Now if you are a horror fan or a zombie fan, this film definately fits the bill. This takes place in the rural parts of England, mostly outside of Manchester. The premise is based around a newly introduced couple, one heading to visit her sister and the other a salesman in antiquities who mistakenly meet when the woman puts the salesman's motorcycle in shop after hitting it at a gas station. The two, taking trips to the outskirts of Manchester, head out together to their destinations, soon find that all is not well in the rural farm lands of Manchester. Odd attacks that lead to the deaths of folks have occurred and the leads are eventually placed in situations of life and death unaware of who is the murderer since it appears the murderer is mistaken for someone that is already dead. The lead male, however, soon concludes that an expirmental and environmentally friendly agricultural tractor using magnetic and radio waves to kill the insect pests of crops may in some way be causing the recently dead to rise from the grave.
A cat and mouse game begins between the local police chief, played by the splendid character actor Arthur Kennedy (Lawrence of Arabia), and the salesman who continues his rants about living dead, irresponsible government science, and having been at the wrong place at the wrong time during the deaths of constables. This leads to a number of scenes of suspense, horror, and unfortunate calamity. With the word of only the salesman, the police scoff at him and his rants and begin to believe with a great amount of circumstantial evidence that maybe he is the guilty one. When the small number of zombies do attack around the epicenter of the agricultural machine, they leave no one alive to validate his facts and soon the salesman finds himself wanted by the police.
This movie is a classic for the genre. The screenplay takes a great deal of care making the zombie epicenter a very localized occurrence. This makes the film feel much more realistic (for a subject that is supernatural). Having a lone survivor of a morgue attack at a cemetary or a hospital have no one backing their stories with the only evidence being recently autopsied dead bodies appearing defiled by the witness and doctors or morticians killed is ingenious. This is no apocalyptic film. This is pure horror, localized and limited to a small section of a small village.
The movie does have some flaws, though minor in detail. Some of the dialogue is dated (Arthur Kennedy's police chief rant about hippies was classic). The gratuitous B-movie blood and boobs crowd seem to get an unexplained full frontal nude woman in a wig run across the streets of Manchester for no apparent reason at the beginning of the film. I actually still don't know what the point of that was especially when the director could have gotten some non-gratuitious nudity in the film later for such a crowd. There were a few contrivances that could have been tightened up. And a tacked on ending was not needed and should have been dropped completely from the film; in the documentary on disk 2, the lead actor even says this stating the film could have been ended a minute earlier at a more brilliant conclusion.
The DVD has many extras and is definately a nice package. For the film, and its genre, it most certainly is rated 5 out of 5 stars.
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September 25, 2006 "Please retry" | — | 1 | $49.71 | $19.98 |
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Reviews with images
The Best Zombie Movie you've never seen fully uncut - until now!
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is known by many titles, including Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and Don't Open the Window. But this newly re-mastered edition from Synapse Films (supervised by restoration specialist and film historian Don May Jr. and scanned in 4K) delivers the most complete cut of the film with the most accurate color and inarguably the most gorgeous transfer since it debuted at the Sitges Film Festival back in 1974.While not the first film to be inspired by Night of the Living Dead (1968) it was one of the first color zombie films to get a wide release in its wake, and predates Night’s own official sequel, Dawn of the Dead, by four years. Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) featured reanimated corpses, but their condition was not contagious in adherence with the precedent established by John Russo and George Romero. Director Jorge Grau ran with that concept, but Manchester Morgue arrived early enough in the modern cycle of zombie lore that the official rules had not been fully established. And so the film’s strong social message, a sort of ecological cautionary tale, has also become part of the fabric of zombie fiction–straight through to The Walking Dead.Grau got his start in much the same way as Italian horror maestro, Mario Bava –as an assistant to Riccardo Freda. Like Bava before him, Grau had a gift for camera placement and a proclivity for realistic violence, but coming from Spain, Jorge brought an earthy surrealism to his films that made him a unique talent in the European film industry.in 1974, Manchester was an industrial metropolis, making it the ideal setting for a horror film addressing the dangers of pollution. While not quite as bleak as Joy Division lyrics might have one believe, it was not uncommon to see regular people wearing face-masks or to see factory smoke darkening the clouds above the city. The first hints of something amiss are manifested in babies and explained via television sets and radios rather than hitting audiences over the head with obvious shots in hospitals. This allows Grau to foreshadow the coming horrors without committing to a specific motif. Groundbreaking Italian make-up specialist Gianetto Di Rossi infused the film with extremely gory FX that imparted a more realistic flesh tone, blood tint, and medically accurate viscera to the violence than prior or even subsequent horror films. Di Rossi would go on to great fame for his work on Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, which established an entire cottage industry of Italian films which contributes to Manchester Morgue’s long-lived reputation as a bonafide (if rarely screened) splatter classic.Five-time Oscar nominee Arthur Kennedy lends a conservative check to hippie Ray Lovelock with the former as a staunch police inspector and the latter an aloof art dealer, who find themselves uneasily united in a battle against the risen dead. And while the dialogue puts the politics of the day on display, the frank depiction of hard drug use and public nudity were quite ahead of their time, giving an almost Almodovar-esque flavor to what is otherwise a graphically violent horror film.The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue has long been championed by an influential cabal of filmmakers from the generation of rabid film fans who were forced to track down clandestine, tenth-generation copies on videotape in the pre-DVD era. Among them is Shaun of the Dead’s Edgar Wright, who has declared it one of his favorite zombie films of all time.Thanks to Synapse Films you don’t have to surf the dark web in search of this previously banned video nasty. You can get a smart, three-disc package absolutely loaded with extras for less than your average Criterion Collection release. The deluxe steelbook package also includes a CD of the film's very effective score by Giuliano Sorgini, who also supplied a memorable score to 1977's The Beast in Heat. A feature-length documentary on Jorge Grau includes some of the last footage ever captured of the director, who passed away in 2018, and Gianetto De Rossi is the focus of another documentary that covers his storied career in special FX make-up. Both are well produced and incredibly informative.The list of overlooked horror classics gets smaller every year, and The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is not just worthy of its legendary reputation, it has gotten better with age. We may never see practical special effects this good again, and it may be another fifty years before we see another horror film with such lasting impact. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2008
Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2018
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2020
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2007
Top reviews from other countries
BorderBoy
No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos.
Reviewed in Mexico on March 29, 2024
BorderBoy
Reviewed in Mexico on March 29, 2024
Es de esas películas oldies que son buenas, que no tuvieron tanto reconocimiento, pero que con el paso del tiempo obtienen status de culto.
No soy fan de cintas de zombies pero esta me agrado bastante, es diferente, vale la pena.
Esta edición de Synapse tiene la película en Blu-ray, en dvd y con el cd del score; además de un póster y un libro con notas de producción; todo envuelto en un Steelbook con su respectivo slipcover.
La edición tiene audio en inglés y subtítulo en inglés.
NO tiene audio ni subtítulo en español.
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Gizzy
A true example of horror done to perfection.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2023
Eric D. Leach
One of the finest and original classic genre movies of all time.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 27, 2012trmaxx
Big improvement on blue underground release
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2023