Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Jorge Grau's Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) is easily one of the best zombie movies I've ever seen, and I've seen a whole damn bunch. Sleeping Corpses combines the technical mastery of George Romero and the mood and gore of such Italian greats as Lucio Fulci and Lamberto Bava.

When a string of mysterious murders rocks the idyllic English countryside, the police suspect a cult of Satanists, and turn their investigations to newcomers George and Edna. Now the two Londoners must race to prove the real cause: reanimated corpses brought back by an experimental alternative to pesticides.

This film is pretty solid. It has a fair amount of zombie gore, but is by no means over-the-top. Screenwriter Sandro Continenza has put a unique (and environmentally-conscious) twist on Romero's zombie origins mythos. The effects, of course, were standard for the time, which is to say that they are organic and make-up based, rather than digital.

The film starts at a leisurely pace, but by the end, the tension and action are at a fever pitch, culminating in a blood bath at the creepy local hospital/insane asylum. Most of the film is shot at night or around dusk, the twilight melding with the eerie sets to create a deep sense of dread and foreboding.

One of the truly great aspects of Sleeping Corpses is the scale of the zombie outbreak. So many zombie movies, particularly those of the last 10 years or so, feature an apocalyptic pandemic-style outbreak, wherein zombiehood is pathogenic and highly communicable. Because of the constraints of the zombie origin in Sleeping Corpses, the outbreak is actually quite minor, confined to a few miles of the English back country. And zombiehood is only communicable under very specific circumstances.

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) was rumored to be a commentary on the Vietnam War. Similarly, there is a very strong counterculture subtext in Jorge Grau's Sleeping Corpses. The zombies represent hippies in the eyes of the mainstream: mysterious, cultish, and dangerous. The zombie outbreak is created and unwittingly propagated by the "establishment," the authorities, so to speak. And the only people who know the truth are the misfits, the outsiders, the dirty hippies.

All in all, a very enjoyable film, although I was fairly disappointed with the ending, which is beyond all common sense and logic (even for a zombie movie), and basically feels like Grau giving in to what he thinks his audience would need for a satisfying conclusion.

Storyline & plot: 8/10
Cinematography & effects: 7/10
Music & mood: 7/10
Performances: 5/10

The Reverend says: 7/10