FREAKSHOW The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue

Join us every Monday as we look at a cult movie. Our film of the week this time is a British zombie film… or is it Spanish?

1974
Director: Jorge Grau
Cast: Ray Lovelock, Christine Galbo, Arthur Kennedy
Available on region one (DVD and Blu-ray) and region two DVD
Watch the trailer here

We usually think of the zombie movie as an American or Italian genre, set in US cities or far-flung jungles. Much of the pleasure of this UK take on Night Of The Living Dead comes from seeing the undead wandering round the grey landscape of ’70s Britain – all Joy Of Sex beards, cardigans and minis – as if they’ve accidentally lurched into an early Mike Leigh film.

As those classic zombie attack scenes are restaged in NHS hospitals and country churches you can’t help feeling a surge of patriotic pride. It’s a struggle not to punch the air and shout, “Yes! That’s our manor!”. How can you resist a zombie flick where the central characters are called George and Edna and the first response to a zombie killing is give the widow a nice cuppa and some bourbons? Funny, then that this quintessentially British film is an Italian/Spanish co-production, made by a Spanish director…

This is a cheap film: there are never more than three zombies on screen at once and their make-up consists of red contact lenses and white face paint. But it’s well-paced, imaginatively shot, and features some convincingly nasty gore. (Look! A copper having his guts ripped out! A real British bobby!) The zombies are fast moving and strong, which creates real tension. Plus, the characterisation is sublime. The hero is a sort of camp Mancunian Robin Askwith (The script is peppered with lines like, “Don’t get yer knickers in a twist!”) and Arthur Kennedy is perfect as a police inspector with a chip on his shoulder about hippie types with “long hair and f****t clothes”.

For Brits, the reason the film was set here is amusing: the producer thought Manchester sounded like “a distant, mysterious place”. Maybe it took an outsider who found four-day-week era Britain exotic to make it a such successful location. Perhaps that’s why, just as another foreigner (John Landis) filmed the best British werewolf movie, Jorge Grau made the definitive British zombie flick.

Ian Berriman, reviews editor of SFX and cult movie nut, has watched Rat Pfink A Boo Boo four or five times, but never seen On The Waterfront. The nutter.