Coming out of a joint effort between Spanish moviemaking and Italian money and shot in the rural splendor of the UK countryside with all English dialogue, LSCL is yet another “flesh eating ghouls brought about by untested science” movie that the grimy ‘70s were so generous with. It’s weird enough to stand out from the majority of it’s peers though, illustrated perfectly by the pointless opening scene in which a nekkid white broad with the Incredible Hulk of white chick afros runs through the streets of “London” (not actually London but a low budget simulation) for no apparent reason… toldja.

Leaving “London” for the weekend is our hero, a long haired (well, it’s a little long I guess…) antiques dealer by the name of George who’s on his way out into the country to spend the weekend with some friends. On the way his motorcycle is backed over at a petrol station by Edna (well, not Edna so much as Edna’s car), who is on the way out to see her sister and brother-in-law in another part of the countryside… I don’t know the geographical difference in these places, so I didn’t bother to write them down. All I know is that they’re heading to two different places and George now needs a ride because his bike’s gonna be mechanic bound for the rest of the weekend. Unwilling to take George to his friends’ place first (because she’s got to get to her sister Kate’s place asap so she and brother-in-law Martin can have her institutionalized for her heroin addiction), Edna drags him along with her, promising to give him her car once they get where they’re going, trusting him to apparently bring it back to her once the weekend is over… wow, what a happy, trusting place the 1970s were! I kinda understand why my grandparents still think it’s okay to leave their front door unlocked while they’re at work… that and they’re old and don’t have anything worth stealing… and they probably lost the key sometime around 1984 and are just too proud to admit it or get new locks…

On the way to, uhm, wherever Kate and Martin live, Geo and Ed have to stop and ask for directions at an out-of-the-way farm (is there any other kind?) where it turns out some science types from the Department of Agriculture are trying out their fancy new sonic pest control doo-hickey. It seems the device (some kind of tractor equipment with a satellite thingy on top) is meant to send a specific wave frequency into the surrounding area that causes insects and other low-intelligence lifeforms into a violent fit, turning them against each other in Mother Nature’s Thunderdome, killing the pest populace without the use of poisons or napalming… trust me, those in the agricultural community do crazy shit when they get bored. Oklahoma City would be a little happier today if it weren’t for bored people doing unnatural things with industrial strength fertilizers is all I’m sayin.

Anyway, back to that sonic rage machine, you can imagine where this is going. If you can’t, well, let’s just say that Ed has a brief run-in with a very sickly looking chap before George comes back just in time to miss the whole thing and call Edna crazy for thinking she was nearly accosted by the living dead. Speaking of which, back at Kate and Martin’s place, Kate’s left alone at the house while Marty pursues his photography hobby, shooting flowers in the nearby woods. Dosing up with some of that sweet sweet intravenous brown sugar, Kate’s artificial happiness takes a nose dive down the shitter when she too gets a visit from the living impaired man… who must have dies from downing too much rocket fuel, cuz he hobbled his ass to the house ahead of our heroes and they’re cartin’ around in one of those obnoxious Mini Coopers. Escaping into the forest, she’s found by Martin who comes to her rescue, only to find his role in the movie is to be a short one as he too has an unfriendly pow-wow with the pissed off ghoul, ending more tragically than Edna’s experience when he winds up strangled, his instamatic camera capturing the attack on film. Kate’s spared by the timely appearance of sister Ed and random hippy-guy George, who scare off the creeper with their headlights, sending him moaning and pissy pantsed into the night.

The local constabulary shows up the following day, managing to be just as useless in European film ventures as they are here. Finding Kate’s stash they pass off her stories of a crazy-eyed murder as a not-so-happy side effect of getting cranked and take her in under the pretense that she was the one to kill her husband courtesy of her illegal retard muscles. Kids, don’t do drugs. I’m not saying that because they’re directly bad for your health and may lead a very unattractive demise on your part, I’m just saying that because you’ll get pinned for every illegal crime in a ten mile radius if the cops find out. It makes your job a lot easier when you can blame the socially unclean for everything. That reminds me, I better call into my parole officer when I finish up here.

Desperate to find some kind of evidence to clear Katy, Ed and George opt to steal Martin’s camera from police custody (as opposed to suggesting the cops check it out themselves…) and get the film developed themselves, hopefully to find a few clean pictures of Marty and his pulse-less attacker. Further investigation around town reveals that the zombie is indeed part of the local “color” (i.e. homeless drunkards) and was found face down in the river a week or two prior, leaving him corpsed up with no place to go, thus cementing what we the audience already figured out: he’s the undead. Could this be the result of the experimental sonic pest control being tested? If you have to ask yourself that question, not only do you deserve a slap across the face with a copy of John Stanley’s “Creature Features” (which, ironically enough, I just found out does not cover this movie…), but you should be able to finally make the connection when it’s revealed that newborns in the area are all coming out with strange rashes on their skin and particularly violent tendencies. Still not positive? Then I cannot help you and I pray to Zuul that someone can. There is no God, only Zuul… uhm, and Me.

