 |
 This one has info on the inside of the outer sleeve that is pretty interesting.
The guy doing the writeup there says this about the movie's
story: there's a "host of inconsistencies and idiocies [that] run through the
storyline." He goes on to attribute this to the fact that something like four
writers worked on this picture. He also notes that this leaves the film
"seriously flawed." The back of the box says that it is a "carefully
constructed and beautifully photographed tale of the undead roaming the English
countryside." I'm guessing two different guys were in charge of writing each
side of the sleeve. 1974, 93 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This mid-seventies zombie shocker from Jorge Grau has risen from the grave
under a number of different titles including Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue and Don't Open The Window. It tells the story of what happens when man goes a wee-bit too far in
futzing about with the environment and causes some kind of zombie-rumble. It's
a serviceable entry in the zombie, flesh-eater cannon that is helped out by its
lush English locales. It all starts in London when George heads off to his
country home on his motorbike for a relaxing holiday. George is young stud who
wears a leather jacket and large sunglasses. He has this longish feathered
hair and and beard that made me think that I was watching Maurice Gibb of the
Bee-Gees for much of the movie (and I'm not such a lamer as to make an awful
Stayin' Alive reference now) which was a little distracting during some of the
more
dramatic moments, but those were few and far between so it wasn't what you'd
call a large handicap or anything. As George tools on out of town, we get a
montage that is designed to get across the message that we are ruining our
environment. There's pictures of car exhaust, people wearing surgical masks, a
witttle-bitty dead birdie and an ugly chick that streaks across the street.
Trust me when I say that that was some serious pollution we need to clean up. George stops at the local FINA station (I thought that stood for Finest In
North America) and parks behind some dunce in a little car. When she's done
filling up her car with petrol (since this is a EuroTrash movie, I'll try to
stick EuroTrash terms like "bloody" and "bugger" and "g'day mate") she decides
to put her car in reverse and back out of the FINA over top of George's
wittle-bitty bike. There's a sickening crunch and George suddenly needs to
have a brand new wheel attached to his bike. Since it's the weekend, he's stuck
though and tells the woman that she can give him a lift to someplace that had a
British name. This woman's name is Edna and it's the only Edna I can really
remember in my life except for Edna Garrett from The Facts Of Life and she ran that little rinky dink store called Edna's Edibles who's only
claim to fame was that George Clooney showed up for a few episodes to hit on
Tootie or something. Anyhow, Edna doesn't so much agree to give George a lift
as he just sort of forces her to. He even lets her know that she can leave the
driving to him. Couldn't really blame him, what with the accident back at
the FINA and all. Wouldn't really do to have some broad trying to outdrive a
bunch of zombies when she manages to run over the only vehicle within a country
mile of her, now would it? You get a little backstory at this point with
George saying he's got to go meet some people at his house for something or
other
and Edna saying that she's supposed to be going to visit her sister in a nearby
village.  Since George doesn't know where her sister lives and since Edna couldn't
navigate her way out of an empty FINA parking lot, they get lost and can't find
the dang place. So they stop and George goes up the hill to talk to some
gentleman farmer or something and Edna is left alone in the car. George also
took the keys from her so that she wouldn't accidentally back over any zombies
or anything. So she's in the car wondering how much her insurance rates are
going to go up when this dude materializes around the nearby river and starts to
shamble his way toward her. We can tell from his greyish complexion, vacant
demeanor, and red contact lenses that he is probably the first of the titular
corpses that we should have let lay. Edna's seen Night of the Living Dead so she knows what to do in a situation like this. She screams and panics and
runs and falls into the river a few times before George can come back and look
around and see nothing out of the ordinary. Meanwhile George has had his own
important plot development. The farmer he met was working with a couple of
guys in these white jumpsuits that I guess are supposed to look like some kind
of hazardous materials outfits. These guys were all huddled about this giant
red combine that has been outfitted with some kind of rotating do-dad with a
