A Spanish director, working with an Italian crew, filmed this movie in the English countryside. It's about a cop-hating hippie, a hippie-hating cop, a couple hysterical women, and -- of course -- some flesh-eating zombies. It's "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie," AKA one thousand other titles, a halfway decent Euro effort to cash in on the success of "Night of the Living Dead." Unfortunately, it's probably this latter fact that prevents it from being a better movie.
The plot has been recounted here numerous times: an experimental agricultural machine designed to kill insects somehow manages to turn babies into little psychos and raise the recent dead from their repose. All well and good. After the zombies arise, however, things get a bit muddled. It seems they need the blood of the living to raise other zombies. Why zombies -- unthinking, re-animated corpses -- would care about making more of themselves, never mind knowing how to do it, isn't explained. They also rip apart and eat people, in the classic Romero fashion, even though this seems somewhat at odds with the first explanation for why they molest the living.
The zombies are pretty ferocious. For some reason, they are fairly smart and have superhuman strength, and the only apparent way to kill them is to burn them. There is, however, no zombie plague -- a grand total of perhaps six or seven of them make an appearance throughout the movie.
This isn't as disappointing as it sounds. Part of what the movie does right is set an ominous mood of growing suspense. Another nice touch is that the authorities never actually learn that there are zombies: All the murders in the film are attributed by the police to the main characters, and more-or-less plausibly so.
All in all, the Good Doctor would classify "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" as an above-average foray into the zombie subgenre. Plotwise, it doesn't make perfect sense -- and I attribute at least some of this to the desire of the producer or whoever to make it more like Romero's movie -- but it has a much more cohesive storyline than the slew of mostly crappy Italian zombie flicks that followed. The splatter effects, while rather infrequent, are quite good. Plus, the subtext of environmental doom lends the movie a bit of depth not possessed by most films of this type, while the two lead characters are fairly believable and likable. The police detective, played by Arthur Kennedy, is, however, rather ridiculously over the top, and the pacing could be quicker. Also, the stupid "twist" ending forces the Good Doctor to deduct serious points, especially since the ending would have been really cool if only the movie stopped about five minutes earlier.
Anyway, it's not a masterpiece, but it's not too bad either.
The plot has been recounted here numerous times: an experimental agricultural machine designed to kill insects somehow manages to turn babies into little psychos and raise the recent dead from their repose. All well and good. After the zombies arise, however, things get a bit muddled. It seems they need the blood of the living to raise other zombies. Why zombies -- unthinking, re-animated corpses -- would care about making more of themselves, never mind knowing how to do it, isn't explained. They also rip apart and eat people, in the classic Romero fashion, even though this seems somewhat at odds with the first explanation for why they molest the living.
The zombies are pretty ferocious. For some reason, they are fairly smart and have superhuman strength, and the only apparent way to kill them is to burn them. There is, however, no zombie plague -- a grand total of perhaps six or seven of them make an appearance throughout the movie.
This isn't as disappointing as it sounds. Part of what the movie does right is set an ominous mood of growing suspense. Another nice touch is that the authorities never actually learn that there are zombies: All the murders in the film are attributed by the police to the main characters, and more-or-less plausibly so.
All in all, the Good Doctor would classify "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" as an above-average foray into the zombie subgenre. Plotwise, it doesn't make perfect sense -- and I attribute at least some of this to the desire of the producer or whoever to make it more like Romero's movie -- but it has a much more cohesive storyline than the slew of mostly crappy Italian zombie flicks that followed. The splatter effects, while rather infrequent, are quite good. Plus, the subtext of environmental doom lends the movie a bit of depth not possessed by most films of this type, while the two lead characters are fairly believable and likable. The police detective, played by Arthur Kennedy, is, however, rather ridiculously over the top, and the pacing could be quicker. Also, the stupid "twist" ending forces the Good Doctor to deduct serious points, especially since the ending would have been really cool if only the movie stopped about five minutes earlier.
Anyway, it's not a masterpiece, but it's not too bad either.