Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

What's with the naked lady?...It's as easy as 1, 2, 3.As soon as our leather clad hero George closes his art dealership and leaves London for the peace and quite of the country on his motorcycle, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie immediately sets itself apart from other zombie films by bombarding the viewer with what is going to cause its epidemic of animated corpses. The boogie man in this film is the industrial pollution of modern civilization. During the fabulous opening montage of gridlock traffic, belching smoke stacks, auto exhaust, and various pedestrians wearing protective breathing masks, a lovely curly haired woman on the side of the road suddenly tosses off her full length trench coat and goes streaking naked across the very intersection in which George is waiting for the light to change. It's a beautifully executed moment of simplistic symbolism that not only grabs the viewers attention in a big way, but clearly illustrates the point of the whole film. Civilization is by definition, an abomination to nature, and this ladies choice to impose nature back onto civilization, disrupts that which has long since become normal to all of us. It's an awesome idea that slaps the audience in the face with its obvious meaning, without giving us any explaination.The freeways have always been perminant monuments to our time.After the opening montage, George stops at a gas station to stretch his legs and drink a much needed beverage. It's here that our leading lady Edna, accidentally backs her car up over his bike. Being responsible, decent, and kind, she offers her assistance. Being a patronizing jerk, he takes her car keys and says."I'll drive, I mean we don't want to go all the way in reverse do we?"After a bit of arguement as to whos destination should take president, they decide that placing Edna's junkie sister into rehab is the more pressing need, but George's trip becomes further side tracked due to Edna's unfamiliarity with the area. It is here that George's journey to idealistic serenity is fatally interupted by the walking dead. While asking a local farmer for directions, George notices a very unusual oversized vehicle parked in the middle of the farmers field emitting an eerie and unsettling sound. George discovers that The Department of Agriculture is conducting an experimental method of destroying insects without pesticides by using ultrasonic radiation. George berates the technicians with his pro ecology stance, leaving Edna back at the car to be attacked by a haggard bearded tramp with wet cloth, and red tiger striped eyes. Hearing her cries for help, George and the farmer hurry back to the car, but the bearded tramp is long gone by the time that they get there. From the description she gives of the attacker, the farmer is convinced that it is Guthrie The Looney. The only problem is that Guthrie The Looney drowned about a week ago.I like Edna's sister Katie. She's exactly what I would look like if I was a woman.Guthrie The Looney ruturns just in time to spoil Katie's attempt to get high. He chases her to where her photographer husband Martin is busy setting his camera to auto-snap on a tripod along side a river. Martin tries to protect his wife, but is easily killed by this walking dead monster. His death brings the police, and the police bring the detective sergeant in charge of the case.The first half of the film is all about the plot. You have George and his discoveries of cause and effect with the ultrasonic machine. Edna and her belief that the man who attacked her and her sister is not only the same man, but is actually Guthrie The Walking Dead Looney. Then you have The Sergeant who at first believes that Katie killed her husband to avoid being committed, but later suspects that George might be a devil worshipping sadist when the body count begins to rise.Kindly put your cellphones on vibrate and stick them where the sun dont shine!I find the very idea of civilized technological advancement being this films culprit to be down right ironic. I just can't help but feel that this first 50 minutes of plot with only a couple of zombie attacks might just bore the majority of average film goers who need continual bells and whistles at all times. I can almost picture a remake of this great classic, but instead of having industrial pollution creating flesh eating zombies, it would be cell phones and the continual erosion of modern mans text message happy attention spans. As soon as living peoples attention spans fade entirely away, they turn into the mindless living dead. The good news for those that have retained their ability to focus, is that the dialogue and scenes in this gradual build up are chalk full of great memerable moments, and the zombies in this film are far from mindless.What makes this particular film the greatest zombie movie of the 1970's with the single exception of George Romero's Dawn of The Dead, is the payoff that happens at the 50 minute point. It is when George and Edna find themselves trapped in the underground mausoleum with none other then the walking dead Guthrie, that this film reaches an unprecedented level of sustained tension, unlike any other moment in any other zombie film before or since. Guthrie anoints the eyelids of all the other dead bodies in the room with the blood of the cemeteries caretaker, creating a gang of animated evil dead. For the next 15 minutes, George and Edna are literally an inch away from dying at all times, fighting every single second for their very lives. It is here that you see the truly awesome power of these zombies. They may move slowly, but there is a deep eternal groan when they laboriously turn their stiff bodies to face you. It is as if they are as heavy as boulders while packing all the implied power that that amount of heaviness would supply to their living dead corpses. Rather then seeming awkwardly amusing and mindless like the zombies in Dawn of The Dead, there is an undefinable aura about the zombies in this film. It is like a sinister evil power had infused them with all their living dead abilities, and their lust for human blood and organs. These are serious zombies that just won't die. Nothing George tries to do to them, no mater how damage inflicting seems to bother them at all. By the end of this section, Guthrie and his zombie gang seem so menacing and unstoppable, that they even look like stalking gunfighters from a Sergio Leone Western.It is absolutely marvelous the amount of anxiety that this prolonged moment can inflict upon the viewer. It is in fact, down right awe inspiring. It is a testimony to all fazes of the movie making process, that director Jorge Grau managed to create, what is in my mind, the single greatest moment of continual peril in the entire zombie genre. That is why this is a five star must own classic. I won't spoil the ending by going any further, suffice to say that in this film, when the going gets tough, you can bet it's because the dead are closing in all around you, and they are seeing red.

This film has all the "hip" topics for a serious seventies feature film, environmentalism, generation gap issues, paranoia, and even drug/heroin addiction, but add in a smattering of zombies and gore, and this Spanish/Italian production shot in England becomes an instant genre classic.The film is a little slow to get started as several intertwining story lines get developed (overdeveloped really), but once the first zombie appears, the plot clears the fog line and really moves forward. There's lots of good frights and good bloody zombie cannibalism, including a great scene involving a hospital receptionist and three half-dressed male zombies (hmm...what's that one zombie reaching for?).Despite the big environmental push of the opening credits, the subplot really narrows down to a generation gap issue between an irascible old police sergeant and a young, hip, long-haired London professional, who through a series of untimely events, finds himself unfairly immersed in a nightmare in the English countryside. The film has good level of paranoia for the youth of the seventies. Our young protagonist fights the good fight, but it's against big odds. No one will believe him as he tries to expose the zombies and the cause for the walking dead. Society just doesn't want to hear the truth and refuses to listen to its youth. Eventually, he finds himself battling not only the bloodthirsty cannibals, but also the police sergeant, whose tunnel vision and prejudice has caused him to not only peg our young hero (and his kind) as a devil-worshiping thrill killer, but also as the reason for all of societies ills.There's a little bit of unintentional silliness, but this never gets in the way of the story. Good gore. Good shocks, Great fire scenes. Zombie fans will like this one, but don't pair or compare with something like 28 Days Later. It's a lot closer to Night of the Living Dead. Enjoy!