A lesser-known early post-Romero zombie classic, this one is set on location in mostly rural parts of Northern England (not Manchester, though, despite the name) although almost all of the actors are actually Italian, and the director is Spanish. There are a couple of direct ripoffs of Night of the Living Dead - the first zombie attack is of a single woman in/near her car, the nihilistic ending - but other than that, if I'm honest, apart from a few short scenes of gnarly disembowelment (and one truly gratuitous streaking scene in the opening minutes), this could almost have been a Doctor Who episode of this era (early Tom Baker). It very much had the feel of something like Horror of Fang Rock, complete with the regional theater level acting and copious use of dry ice. Also, the explanation for the zombification is very Doctor Who-esque, complete with that era's environmentalism (think The Green Death). Bear in mind I'm saying this as someone who loves 70's Doctor Who, mind.
We open on our protagonist, George, who is closing up his antique shop supposedly in London (although this scene actually was shot in Manchester) and gets on his Norton and sets off out of town. He's made it oop North when he stops off at a petrol station. He asks the attendant, who is currently dealing with a pretty redhead in a car to fill up the bike and goes over to buy something to drink. As he's doing that he hears a crash, and sees that the redhead has backed her car over his bike and crumpled the wheel. The mechanic says they'll have to send away to Glasgow, and they can't do it before Monday. Long story short he bullies (basically, George is a bit of a dick for most of the beginning of the movie) the young woman, Edna (makes you think the Spaniard came up with the name from reading Victorian English novels) into letting him drive to where he was going. He also shows serious road rage in getting round a large truck that says Manchester Morgue on it. (Yes, we do see it again,
and I thoroughly expected the title to be explained at the end where the corpses it takes from the small local hospital where a lot of the film's action happens, and where the climactic zombie outbreak occurs, arrive in Manchester and spread the plague in a large city, a bit like the scene at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where we see trucks carrying the pods to a big city... but it doesn't. It opts for a much stupider last twist.
Anyway, where was I? Turns out Edna is in a hurry to meet up with her sister and persuades George to take her to where she's going (Windermere) first and then he can have her Mini and she'll get someone to pick it up. However, she doesn't know exactly where her sister lives, so they have to stop off (in an absurdly picturesque dale)
at a farm to ask for directions. Here George encounters the farmer working with scientists from the government who are trying out a new pesticide-free way of killing bugs - specifically a kind of radiation.
George, being the long hair that he is (the farmer remarks that it's obvious he's from London as the young folk hereabouts don't dress like him), disapproves. But the farmer at least promises to show him how to get to Edna's sister's place. Meanwhile, Edna, waiting by the car, is accosted by a strange man dressed all in black and soaking wet.
She gets away and runs to meet George and the farmer, but by the time she does the man has vanished. The only man who meets his description, however, is a local vagrant, Guthrie, whom it can't have been, because he drowned last week and was buried...
George isn't sure he believes Edna, but they set off for the sister's house. Cut to the sister's house. Except, at first we don't know that's what it is, because we're just seeing a man (a rather seedy looking man, to be honest) developing photos in what looks like an outbuilding and then setting off through the dark. But he hears something and goes back to find a woman (Edna's sister) in the building he just left.
She claims to be retrieving strawberries to make a pie for Edna, but he knows better. Essentially he's kept her out here in the middle of nowhere trying to get her clean from her drug addiction, but for some unexplained reason there is heroin on the premises and she knows where it is. They fight and he goes off and then she gets the heroin out and starts heating it up on the spoon when... the same man who attacked her sister appears. She escapes through a window and flees calling for her husband, who is currently taking flash photos at a nearby waterfall. The man and the husband tussle... and George and Edna arrive. Edna's sister brings them over, but all they find is her husband's corpse. Again George is asked to believe that there was a strange man responsible. Anyway, cut to the next morning and our other major player (and the only other English-named actor besides George) the local (although, oddly, supposedly Irish (probably because American Arthur Kennedy couldn't do a good English accent)) police inspector,
who (a) hates hippies, and (b) is convinced that George, Edna and her sister are in some way responsible. So George and Edna are forbidden from leaving and have to stay in the hotel in town (The Old Owl). George gets the idea of having the film in the husband's camera developed and has Edna distract a policeman (Craig, who will meet a grisly fate later) while he takes it.
Alas the photos do not exonerate the sister and she has a breakdown and gets moved to the local hospital. They visit and while Edna is with her sister, George has a weird encounter with a doctor who tells him that babies are being born with absurdly violent urges (yes, babies - we see bloodied maternity nurses!). George theorizes that it is something to do with the bug-killing radiation and they go and visit the farm again. They find out that the radiation works on the nervous systems of the insects, and George and the doctor postulate that the babies' simple nervous systems make them vulnerable. Later, in the local shop, looking at the photos, George and Edna are caught by the inspector who is now even more convinced they're up to something and says he'll see them at the inquest. Edna is still going on about Guthrie, so to settle matters, George takes her to the local grave yard to see if they can find Guthrie's grave. What they find at the graveyard is a slaughtered verger and yes, Guthrie,
who not only attacks them but daubs blood on the eyes of two other corpses awaiting burial, which seems to wake them up. At this point Craig, who's been assigned to chase them, arrives, and the three hole up on the church.
However, these zombies are much less brainless than usual and team up to use a grave stone to break down the door. Poor old Craig bites it and we get the first gnarly scenes of cannibalism. George is now convinced that the newly dead are similar enough to babies in their primitive nervous systems and now is determined to destroy the bug-killing device. But first they manage to destroy the three zombies using, you guessed it, fire. But tragically the inspector, on seeing Craig's hideously dismembered corpse and three other charred corpses only suspects satanism and is determined to stop George and Edna by hook or by crook.
At first George thinks the zombie crisis is over, because last time he and the doctor saw the bug radiation device, they shared that it had only a mile radius, but when he goes to smash it they tell him that they've just expanded its range to five miles, and he realizes that this encompasses Edna's brother-in-law, at the house Edna is visiting. And indeed, we see Edna almost got by him - he injures her arm, but she runs over him. Weirdly she drives away about a half a mile then just stops, in the dark and the mist, and gets out of the car! It looks like she's being attacked by him again, but it's just her imagining it (she's shellshocked) and it's really George. He takes her to a nearby petrol station and tells them to call an ambulance, while he takes some kerosene to burn the corpse... but the cops have laid a trap and haul him in. However, he gets away and heads for the hospital, where the husband's corpse has also been sent, and is making more zombies as we watch. Cue several more gnarly body-munching scenes and our grisly climax.
Then the epilogue where our inspector, still ignorant of all the zombies, thinks that he's responsible for ending a satanist murder-spree, retires to his hotel room for a well-deserved rest...
In general, this one's about on the level of importance in early zombie-lore as Hammer's The Plague of the Zombies, which is to say, a notch below Romero, but a notch above a lot of the cheesier Italian gore-fests of the era. Check it out, if that's your cup of blood.
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