Review: 'The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue' Blu-ray

After a woman (Christina Galbó) runs over a motorcycle at a petrol station outside Manchester, the antique-dealing biker (Ray Lovelock) bullies her into giving him a ride to his friend's house in the country. She's a touch anxious because she's on her way to deliver her smack-addicted sister (Jeannine Mestre) away from a creepy husband (José Lifante), who takes exploitative photos of his wife while she's high, and to rehab. Quite a feast of human drama right there, but there's more, because high-tech exterminators are performing some rather environmentally unfriendly pest control on farmland in the country. Turns out the radiation they're using doesn't just turn bug against bug until they cannibalize each other into non-existence. Let's just say the exterminators' methods make the human dead and buried quite a bit less dead and a whole lot less buried.

Coming a mere six years after Night of the Living Dead, Non si deve profanare il sonno dei mortio--aka: Do Not Profane the Sleeping Dead, aka: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, aka: Don't Open the Window, aka: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue--follows a lot of the same beats as George Romero's groundbreaking zombie flick, but it does so with richer characters, drama, plotting, performances, and special effects and a more focused point of view. Night of the Living Dead stumbled into topicality when Romero cast a black actor to play a role not written for any particular race. Director Jorge Grau and screenwriters Sandro Continenza and Marcello Coscia specifically designed Non si deve profanare il sonno dei mortio to denounce environmental destruction and fascist policing (as embodied by old-school Hollywood star Arthur Kennedy as a very American police sergeant somehow working in Windermere). With its satirical edge, sly equating of zombies with emotionally dead urbanites, and focus on human conflict as well as organ eating, Non si deve profanare il sonno dei mortio became a major influence on Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead. 

Synapse Film's selects the least evocative title for its new blu-ray, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, but the presentation is pretty fabulous. The video is natural, with a heavy though very period appropriate grain, and colors that pop. The original mono soundtrack is a bit muddy, but the disc also includes a 5.1 surround mix.

Extras are substantial. Chief among them is an 89-minute documentary on Jorge Grau. Grau discusses how producer Edmondo Amati specifically wanted him to emulate Night of the Living Dead and how he upped the human content in Continenza and Coscia's script. Although Jorge Grau--Catalonia's Cult Film King mainly focuses on Manchester Morgue, we also learn of Grau's origins in theater and non-horror movie making, his work on other horrors such as Legend of Blood Castle, and the difficulties of filmmaking under Francisco Franco's fascist regime. Appearances by film historians (hello, Kim Newman!) help round out the story.

There are also two conversations with the late special effects maestro Giannetto De Rossi, both conducted by the same interviewer and totaling an hour. De Rossi is very candid, discussing his disappointment in missing an opportunity to work with Billy Wilder, dismissing one of his projects--Emanuelle in America-- as "shit," and poo-pooing notions that his work in Manchester Morgue was inspired by Night of the Living Dead, which he thought was crappy. De Rossi's side of the conversation is subtitled, since he speaks with a thick Italian accent, but there are some unfortunate gaps in the translation where the subtitler likely had trouble understanding what De Rossi's was saying. There are also a couple of interesting commentaries with film historians, the more entertaining being the conversational one between Nathaniel Thompson and Bruce Holecheck, who help explain why the opening titles may look different than longtime fans remember.