The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1975)

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This is an outstanding zombie film that instead of going straight for the jugular, piles on the atmosphere and tension...and then goes for the jugular. Slightly annoying antiques dealer/hippy George leaves the polluted and overcrowded city and heads for the countryside on his motorbike, where he intends to spend the weekend watching the grass grow in the back garden of his cottage. His weekend is ruined when Cristinia Galbo reverses her car into his bike, wrecking it, so the least she can do is give him a ride to his cottage. Cristina soon finds that George is a bit of a gobby smartarse who might have a point, talking as he is about how the powers that be are destroying the Earth. George finds out the Cristina is a neurotic flake who doesn't even know where her sister's house is.George ends up leaving Cristina in the car to go and ask a farmer for directions. It's at the farm he discovers an experimental machine that is being used for destroying insects and parasites (haven't these folk heard of the food chain?), which he lectures the scientists about in his strangely Zippy-from-Rainbow-like voice. It's about this time that a strange man dripping with water tries to attack Cristina, but when George and the farmer get back to the car, the man is gone. It's weird however how the description of the man reminds the farmer of Old Guthrie, a tramp who drowned in the area recently.It's dark by the time George and Cristina get to her sister's house. It turns out Cristina's sister is a junky just about to be taken to rehab, and while trying to sneak a fix in the shed she's attacked by Guthrie, which leads to the death of her husband Martin. Enter the cops, especially hard-ass Irish cop Arthur Kennedy, and if there's one thing he hates more than dead bodies, it's hippies! He doesn't buy the story of walking corpses and arrests Cristina's sister after he finds out she's a junky. How are George and Cristina going to prove her innocence?It takes ages for the first full on zombie attack to occur, but you won't be caring. Every scene in the film is just filled with atmosphere. Martin is killed right in front of his automatic camera that keeps flashing upon the scene of a waterfall. His house is adorned with pictures of his wife having withdrawl symptoms. The local pub has a scabby live owl perched in the hallway. When the zombies do rise up, there aren't that many of them but the sheer terror of the victims comes through live and clear. The zombie rules haven't truly been written in stone either - these zombies are super strong, can take a shot to the head, but really don't like being set on fire.Grau doesn't skimp on the gore either, especially when zombies rise up in the hospital and attack the receptionist. Best of all is Arthur Kennedy's performance as the copper. He hates George so much that he will not listen to anything he's saying at all, even if it could save lives. This leads to several shocks near the end of the film, as well as the ambiguous ending.I must admit this is one film I did rush out and buy when it appeared on DVD, and have watched it many a time. It's a good one! The only thing it lacks in comparison to the later Italian zombie film is cheese.

I see a whole lot of 8 and 9 star reviews for this movie. Now, I certainly understand that each of us has their own opinion and I probably like movies that others would wonder about my own rating. Where's the sense of scale, though? If this movie is an 8, then what exactly constitutes a 5 for those people, or god forbid, a 2? The general praise I see is it's "historical significance" being an early precursor of the European zombie movement and, for that, I can see it deserves some credit. However, simply being a museum piece does not equal being a quality movie that most modern viewers will enjoy, does it? Charlie Chaplin may be important to comedy, but very few of us still find him funny, but I digress. Yes, This comes right after Night of the Living Dead and, I would include, Tombs of the Blind Dead, and seem to have inspired Fulci a great deal, especially in the look of the zombies.After watching the movie, I was left thinking of Val Lewton, to some degree. If I removed the monsters from this movie altogether, do I still have anything entertaining left? The answer is a resounding "NO". Yes, the scenes will the zombies (all 15 minutes that you'll get) are indeed well-done. They have that slow, languid quality like you're in nightmare that you just can't escape from. The rest of the movie is a big, gigantic mess though. The actors are just not good, despite other reviews, especially the male lead. The dialog comes off like something I wrote in junior high creative writing. It's overwrought and just really laughable in parts, especially from the Sheriff. For me, that sort of stuff just pulls me out completely and eliminates any tension because all I'm concentrating on is how bad the writing is in this movie.I do give cred for giving some explanation to the zombies besides the usual virus, and the means of killing them differs from most other zombie genre movies, but those things don't make up for the rest of the weak points.If you are a completest, like me, just working your way through the catalog, so to speak, then this is worth a view (if only for it's historical significance), but if you're a zombie enthusiast looking for your next fix, then you can do much better than this (try the aforementioned Tombs of the Blind Dead first).

On his way from London to a meeting in the northern part of England, "George" (Ray Lovelock) has his motorcycle damaged when a young lady named "Edna" (Cristina Galbo) accidentally backs her car into it at a gas station. Since she is at fault she reluctantly accedes to George's request to drive him to his meeting but manages to convince him to drive her to her sister's house first. However, when George stops to ask for directions she is attacked by a strange man and barely manages to escape. Unfortunately, George doesn't believe her and they continue on. Not long afterward, Edna's sister "Katie" (Jeannine Mestre) is also assaulted and her husband "Martin" (Jose Lifante) is killed by the same person who attacked Edna. When the police arrive "the Inspector" (played by Arthur Kennedy) immediately considers George and Edna to be his prime suspects and becomes even further convinced as the death toll increases and both of them blame "dead people" as the culprits. Anyway, rather than detail the rest of the movie I will just say that this was a pretty good zombie movie which resembled "Night of the Living Dead" in several ways. Admittedly, there were some parts which were pretty slow and some of the lighting in certain scenes could have been better but by and large it was still an enjoyable film for the most part. Accordingly, I rate it as slightly above average.

