Radioactive hubris in the English countryside unleashes ‘The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’
By: Lucas Hardwick
Tags: Film Reviews, Horror Movies, Zombies, Film, Horror

Radioactive hubris in the English countryside unleashes ‘The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’ Lucas Hardwick Follow Jul 27 · 7 min read

The zombification of the human race isn’t going to arrive in the form of a relentless virus or a stupid shadow agency or some damned governmental mandate conspiracy theory to make us wear masks. Instead, our undead destiny lies in the fate of the pepper weevil and our irresponsible place at the top of the food chain.

Title card for ‘The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue.’

According to an article from the Canada Broadcasting Corporation, in 2016 the diabolical pepper weevil, unsympathetic towards the human proclivity for food with, you know, flavor, managed to obliterate Ontario pepper crops to the tune of around $83 million, and that doesn’t include costs to manage the infestation. But fear not, your salsa is safe as researchers from the University of Guelph — also human and thus also at the top of the food chain — developed a plan to clobber a mess of lab-hatched pepper weevils with the right amount of cobalt-60 radiation to make them sterile, but still ambitious enough to keep them horny, and release them into the wild in a long-game — not short of playing God — that will crack down on the pest’s desire to thrive under the supple skin of one of our most prolific flavoring agents.

And now that pesticides are out of the picture, we can all hope for a better tomorrow full of peppers and any other crop formerly destroyed by weevils without the toxic impact on the environment. Well, not necessarily. Since cobalt-60 doesn’t occur naturally, because why would it be that easy, its existence instead depends on your desire to charge your smartphone — so you can share this article later with all your friends on social media — with electricity that is likely generated from a nuclear power plant. And because it requires neutron reactivity with iron, cobalt-60 literally depends on the physical structure of the power plant itself.

All that sounds pretty boring and is a pretty deep rabbit hole to get to my point, but hang in there. The fun part of weevil annihilation isn’t only in the fact that they don’t know it’s happening, but that it’s happening as the cobalt-60 decays into dreaded gamma rays that we always hear about wiping out entire star systems in sci-fi flicks. Okay, so it’s not enough gamma radiation to turn the infesting population of weevils into ash, but that’s not what we wanted anyway; instead, it’s just enough to get ’em shooting blanks so we can enjoy our peppers. But if we see this plot all the way through, we won’t even need peppers anymore because we’ll be undead cannibals and the weevils can go back to nesting in red bells and poblanos while we go about our inevitable self-destruction.

Of course this all means I’m talking about Jorge Grau’s 1974 zombie flick The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, a.k.a. the more relevant Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, a.k.a. the poetic Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead (Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti), a.k.a the less relevant but curious Breakfast At Manchester Morgue, a.k.a. the even less relevant and ridiculous Don’t Open The Window, a.k.a about 11 other titles of varying pertinence.

The film opens in a montage alluding to world collapse as we’re bombarded with images of pollution, drug use, and the time-honored, yet out of fashion pestilence of streaking, all as a complacent society ignores the writing on the wall and grumbles through existence. But our protagonist, the progressive, hippieish antique dealer George Meaning (Ray Lovelock) has plans to escape this hellish path to annihilation as he rides his motorcycle to the English countryside for a weekend of setting up his new house with friends.

After a quick stop for petrol gets George’s motorcycle smashed by girl-next-door beauty Edna Simmons (Cristina Galbó), the two end up sharing her car that ideally will eventually get them both to their separate destinations — Edna to her sister Katie’s (Jeannine Mestre) and George to his countryside cottage. But the road to Hell — or in this case, South Gate — is paved with good intentions, and while Edna isn’t clear on how exactly to get where she needs to go, George stops to ask a farmer, who happens to be having his crop irradiated for pests, for directions.

As Edna awaits George’s return, she’s accosted, but unharmed by none other than undead Guthrie Wilson (Fernando Hilbeck) who recently drowned himself in the nearby river.

Meanwhile that night, Undead Guthrie turns out to be hiding in the shack where Edna’s sister Katie (Jeannine Mestre) is enjoying a little China white, and chases her to the river where her husband Martin is snapping photos. A brief struggle results in Martin’s death, and Guthrie’s escape, and soon the fascist police inspector played by Arthur Kennedy is on the scene and isn’t about to hear any nonsense about a dead man coming back to life to kill poor Martin. So the Inspector sets his sights to only where a fascist possibly could, on that of filthy hippies George and Edna.

