You certainly have to make plenty of allowances - the English-language dialogue is often laughable, and not helped by being obviously dubbed (the film's set in the north of England, but most of the supporting cast are Spanish and Italian, and look it – so it’s more than a little incongruous hearing dubbed regional accents emerging from their out-of-sync mouths), both acting and characterisation are ropey in the extreme (Edna’s heroin-addict sister is straight out of a below-par episode of Casualty), and some set pieces are, to put it mildly, a little familiar (though, to be fair, probably less so in 1974) - but once it gets going it exerts a surprisingly powerful grip, blending highly effective suspense sequences with moments of startlingly graphic gore (for the period), and more than a modicum of hard-hitting socio-political comment, mostly targeted at the police and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Considering the budget, the language barrier and various other limitations, it's an impressively intelligent, inventive and often genuinely scary film that's rather closer to Romero's classic than to most of the zombie rip-offs that emerged in its wake. Ironically enough, it was opportunistically reissued in the early 1980s in Italy as Zombi 3, a 'sequel' to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters which itself was rechristened Zombi 2, with George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead being the original Zombi - but both the Fulci and Romero films were made several years later!

What’s especially striking about the film is that it looks simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, the first deriving from the English rural locations (which have dated less than you might imagine), the second from the fact that the film was directed and shot by foreigners (Spanish director, Spanish/Italian crew) approaching them with fresh eyes. True, director Jorge Grau isn’t quite in the Antonioni (Blow-Up) or Polanski (Repulsion) class, but this certainly looks and feels unlike any other British horror film of the period.

Although most of the film is set in the countryside, there’s a striking opening sequence (bearing a passing resemblance to parts of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another film made a few years later!) in which the inhabitants of a city (presumably Manchester) are so jaded by the dreariness of their day-to-day existence that they don’t even register a full-frontal female streaker running across the road protesting something or other, and this sequence alone establishes a skewed, off-kilter atmosphere that becomes all the more enveloping as the film progresses.

Youthful antique dealer George (Raymond Lovelock sporting a rather unfortunate hairstyle and an even more unfortunate Cockney accent) is on his way to visit friends in the Lake District when his motorbike is damaged at a garage when Edna (Cristina Galbo) accidentally reverses into it, putting it out of action for a few days. So he has no alternative but to tag along with her as she goes to visit her sister, a former heroin addict who lives with her photographer husband in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.

On the way, George gets out of the car to ask for directions from a group of farmers and scientists trying out an experimental pest-controlling device from the Ministry of Agriculture and Edna is attacked by a shambling tramp with sinister staring red eyes in a scene straight out of the opening of Night of the Living Dead. She flees – but her nightmare is only just beginning, as she finds her brother-in-law not only dead but crushed and her sister a catatonic wreck.

We know what killed him, because we’ve seen the zombie with our own eyes – but how on earth are George and Edna going to convince the police, especially when the local inspector (Arthur Kennedy) is about as hardnosed and unsympathetic as they come, and has a particular dislike of drug addicts and long-haired hippies, which rather places the burden of proof on poor George who, much like Dante in Clerks, wasn’t supposed to be there anyway.

Unlike most other zombie films, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie actually offers a reasonably rational scientific explanation for the dead coming back to life - it's a side-effect of a new experimental device developed by the Ministry of Agriculture that's designed to kill parasitical insects by messing around with their nervous system so that they attack and eat each other instead of valuable crops. This radiation has no effect on adult humans, but it's clear from cases at a local hospital that babies are suffering side-effects… and so are recently deceased corpses. If anything, in the wake of the BSE scandal and its real-life message about the dangers of tampering with nature, this part of the film is rather more potent and prophetic than it was in 1974!

What also hasn't dated - quite the reverse, in fact, given the current post-Macpherson row - is a fascinatingly negative portrait of the police, who, with just one exception (who inevitably ends up prematurely dead) are portrayed as being simple-minded authoritarians with decidedly right-wing tendencies and a fondness for gratuitous violence. It's tempting to read too much into this, though, as Jorge Grau was probably thinking more of Spanish Fascists (who were still in power in his native country when the film was made) than the British police force per se - and their depiction is skewed rather more by the casting of the obviously American Arthur Kennedy as a somewhat implausible British police inspector (there's nothing wrong with his performance, which is comfortably the strongest in the film - it's just that the accent is a little jarring!).

Fans of Lucio Fulci’s work will lap this up – it’s less overtly gory (though the effects are decidedly Fulciesque – unsurprisingly, since they were created by the same man, make-up genius Giannetto De Rossi), though the highlights are as memorable as anything in his output, and Grau shares Fulci’s talent for creating a genuinely creepy and menacing atmosphere even when by rights you should be laughing at the film’s obvious shortcomings. And what lifts this way out of the rut is a superb piece of sound design (calling it a “score” seems somewhat inadequate) by Giuliano Sorgini, which uses various electronic whirrs and rumbles blended with natural sounds to create a deeply unsettling effect (particularly on this DVD – see below) that’s not unlike what David Lynch achieved with Eraserhead - though, yet again, this film came first!

