4. The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (1974)
George is taking time out of his antiques business in Manchester to go to the Lake District. On his way, a woman called Edna reverses over his motorbike and severely damages it. Pretty pissed off, he accepts a lift from Edna to his destination in Windermere, but first she has to visit her troubled sister. George runs across an agricultural experiment in which researchers are using ultrasonic frequencies to kill insects in crops. Hmmmm. I wonder if this little experiment will have any further ramifications? By the time Edna and George arrive at her drug addict sister's house, a man has killed her sister's hubby. When they report this, the policeman thinks Edna's sister - Katie - is responsible for the death. She has a breakdown and is hospitalised. In the same hospital newborn babies are being unusually aggressive and attacking their mothers and the doctors. After fleeing from the law and getting trapped in a chapel full of zombies, George and Aedna manage to survive not being eaten. The PC who was trailing them has less luck and gets ripped apart and chowed on by zombies. George has figured out it is the agricultural machine that is reanimating people and destroys it. The stupid Sergeant finds his PC's remains and believes that George and Edna are Satanists. He orders a shoot to kill policy on them. The machine is repaired and now operates again. It reanimates dead bodies in the morgue. In the hospital staff are battling for their lives amidst the zombie-induced carnage. It is too late to save Edna or George as the stupid Sergeant kills the latter. Feeling very pleased with himself for solving the case and killing George, the Sergeant must confront the enemy again at the end, and this time, he really wants a chunk of nice, juicy pig. Directed by the Spanish Jorge Grau, The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue is definitely a very underrated zombie movie. You may know it under another of its numerous titles - Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and Don't Open the Window - are two alternative titles that I can think of. Obviously any early 1970s zombie movie is going to be heavily influenced by Romero's Night of the Living Dead. We can see the influence in Manchester Morgue when Grau plumps for a similar downbeat ending as Romero's film. George the hero (like Ben) is killed off in a rather stupid fashion. But at least in Grau's film, the zombified George gets a chance to chow down on the stupid policeman. Grau's film chooses quality of zombie attacks over quantity of zombie attacks. These attacks are brutal and bloody and will shock you all the more for being measured out.