red siren on top of it. It produces something called ultrasonic radiation or
some such nonsense. It's supposed to aggravate all the bugs in the area into
attacking each other and killing all of them off. Since John Deere doesn't
sell an Ultrasonic Radiation Combine these days, you can pretty well guess that
the gizmo has some unintentional and problematic side effects. Two actually:
inexplicably it raises the dead and causes babies to become extremely
aggressive. You can sort of see where this movie starts to lay down on the job a bit with
the whole mega-combine, zombies, and killer babies bit. This machine causes
insects to attack and kill one another, it causes babies to poke the eyes out
of nurses and it causes corpses to get off their duffs and wander around eating
people. They also tell us that the zombies spread this plague of undead to one
another through the blood of their victims. Not sure how that follows from the
rest of it and still not sure how the zombies follow from the whole pest
control thing and I'm pretty sure that the whole killer baby thing is from a
different movie all together, but George managed to figure it all out while he
was trapped in a cemetery building with Edna and a cop. The cops become
involved when the husband of Edna's sister turns up dead and the sister becomes
suspect numero uno because she's a no good drug fiend. Actually it was the
zombie that tried to make zombie-chow out of Edna earlier, but the facist
Inspector doesn't buy that and believes that George and Edna are in on it as
well. They even try to play up this whole "cops are pigs" angle when they
have the Inspector sneer at George with lines like, "you people with your long
hair and your faggot clothes, all you think about is drugs and sex." George
responds in typical punk fashion by giving him the Nazi salute. Glad to see
that the Nazis got at least a mention in this zombie flick. They seem to
populate these types of movies like polyps on my bum (that's English for ass,
you know).  After George and Edna get out of the cemetery they eventually split up for some
reason. George goes to destroy the magic combine and Edna goes off to do
something regarding her sister. The movie seems to meander every now and again
with George and Edna going here and there for some reason or other. George
wrecks the machine, George is at the hospital farting around with killer
babies, George goes back to Edna's sister house. George gets busted by the
fuzz. George escapes from the fuzz, hooks back up with Edna dumps her at a gas
station (Shell, not FINA), goes somewhere else, heads back to the hospital,
hooks back up with Edna, sets her on fire, gets shot by the Inspector, comes
back to life, etc. After awhile it just seemed like we were on a scavenger
hunt with George. Dude, get a plan and stick to it. I'm not sure what his
plan was, but I'm fairly certain it didn't involve getting shot and becoming a
zombie. All this running around weakened any kind of suspense the movie tried
to build up. The reason Night of the Living Dead worked was because of the mounting claustrophobia. Everyone was trapped in a
single farmhouse while the undead slowly closed in. Everytime a zombie thrust
its hand through a boarded up window, the tension ratcheted up because there
wasn't any place else to go and eventually those two by fours weren't going to
be
able to stand up to the sheer numbers and relentlessness of the things
outside. In this movie, George was driving around in stolen police cars and
everyone else was going about their business. There wasn't the sense of
urgency or doom that pervaded NOTLD. As slow and dumb as zombies are, you need to have that feeling that
everything is
closing in and backing you into a corner to actually communicate to the viewer
that there is a threat worth caring about. It was only through George's
stupidity at the end that he got wasted by the cops and became an undead loser.
That said, the movie wasn't without it's merits. It was actually better than
most of the living dead ripoffs. The English countryside looked beautiful and
green and vibrant, making it an interesting setting for a couple of rotting
corpses to wander around. There weren't many gutmunching scenes, but the
couple we had were what you've come to expect with people's chests ripped open
and junk being pulled out all red and chunky and ready to eat. They used sound
to good effect with some eerie and unsettling noises whenever the zombies were
onscreen. Overall this is a small scale zombie movie that achieves small scale
results. A muddled story finally unravels and prevents this from being a
totally satisfying experience, but you probably could get away with showing
this as a third or fourth zombie movie of an all night zombiethon when most
people are fairly sleepy and undemanding.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