The DVD is generally excellent, featuring a more than adequate picture and an outstanding soundtrack. The anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer is mostly very good indeed, so it's a shame that I have a few nit-picks. The print is in superb condition considering the film's age and budget: spots and scratches are at an absolute minimum, and although there's some very faint tramlining on occasion, it's never distracting. The picture is slightly grainy, though this suits the material rather well, and colours are impressively vibrant. In fact, during the daylight sequences the transfer is pretty well perfect.

Problems arise, though, when things get darker, especially in the film's second half. Though the level of fine detail is generally commendably high, the picture tends to get a little swamped by the shadows when they dominate a scene, and there's some severe artefacting during a night-time fog-bound chase at around the seventy minute mark where the overall picture quality drops alarmingly. That said, for the most part the film comes across very well indeed, and it's certainly one of the better transfers of a low-budget film from the early 1970s that I've seen to date.

Where the transfer really shines is with the soundtrack. Normally, I'm intensely suspicious of Dolby Digital 5.1 remixes from rather more basic source materials, but this shows signs of real creative thought at every level, and for once the result is significantly and demonstrably better than the original. Surround effects are generally kept to a minimum - wisely, as they usually sound all too obviously fake if they've been added decades later - but where the disc really takes full advantage of the format is in the use of the subwoofer, which is pressed into service on numerous occasions to deliver a weird bass electronic throbbing that at times is genuinely stomach-churning: one reason this film was so unexpectedly involving is that you can feel the effect of the radiation on the corpses as well as hear it! It's not especially subtle, but it's immensely effective.

As for the soundtrack in general, it's perfectly competent, though the flat, post-synchronised dialogue is painfully obvious - but there's not a lot Anchor Bay could have done about that! There's an alternative Dolby 2.0 soundtrack for purists - apparently the soundtrack was originally mixed in stereo, which would have been very unusual for the period (Dario Argento’s Suspiria also has a pre-Dolby stereo track, but – yet again- it was made a few years later). Chapter stops have been set at a generous 26.

This DVD is available in two configurations - a normal Amaray case or one of Anchor Bay's special limited edition tins, though with a print run of only 5,000 the latter is in increasingly short supply. As far as I can make out, the disc itself is identical in both packages - but with the limited edition you get, in addition to the tin itself, a couple of cards (slightly larger than normal postcards) of colour advertising artwork, a fun if gimmicky Let Sleeping Corpses Lie mortuary toe tag and, best of all, a superb 24-page booklet packed with colour stills and an extensive essay on the film by Midnight Media's Nigel J Burrell. Despite Anchor Bay being a US label, the piece was clearly originally written for British readers - the film is referred to as The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue throughout, and there's a section on its status as a "video nasty" in the early 1980s (which alleges that the film's anti-police stance didn't do it any favours in the ensuing crackdown!).

On the disc itself, extras are fairly minimal - the highlight being a 20-minute interview with a winningly genial Jorge Grau (in Spanish with optional subtitles) that covers pretty much all the bases, from the original inspiration (the pitch was "Night of the Living Dead… but in colour!") through production (he's very funny on how he used Arthur Kennedy's resentment at having to appear in a film like this to the film's advantage!) and its subsequent cult reputation. It's mostly a talking head to camera performance, though it's intercut with clips from the film from time to time.

The other extras include a 30-second TV spot (though this turned out to be in anamorphic widescreen) plus a three-minute montage of radio spots, all for the US release, which was called Don't Open The Window!, all of which are enormously entertaining, though I can’t say I’d have rushed to my local drive-in if I’d heard them out of the blue. The radio trailers are accompanied by a montage of print advertisements, and a further section contains a small stills gallery. Unlike the usual step-by-step navigation arrangement, this plays in time to some music from the film, and again runs just under three minutes.

All in all, even the limited edition isn't a patch on the likes of Criterion's Carnival of Souls for sheer feature-packed excess, but that package really did go spectacularly over the top, whereas this one merely offers a good transfer and general coverage of the standard bases. I'd have liked a commentary, though going from the Grau interview it would probably have to be subtitled - but at least the transfer (especially that amazing soundtrack!) presents the film to its best advantage. But I'd think long and hard before shelling out for the limited edition - the booklet is great, and there's the cachet of owning a genuine collector's item (and one that's rather more limited than many of the other Anchor Bay tins), but I'm not convinced that it's ultimately worth the fairly considerable price difference between it and the normal version.

But the film itself is definitely worth seeing – as I’ve emphasised above, it’s historically fascinating for the way it pre-empts later, better-known horror films, and artistically fascinating for all sorts of other reasons. I had seen it before, at one of the late lamented Scala Cinema’s marathon all-day-all-night horror bashes in the mid-1980s, but that’s not the kind of atmosphere that particularly suits a fundamentally sober and serious horror film like this – and of course mono sound delivered through the Scala’s notoriously terrible speakers was laughable by comparison (there were plenty of rumbles, but they were down to tube trains running under the cinema rather than any technical wizardry on the part of the film-makers!), so it didn’t make much of an impression. Which made this DVD even more of a pleasant surprise.

Michael Brooke