Sep 03 2004
Movie: “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” (1974)
“Let sleeping corpses lie” (1974) directed by Jorge Grau.
(”The Living Dead at the manchester Morgue”, “Zombi 3″ and “Don’t open the window”)
(MF Title: “Ministry of agriculture re-animates the dead!”)
Starring: Cristina Galbó, Ray Lovelock, Arthur Kennedy, Aldo Massasso, Giorgio Trestini and Roberto Posse.
Zombie Film Rating: 
Summary: George is travelling to his house in a remote section of the English countryside, and while stopping for fuel his motorcycle is run over (nope, not kidding) by Edna, who is travelling in roughly the same direction to visit her recovering heroin addict sister Katie.
Naturally Edna offers George a ride to his house, and they become lost in the countryside. Eventually they reach Katies house, immediately following the murder of her husband by a lone zombie. The police attend and immediately suspect Katie, the lead investigator (Arthur Kennedy) is a bigotted old school cop who distrusts the “hippies” he is dealing with, and of course any suggestion of zombies is to be disregarded.
We now continue into a rather stilted and slow start to the film, where the authorities have no interest in investigating the crime (having already found a drug addicted hippie criminal as their suspect) and where George and Edna have to discover the truth before its too late.
Predictably every effort made to discover the truth puts George and Edna at the scenes of assorted other crimes, and merely serves to solidify the suspicions of the inspector. Naturally with the death of a police officer assigned to follow George and Edna the inspector wants little more than to see the “hippies” dead.
Now of course as the movie develops we discover that an experimental agricultural device (along the lines of a microwave) that is designed to kill bugs seems to reanimate the dead. Georges best efforts to disable this device fail, and instead (through some wierd ritual that I never did figure out) the zombies reanimate other zombies, creating their own little army of the undead.
The film culminates in a zombie assault on the hospital where Edna has been taken, and George does his level best to save her from the zombies that are seemingly overrunning the countryside.
The final confrontation results in the destruction of the evidence that zombies are out there, and the inspector kills George. In the mildly ironic ending George (now a zombie) tracks down the inspector and kills him, just after we’ve learnt that the new Agricultural machines have been accepted for wide testing, and their range has been expanded!
Critique: A fairly early entry to the post “night”, pre “dawn” zombie films, this one used a fair bit of gore and despite the occasionally slow pacing made for quite an entertaining film.
I have to admit I enjoyed the agricultural angle, it beats yet ANOTHER chemical spill as the trigger event.