Still not content to believe that the government has accidentally created a race of undead psycho murderers, George takes Edna out to the local cemetery where the drunkard is supposed to be buried. When they get there, they find the bum’s grave is… wait for it… almost there… here comes the crescendo… EMPTY! Yeah, shock and horror. Anyway, they also discover the place’s caretaker’s been offed as well before being confronted by a cop who was ordered to tail the couple in case they’re more deeply involved in Martin’s death than they’ve let on. The two-who-are-now-three wind up attacked by a small posse of blood hungry cadavers, cornered in the church until the cop makes a stupid mistake and gets brained by a big marble cross wielded by the ghouls. George and Ed escape and head to town to warn everyone that the dead aren’t so dead anymore, but of course this is when the police chief, who’s already biased against the hippy hair sportin’ George and the sister-to-a-drug-addict Edna, shows up at the church and finds no rage spouting corpses, but several dead and burned bodies, including his officer. The logical answer? George and Ed aren’t just no good anti-establishment free love menaces, but crazed cultist Mansonite devil worshippers! Run for the hills ma, the hippies is comin’! The hippies is comin’!

The rest of the movies finds George and Edna trying to find evidence of the zombies to clear their names, chasing off the Department of Agriculture guys and banging up their experimental tractor thingy, attempting to get Kate out of the hospital before the bodies in the morgue can rip out everybody’s titties and innards, all while dodging the bullets and biases of the pissed off police chief who’s taking the law into his own hands! To all those pussies who cry about how “life ain’t easy for a pimp”, take in a viewing of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and see if you got it half as bad as circa 1970s British hippy antiques dealers did!

Though there are plenty of other options out there for your blood soaked zombie dollar that have more action and zombie killing rampage fun, LSCL is the answer if you want some undead entertainment with an artsier edge to it. The DVD is cleaned up and looks amazing and I never would’ve thought the English countryside would make a great setting for a zombie flick, but it definitely is. The use of colors in the movie stand out better as well, thanks to all this fancy high-technology we have today, with depressing blues, eye catching crimsons and ominous shadows. The ghouls themselves are very memorable, not only because of their stellar “comic book explosion” contact lenses, twisted psycho violence grins or their mangled autopsy scars, but because they’re creepy, hairy, ugly British guys and that goes a long way. Some of you get what I mean while the rest of you don’t, but English people are physically disturbing, trust me. The story itself plays an interesting twist on the old “government project gone wrong” formula, by-passing things like experimental surgeries or toxic waste in favor of something a little more interesting: sonic transmissions that drive subjects to homicidal madness. On the other hand though, these guys are dead, so shouldn’t their lack of working brains and other necessary organs make something like that useless? Oh well, technicalities I guess…

The acting was great (the hateful head cop was especially fun to hate), the gore was great when it was there and not overused to the point of desensitization, some of the shots feel inspired and the sets and settings are all used very well. The music is effective to the overall sense of the movie and there’s technically not a lot to complain about. The morgue and cemetery scenes stand out as probably the more haunting moments for me and I was a little shocked and even a tad in awe when the ghoul bashed the cop with the big marble cross. Of course I know it was made of foam, but it hit me like a brick. It’s a great living dead flick and if you’ve never heard of it or if you have heard of it but haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet, I recommend it.

On a closing side note that has nothing to do with the actual content of the movie itself (kinda why it’s called a “side note”…), Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is also one of the three or thirty ghoul movies that's been released in Italy under the moniker of Zombi 3. I can understand people wanting to cash in on the popularity of Lucio Fulci's commercial knock-off of Romero and Argento's Dawn of the Dead, and I can only see it as fitting to bite off (pun intended) of such a movie's title as, if nothing else, an act of cinematic pseudo-justice, but the complete lack of common fucking sense involved with such an act is offensive to me as a horror movie consumer!... and by "consumer", I of course mean that I ingest the movies once I've seen them and add their power to my own. As I was saying though, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was released half-a-friggin-decade prior to Zombi 2, and yet some fire hazard of a man thought it'd be okay to try and release it again with a Zombi 3 sticker on it and hope it would sell better this time around?! I try to make it a habit not to listen to anyone, but I'm starting to understand why the rest of the world hates Italy...