And we’re off into a slow-burn zombie mystery thriller, as George and Edna bop around bucolic England trying to prove their innocence and unravel the mystery of the undead man in black seen thus far only by Edna and Katie.

If you’ve seen one zombie flick, you’ve seen ’em all, but that’s not stopped about 60,000 films from being made on the topic, and lest we forget the AMC series The Walking Dead is still chugging along with only remnants of the original cast remaining as it enters its 80th season this fall. So in spite of the fairly single-minded tropes of virus-infesting, brain-eating, and head-lobbing that typically serve as the driving force for most zombie movies, the genre has really powered through film history as a mainstay of macabre fascination. And every so often, we get a zombie flick that manages to defy what we already know and either gives us something new to work into the mythology or finagles a way to make the gore that we show up for mean more than just a thrilling bloody rubber spectacle. George Romero gave us the zombie as cannibal in Night of the Living Dead along with an unintentional social commentary. Dan O’Bannon gave us more specific brain-eating zombies who could run in the 1985 horror-comedy Return of the Living Dead. And the most fascinating innovation for zombies arrived in the 2008 Bruce McDonald film Pontypool, based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, where a language based virus causes its victims to repeat a word over and over until they no longer know what it means, wrecking their brains to the point of zombification.

This more intelligent approach to a zombie movie shouldn’t come as a surprise with a guy like Jorge Grau at the helm. Before Manchester, Grau worked mostly directing more conventional films. And since Grau wasn’t a genre filmmaker, his attraction to Manchester was its potential for ecological commentary, and Grau successfully balances all the fun things that keep us going to zombie movies with the precision of intelligent, well-paced storytelling with a message without ramming it down our throats.

The exposition for George and Edna is particularly compelling because they start out as foils for one another, and without ever consciously acknowledging a love story — with the exception of the final moments of the film — the compassion the two grow to have for one another becomes palpable and we’re rooting for these two to make it out alive because they love each other, right!? But Grau never tells us that’s what happening, and instead, George and Edna earn that projection from us as they endure the undead onslaught together. And no matter how many times George says he’s bailing, Edna bats her eyes and gives him her best, “Please, George,” and he’s right back in the shit.

I can also say I’ve rarely witnessed a more subdued yet terrifying look for a zombie on film. I know I’m not supposed to say this but, makeup artist Giannetto De Rossi’s zombies in this movie are far more convincing than the ones in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and aren’t as distractingly grotesque as in Lucio Fulci’s Zombi — whose zombies were also made up by De Rossi. Also, the physically staccato performance by Fernando Hilbeck as the undead Guthrie was especially chilling in his first moments on screen as he jerked his way into frame terrifying poor Edna.

After a fairly lengthy but relevant exposition, things get really hairy for George and Edna as they become trapped in a crypt with Guthrie who uses the blood of a recent victim to revive the other deceased nearby, launching them on a cannibalistic frenzy.



Bravo to screenwriters Sandro Continenza and Marcello Coscia for coming up with a new way to make zombies using radiation as pesticide. Extra points for even broadening the range from a mile radius to a five mile radius in the middle of the film to ensure our eventual doom.

As the body count grows, the undead count grows even more, and by the end, in a twist that doesn’t undo the film, but rather causes you to shift allegiance, the fate of the world becomes pretty clear and Grau makes you feel okay with it. What we have is a case of progressives — George and Edna — caught between fascistic oppression and science that’s so far up its own ass that it couldn’t possibly be responsible for the rash of undead cannibals combing the countryside. And in a clever bit of irony, perhaps unintentionally, but I doubt it, Grau symbolically tells us who’s truly undead.

It’s not often a genre flick can do genre this well without tossing good storytelling out the window and going full-bore entertainment — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s especially satisfying when you get great storytelling with Caro syrup, rubber, and latex. Produced by Italians, directed by a Spaniard, and filmed in England, and remaining true to zombie innovation in the early days of the First Zombie Renaissance of the late 60s and early 70s, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is smarter than your average zombie and transcends its genre trappings just enough to make a statement without making you feel stupid for showing up just for a zombie film.

Four stars.

(Blu-ray release from Synapse Films)