'Your tearing flesh will scream for death!' (The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (DVD)
Date:	16.02.08 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice locations, the zombies look good

Disadvantages: The film is tedious and lacking in shocks

A review of just the film - the UK DVD has no extras and will set you back about £10 on amazon.

This is a zombie flick from 1974, yet another film that found itself on the video nasties list back in the 80s. It's an Italian/Spanish co-production filmed in England. In spite of the title, none of the action takes place in Manchester.

An annoying hippie art dealer, George, sets off for a holiday in the Lake District. His bike is ruined by a woman, Edna, hitting it with her car. As luck would have it, an experimental pest-control method involving sound waves has the side effect of reanimating the dead (don't worry - I doubt this could happen in real life). George and Edna have to try to avoid being eaten by zombies, and also have the police on their tail - naturally, they get blamed for all the people the zombies kill.

This film has a high reputation among fans of 70s Euro-horror. As a fan myself, I honestly can't understand why. It stands out in the sense that the mid-70s was before the boom in Euro zombie movies, but it isn't particularly good. The best thing about it is probably the location filming in the Lake District, which looks great.

The characters are a profoundly tedious lot. George is really obnoxious, having a chip on his shoulder about something we never discover; he's abrasive and rude and generally tiresome. We're expected to root for him but are never given any reason to. Edna is very pretty but is an utterly generic female in peril who gets hysterical, simpers, and relies on men to do all the important stuff, like thinking. (And... George and Edna? Only a foreigner would choose names like those for trendy 20-something protagonists in 70s England.) The chief cop is so obnoxious, so belligerent that he almost becomes lovable. He is clearly too stupid to really hold down the job he is supposed to have, and is just a generic authority figure for the kids to rebel against.

The cast, with one or two exceptions, looks suspiciously Southern European. Everyone is dubbed, and no one is dubbed well. George sounds a bit like Johnny Depp in From Hell, which can't be a good thing. The Inspector has a strong Ulster accent, which at least makes lines like 'Bring the dead back to life, is it?' seem quite funny. There are one or two accents that are completely unidentifiable.

The story itself has no surprises whatsoever. Its faux environmentalism isn't used with any subtlety or intelligence. Even the supposedly shocking bits are massively predictable to anyone who's ever seen another zombie film. Although the zombies themselves look like they're really dead (quite an advantage, obviously) they don't do much. They're sometimes so slow that the fact they can catch up with panicked, running non-zombies is obviously ludicrous; but sometimes they become unexpectedly nifty. Is zombie consistency too much to ask for? There's some heavy gore action, but it's not well executed and it stands out a mile - the rest of the film is trying for atmosphere rather than messy shock and the gut-chomping bits seem to have been stuck in to pander to a certain audience.

It does try quite hard, I guess. But at no point did I find myself shocked, worried, disgusted or even particularly interested. Although the characters run around like mad things, I never got any sense of why they were bothering. There's just no tension - a scene in which characters are trapped in a crypt full of zombies ought to be a real stand-out sequence, but I just found myself bored. The sound effects that are meant to raise the tension - all heavy breathing, heartbeats, electric bleeping - sound not unlike something you'd hear on Dr Who of the same era.

It's all just too formulaic, which may not be entirely the film's fault, but it brings nothing new to the zombie table. I've seen it all before, only better. Top marks to the (Spanish) director, Jorge Grau, for finding an unusual location for it to happen in, but that's as far as it goes. This really isn't worth the time it takes to watch.

Summary: An overrated video nasty