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Film
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
- Original Title: "Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti"
- Genre: Zombie
- Release Year: 1974
- Director: Jorge Grau
- Writer: J Cobos, S Continenza, M Cosci
- Running Time: 95min
- Rating: R (flesh eating, angry cops)
- Reviewed by: harbinger on sr_createdDate}
Official Blurb:
Two traveling companions, George (Ray Lovelock) and Edna Simon (Christine Galbo), come across a small town infested with the "living dead" that are satisfying their cannibalistic hunger on anyone they come across.
Review:
George is a 70s hipster art dealer headed away from town to get some quiet in Scotland and to sell a piece of art. Edna is woman headed up to Scotland to help commit her sister to rehab for heroin. These two leads encounter one another at a petrol station when Edna backs over George's motorcycle. George being the good practical sport, talks Edna into letting him drive and they set off.
As night approaches, they decide to goto Edna's place first.. but getting lost along the way, they stop for directions. George goes and asks a local farmer. The Farmer it turns out is testing a machine from the Ministry Of Agriculture that uses ultra-sonic waves to drive low brain function critters, like insects, mad, thereby preventing them from harming the crops.
Meanwhile, we start to discover one of the side effects of this machine.. a recently deceased local vagrant emerges to quickly terrorize Edna who is still in the car. The viewer quickly discovers that this machine is responsible for the occurrence of zombiedom.. since the recently dead have no real brain functions. This is something that takes the characters a short time to discover.... with the added bonus effect of having a baby bite the finger off a nurse.. so.. the baby wasn't a zombie.. but babies do have limited brain functions. Kudos to Jorge Grau for adding that little fun scene!
It takes the characters a bit to realize that the zombies are in fact zombies... Grau uses a rational 'real person' approach to how people react to the zombies. At first no one believes it, then the people that witness it first hand do, but the authorities do not, since they haven't seen it first hand.
The one thing that sticks out that is odd about this movie is that the first zombie is created by the sound machine, but that zombie can spread its zombiedom via blood. They don't really explain it, but it happens. The zombies themselves are also 'flash-pot' zombies, much like you would expect a Vampire when hit with sunlight, the zombies quickly burn when coming in contact with fire. Needless to say the lack of zombie evidence once slain in this matter help the scientifically minded police in denial of the zombie menace, and keep perusing George and Edna with the belief that they are crazed murderers on a rampage.
What I liked:
- The scientific and logical approach to the zombiedom. In the bonus material is an interview with the director, and he steps though some of the process of thought he put into the logical causality of a few of the film features.
- There is a heavy influence of Night of the Living Dead. On the interview with Grau on the DVD, he plainly states that he loved NotLD and it was a prime motivator to the scriptwriters and his film direction.
What I didn't like:
- Anyone that has seen other European film of the era (Fulci's 'Zombi' for example) will be familiar the 'feel' for the voice dubbing on this film. You can tell some of the actors are native English speakers, and some aren't. Some of the dubbing seems 'off' from that movement of the characters lips. It's not as bad as many Italian movies in that the actors are clearly not speaking English, but you can tell something is 'off' with the dubs. That said, if my biggest complaint is the dubbing to English, it's not all that bad.
Rating:
Final Scoring:
4.0 Zombie Heads of a possible
5 Zombie Heads
Personal Recommendation: Toss it in your Netflix queue when you get a chance
Availablity:
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