DURING my youth, I had a ‘must-see’ list of weird and wonderful films that were almost impossible to find but that I was desperate to view all the same. At the very top of that list was The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue.
I’d seen stills and read reviews of Spanish director Jorge Grau’s 1974 zombie epic, but its inclusion on the infamous video nasty blacklist of the late 1980s made it a tough film to track down.
When I finally did get to see the film, it was on a murky VHS tape that was so overviewed it threatened to snap every time you re-wound it. It was worth the effort, though, as it turned out to be every bit as good as I’d hoped it would be - and then some.
Whip-crack smart, gloriously gory and hugely entertaining, it swiftly became my favourite zombie film ever. You can keep your George Romero efforts, for me, Jorge Grau wins hands down and corpse up every time.
Thankfully, these days even once notorious ‘nasties’ are given the kind of respect and love they deserve and The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue is available to enjoy in pristine re-mastered and extras heavy Blu-ray editions like the one just released by Synapse home entertainment.
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What sets this Spanish/Italian co-production apart from the hordes of undead who lurch through 1970s genre cinema is its setting. All the guts-grabbing and entrail-spilling that takes place does so not against an urban city backdrop, but rather in the lush rolling hills of the Derbyshire Dales. It’s essentially a Euro horror feast staged in picture postcard England, and all the better for it.
Ray Lovelock is George, a typical early-70s hippie travelling through England who gets involved in a minor traffic collision with a woman called Edna (Cristina Galbo), who reverses into his motorbike in the pollution-filled streets of Manchester.
Acknowledging that it’s her fault, she offers to take George wherever he wants to go - although she informs him she’ll need to call in to see her long estranged drug addict sister along the way.
As they travel, they witness men out in the rural fields operating some strange machinery that apparently emits radioactive waves which kill off nasty insects in the soil by turning them against one another. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the radiation also turns new-born babies rabid with aggression and raises the recently dead from their graves.
Before they know it, re-animated corpses are staggering through the countryside disembowelling and eating anyone that gets it their way.
As George and Edna are outsiders in the rural wilds a bigoted police officer (Arthur Kennedy) believes they are involved in the surge of murderous activity and so they must hang around the Dales while the blood and horror escalates.
Everything on screen, from Giannetto De Rossi’s gruesome makeup effects to the thumping, sinister score by Giuliano Sorgini, adds to the atmosphere of dread and sickly evil with the end result being a zombie film that’s truly unforgettable from start to finish.