Already the intro to LSCL lets us in on a little secret: you the viewer are about to watch a tremendously dumb eco-horror. A dead bird on the road; pedestrians wearing face-masks; smoke rising out of various apertures; and a naked girl running through the streets of London. You read that right; I have no idea how this scene fits in with the movie's cretinous ecological message, but a pair of boobs is always welcome, under any circumstance, so I shall forgive them. You gotta love it when those sadistic exploitation flicks have a "relevant" socio-political message to convey. Brainwashed film buffs eat this stuff up, thinking/hoping it lends a movie importance and elevates it from the B-movie mud from where it tries so desperately but futilely to get out. The more intelligent viewer, however, recognizes the blatant stupidity of using a dumb zombie film as means of conveying political ideas. The baby-faced, effeminate blond hero makes an ass of himself right away; aside from his asocial behavior, he offers his dumb views on pollution and scientists – even telling a few men to stop their "dumb experiment" because he, the wise plucky hero with a high school diploma, knows all about ecology and the environment. In that sense he reminded me immediately of Robert Redford, another blond bird-brain, when in the 70s he tried to convince the scientific community that he understands solar energy better than they do! There is no arrogance like left-wing arrogance, especially in the deepest depths of Hollywood's horse-manure pseudo-intellectuality.This is how the self-righteous, cocky, effeminate, perpetually snarling hero responds to a snide anti-hippie remark about him going "back to nature" on a remote Pacific island: "Yes, and then I have to worry about the atomic fallout." Amazing. May I remind you: this paranoid idiot and chronic conspiracy-theorist is the movie's hero and "voice of reason".The left-winger who wrote this drivel forgot that chauvinism isn't politically-correct, however. (Never mind that political correctness didn't exist back then in its full "glory" as it does now.) The way the script treats the beautiful red-head is chauvinistic to the extreme. Wet and panicky, she tells the men that she'd been attacked by a strange-looking person, but the effeminate-faced hero refuses to believe her, treating her much as you would a child. I've seen little boys and drunken hobos who were taken more seriously when reporting UFO encounters to disbelieving B-movie folk. Even when the red-head's sister gets attacked by the zombie and he kills her husband, still nobody takes the red-head seriously! The detectives – faced with a bone-smashed corpse – snicker at her claims that she was attacked by a man who fits the description of her sister's attacker! It doesn't get any dumber than this. But this is only the beginning.Chief Inspector: "This might have been a sadist, who did this." Inspector's Assistant: "Or a lunatic."Ed Wood wouldn't have written it any "better". Rather than mere mortals being resurrected, I think the dead spirit of Ed Wood was brought to life in order to write yet another insipid script. A sadist IS a lunatic; I'd at least expect cops to know this. But these aren't any ordinary cops; they're dubbed Cockney B-Italian-movie cops: the dumbest there are. In fact, the Chief Inspector behaves like a Gestapo officer, and I do promise unintended laughs to anyone who watches his treatment of suspects. "The police are NEVER right!" says our eco-friendly left-wing rebel hero. Well, of course, cops in THIS kind of script can't even tie their own shoe-laces, let alone solve murder mysteries. Another scene worth mentioning is when the inspector – quite by chance (as if being clairvoyant) – walks into a photo shop, finds his suspect there, and comments on the photos as "evidence" that the red-head's sister killed her husband; too stupid for words: "You're all the same, people like you, with your long hair and faggot clothes, drugs, sex, every sort of filth… and you hate the police." (Actually, it's the writer who hates the police – and capitalist democracies, I should imagine.) The young rebel responds to this idiotic speech by doing the Nazi salute and saying "heil, Hitler!" No, I am not joking. At the latest here we find out that this dumb flick's writer isn't just a left-winger, but a bonafide Marxist misfit, and a buffoon to boot.Hitchcock was notorious for over-milking the innocent-man-accused-of-murder shtick, but at least there were no zombies running around in his movies, playing hide-and-seek with the police, and there was certainly no low-grade hippie counter-culture gobbledygook. The Chief Inspector and his cop posse miraculously manage to never be around when zombies are killing people, so he conveniently keeps showing up at the worst times and then blames the effeminate rebel; this series of astounding coincidences is more supernatural than any zombie resurrection."The dead don't walk, except in very bad paperback novels", our quasi-hippie effeminate hero says. Talk about a script shooting itself in the foot.Believe it or not, I haven't addressed even 10% of the nonsense that takes place in this astoundingly brainless movie. I've hit the 1000-word review limit, so if you want to find out the plethora of other garbage that goes on, watch it. The second half in particular is rather fast-paced: 2-3 very stupid things get said or done per minute. Make sure you don't miss out on the INCREDIBLY IDIOTIC ending: it will leave you speechless (unless you're a film-buff zombie, of course).However, as much as I would heartily recommend this dumb flick to the Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax teams, I do very much commend the cameraman for the marvelous visual quality. The English countryside looks amazing, very 70s, and is worth the price of admission alone – or the few minutes spent downloading this turkey for free, as is the case with me.