Non si Deve Profanare il Sonno dei Morti |
  • Italy / Spain • 1974 • 95m •   • Directed by: Jorge Grau. • Starring: Cristina Galbó, Ray Lovelock, Arthur Kennedy, Aldo Massasso, Giorgio Trestini, Roberto Posse, José Lifante, Jeannine Mestre, Gengher Gatti, Fernando Hilbeck, Vera Drudi, Vicente Vega, Francisco Sanz. • Music by: Giuliano Sorgini.      A cop chases two young people visiting the English countryside, suspecting them of a local murder; unbeknownst to him, the real culprits are the living dead, brought to life with a thirst for human flesh by radiation being used by area farmers as a pesticide alternative.
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Review:
Certainly it's an entertaining film and anyone with any interest in the zombie genre will enjoy it. It has all the inspiration of Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and all the gore that one should expect from the genre. Perhaps refreshingly the horror is more camp than what we're used to these days with the proliferation of torture porn in to mainstream horror. The opening segment also reminded me of Cornel Wilde's NO BLADE OF GRASS as we're shown shots of car and lorries spewing exhaust fumes in to the litter strewn streets. Environmentalism was making a birth during this period and the film is very much a product of its era. Interestingly it's a new " safe " method of replacing pesticides that causes the dead to spring back to life and the moodily lit scenes of zombies attacking the humans are fairly effective as is the muzak which is more like a sound effect than incidental music
Where the film fails is like most horror movies is that when you stop to think about the on screen events everything falls apart very quickly. Ultra-sonic rays are causing the dead to spring back to life but these reanimated corpses are never seen by anyone except the people they kill or the two protagonists Edna and George who quickly get accused of being satanists by the local police. People also do very dumb things like when they meet zombies in a churchyard they run in to the crypt and barricade themselves in instead of making an escape by simply running away. Being very pre Danny Boyle these zombies are slow moving and for some inexplicable reason are also very flammable. The story itself is very slow moving in the beginning because the audience are one step ahead of the characters in that we know the dead are returning to life but they don't. In fact when the film ends most of the characters are none the wiser
There's also a couple of errors involving geography that are quite annoying. At a garage George has his motorbike damaged and the mechanic says he'll have to get a new wheel from Glasgow. Why would someone in The Lake District go all the way to Scotland for a new wheel. Wouldn't somewhere closer Kendal or Blackpool or Preston or Blackburn or Bolton or Manchester be selling motorbike wheels? Also one character mentions to another that " You came all the way down from London " when in fact the story takes place about 230 miles north of London
All in all LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE is an involving enough horror film that is relatively entertaining for the most part. It's not the most original film you'll see and it's certainly not the most intelligent one. In fact the lack of anybody doing anything intelligent is its most serious flaw but I didn't feel like I'd wasted my time watching it.
Review by Theo Robertson from the Internet Movie Database.
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