A strange, easily forgotten, but actually highly entertaining and
genuinely scary horror movie from 1974 with some local
interest for me as I come from Manchester.
There are actually a huge number of alternative titles, as given on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Sleeping_Corpses_Lie though I have rolled with that by which it is best known. Here are the known alternatives.
No profanen el sueño de los muertos
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Non profanare il sonno dei morti
Don't Open the Window
Da dove vieni?
The Living Dead
Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue
Breakfast With the Dead
Brunch with the Dead
Despite its most commonly cited title, little of the film is set in Manchester, and what little was filmed in the city is supposed to be set in London, as the hero escapes the rat race on his motorbike for a quiet life in the countryside. The opening credit scenes show a rather bleak view of pre-Arndale Centre Oldham Street and Collyhurst in the Northern Quarter. A lot of Selnec buses go by, and there is a fleeting glimpse of a streaker who may have just been
genuinely captured on camera by chance.
The rest of the film takes place in The Lake District, which the Spanish director, George Grau, seems to think is Manchester.
The hero, a rather gruff, humourless arrogant hippy, played by Ray Lovelock, finds his bike damaged by reckless reversing by a young lady driver, played by Cristina Galbo. George (Lovelock) insists on travelling with her until his bike is fixed.
Edna, (Galbo) is trying to get to her sister, who is a heroine addict, on the brink of being sectioned and forced to go cold turkey by her exasperated husband. As George stops to ask directions from a group of farmers experimenting with
radiation transmitters that serve as an clean alternative to pesticides, Edna is chased by a madman, who is soon identified as ‘Guthrie The Looney’, a local tramp known to have drowned himself in a nearby river weeks before hand. The shuffling, silent, Rasputin like Guthrie now somehow reaches Edna’s sister and husband before George and Edna travel the same distance by car – getting lost on the torturous route. He genuinely looks like a corpse, as do all the zombies raised by the radiation experiments and by each other’s bites.
The sister seems to enjoy watching her husband get murdered by Guthrie, seeing it as a chance for freedom from being locked away, but when the police arrive, just at the same time as George and Edna, they assume that the travellers are the real killers, even accusing them of Satanism, The policeman, played wonderfully by Arthur Kennedy is mean and genuinely nasty to everyone, and he has some great one liners.
George struggles to believe Edna really saw the deceased Guthrie walking about, so he takes her to the cemetery to see his corpse. The police follow, knowing the couple are hiding something, but not knowing what, and everyone except the unbelieving inspector ends up trapped in the graveyard as the zombies rise in serious numbers. One smashes a tombstone over the head of the one sympathetic cop on the case. A cut, lost scene shows an old dead woman chewing his eyeball. No prints of the scene exist any more (the film was banned for years as a video nasty under God’s Cop James Anderton’s rampage against entertainment. (The irony of the Arthur Kennedy character behaving like him is not lost on many today).
As the distraught sister of Edna is taken to the hospital to be forced to go cold turkey, the zombies close in, besieging the hospital, killing Edna and her sister, killing many, but George is shot down by the Inspector, who tells him that he wishes the dead could rise up, so he could kill him again. He doesn’t get a chance. As he arrives home, George has risen from the dead and kills him in his house.
A closing shot shows the radiation transmitter still doing its job.
There are lots of inventive ideas here, though much doesn’t make sense either, i.e. how the zombies seem to get to very set locations very quickly; why Guthrie is still in the river after he was supposedly fished out and buried; why there are mortuary trucks with wide advertising labels telling everyone as much.
There are genuinely grim moments too; the zombie attack in the cemetery is genuinely brutal, and more so for being set in broad daylight. At the hospital, the radiation makes new born babies attack the nurses, and there are shots of people being carried off in solid steel coffins, clearly designed to be escape proof, suggesting that the authorities know more than they are letting on.
That the film was made by Italians, in Derbyshire and Italy, but set mostly in Windermere, and has Manchester in its title, but passes two minutes of social history worthy stock footage of Manchester off as London adds to its eccentric charm. For those not of a nervous disposition, it’s a true underground classic, with a haunting ecology message to boot – Greenpeace don’t tell us that radiation will raise the dead and turn babies into cannibals. Maybe they should.
Arthur Chappell