crops, which also turns babies and the recently-deceased into violent killers.<\/p>\n

Martin’s hobby is taking photographs of his naked, afraid, drugged-out wife and hanging them around the house:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Our heroes, trapped in the morgue with the only decent cop, PC Craig:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Martin is crushed to death by a wandering zombie, and enter Sgt. Aldo Massasso (of The Suspicious Death of a Minor<\/em>), who immediately blames the wife because she’s a heroin addict and has her locked up in hospital. The movie’s zombie mythology gets weird, as we’re told zombies can’t be photographed, and “they transmit life to each other through the blood of the living.” Martin eventually resurrects and kills his wife, but the movie is mostly focused on biker George’s attempts to escape zombies and tell the damned scientists to turn off their machine, and the Sarge’s attempts to arrest George and Edna, who he’s now telling everyone are satanists. In the end George is screaming towards a zombie-infested hospital in a stolen police car pursued by bigot cops to rescue the woman who wrecked his motorcycle and ruined his weekend, and I’m wondering why he bothers. Then Katie is infected and set aflame, and George is shot by the cops (have I mentioned Night of the Living Dead<\/em> lately?).<\/p>\n

Things don’t end well for PC Craig:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Nor for Edna:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Jorge Grau previously made Violent Blood Bath<\/em> and The Legend of Blood Castle<\/em>. Cinematographer Francisco Sempere also shot Blind Man’s Bluff<\/em> and Death Will Have Your Eyes<\/em>. Cowritten by Sandro Continenza (Crimes of the Black Cat<\/em>, Hercules and the Captive Women<\/em>) and Marcello Coscia (Virgin Killer<\/em>, Tex and the Lord of the Deep<\/em>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead, or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – all good titles, but I’m going with the name on the Anchor Bay box that used to stare at me from the shelves, unenticing with its generic cover art. Turns out it’s quite a good zombie movie, tense and well-photographed. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[400,102,2010,100],"class_list":["post-10472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1970s","tag-britain","tag-jorge-grau","tag-zombies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10472"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10678,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10472\/revisions\/10678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}