Here's a fun, quick, silly one that I knocked out really fast, just to kill a slow evening... But I've got a lot to say about it!

This illustration is a tribute to a very, very, very weird and wonderful European Horror Film from 1974 called, "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie", filmed in England by Spanish director, Jorge Grau.

In Europe, it was released under a different, and much cooler-sounding title: "The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue". And to make things even more confusing, for a while in the '70's, it was also released at drive-in theaters under the really lame title "Don't Open The Window".

I had been reading about this movie in books and magazines for years before I ever got around to seeing it... all the different titles created enough confusion to keep me from tracking it down a lot longer than I should have.

It's basically a zombie movie, but it's done with that sort of... great, moody, off-kilter, slightly goofy style that only the 1970's European Horror films have.

There's a bizarro quasi science fiction environmentalist message, and a lot of quasi-political reminders that in dreary 1974 rural England, the Vietnam War is old news, the Peace-and-Love Movement is dead, and everybody's anxious to be done with all that crap.

The best character in the movie is a near-psychotic American homicide detective (working a case in rural England?!), played by Arthur Kennedy, who somehow manages to completely miss the fact that zombies are slaughtering people left and right. Instead, he spends the whole movie ruthlessly bullying the 20-something hippie kids and blaming them for all the killings! This unfair, irrational, maniacal behavior is played with the utmost seriousness, of course. The hippie kids keep trying to tell this crazy detective that there are zombies about. He refuses to listen to them and just keeps getting more and more angry. Toward the end of the film, he finally gets around to actually shooting one of the hippies. Then he grabs the bleeding, dying kid and snarls, "I wish people really COULD come back from the dead so I could kill you AGAIN!"

The girl in the movie is played by this fetching redheaded Spanish actress named Christina Galbo. At first she struck me as a real "plain-jane" type but she slowly grew on me, and proved to be a truly sympathetic, sexy female lead. I think I did a pretty good job of capturing her likeness in this illustration.

The music and sound effects in this movie are as weird and cool as everything else about it. The horror and scares are mostly of the low-key, atmospheric, "creepy" or "disturbing" type, but there's a few good bloody, grisly moments here and there.

If you like strange, obscure, goofy 1970's Euro-Horror, I suggest you check this one out. It's certainly become a recent favorite of mine...

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