No profanar el sueno de los muertos (1974)

Young antiques dealer George leaves an overcast, polluted Manchester on his motorcycle and heads out into the surrounding countryside. When his bike is damaged in an accident, George hitches a lift with the nervous Edna, who caused his loss by backing into the bike with her car. Amid much bickering and with the radio issuing ominous reports about impending ecological disaster, the couple are soon lost in the Lake District. Stopping off at a deserted riverside cemetery, George goes off in search of help, stumbling across a pair of white suited scientists and a farmer working with a massive, bright red machine. The boffins explain that it's an ultrasonic pest control device, designed to affect the primitive nervous systems of insects, causing them to become carniverous and begin to attack each other.

While George is away, Edna is attacked by a huge, bearded man who emerges from the cemetery, his clothes wringing wet and with a noose around his neck. After a brief struggle, she escapes but by the time George and the farmer find her, the attacker has vanished and no-one believes her story. The farmer identifies Edna's sketchy description of the man as a local tramp, Guthrie the Loony. But he died a week ago, drowned in the river...

That night, Edna's sister Katie argues with her photographer husband Martin who angrily stamps out into the night to photograph a nearby waterfall. While he's gone, Guthrie breaks into the house, terrifying Katie and chasing her out into the woods. Just as it seems that Katie is doomed, Guthrie is distracted by the automatic flashgun on Martin's camera. Guthrie kills the startled husband as the camera continues to take photos, capturing the whole gory business on film. As Guthrie closes in on Katie, George and Edna arrive and scare him off.

The police are alerted and they send the facist Sergeant McCormick, a man whose right wing sensibilities immediately bring him into conflict with the hippyish George. He's even less impressed with the traumatised Katie when he learns that she's a hopeless heroin addict. Hearing that Martin wanted to commit her to a 'drying out' clinic, McCormick reasons that she was responsible for her husband's death, dismissing out of hand Edna's tale of a reborn Guthrie.

Not suprisingly, all of this is too much for poor old Katie who cracks up completely and is taken off to Southgate Hospital for a rest. It's there that the local deceased are stored, awaiting transportation to Manchester Morgue in portable freezer units. When George visits Katie, he finds the place in chaos. New born babies are turning homicidal, attacking the nursing staff, and the doctors are at a loss to explain what's wrong with them.

Learning that all of the affected children are born in the area around the revolutionary pest control machine, George and a doctor visit the site, but their fears are dismissed by the scientists - "It has no effect on more evolved (nervous) systems." The doctor, however, cautions that new born children do indeed have primitive nervous systems.

Reunited with Edna (who's being hassled by an increasingly obnoxious McCormick) at the local newsagents, the couple are shown a newspaper bearing a photograph of the late Guthrie. Edna insists that Guthrie may not be as late as he seems, but George is sceptical: "The dead don't walk around except in very bad paperback novels."

To prove his point, George takes Edna off to the cemetery, unaware that one of McCormick's men is following them. But George's scepticism is shaken by his discovery of the cemetary caretaker's body, and is abandoned altogether when Guthrie appears and tries to attack them. As they hide, George and Edna watch Guthrie smear blood on the eyelids of his fellow corpses and soon they are up to their necks in revived corpses. Escaping through an access tunnel, the couple take refuge in the church, along with the puzzled bobby who's been following them.

Inexplicably finding a shotgun hanging on the church wall (for shotgun weddings, one presumes), the policeman begins blasting away at the zombies but to little effect. George suddenly has a flash of inspiration - perhaps the recently deceased still retain a very basic nervous system, in a primitive form that can be affected by the ultrasonic machine...

His musings are interrupted by the living dead trying to batter down the door with a headstone. The policeman spots his radio out on the path and makes a run for it. But these zombies aren't as slow moving as Lucio Fulci's and they quickly overpower him. "Sarge!" he screams into his handset, "there are dead people trying to eat me!" And sure enough, the zombies eviscerate th ehapless constable and eat his intestines.

Having temporarily satiated their hunger, Guthrie and the others return their attentions to George and Edna, succeeding in breaking into the church. George sets fire to the walking corpses and the couple make good their escape. However, back at Southgate, Martin's body is reactivated by the ultrasound machine, rises from his mortuary slab and heads for home. George sets off with the intentions of destroying the pest control machine, leaving Edna to go back to the cottage and run down Martin with her car. She's arrested by the police when George returns, having failed to destroy the machine, and what's left of Martin is taken back to the hospital.

Of Course, Martin doesn't stay down for long and soon he and other reanimated corpses are wandering the corridors of the hospital. As the bodies mount up, Katie accidentally kills Edna as the living dead feast on a telephonist, the mortuary attendant, a doctor - in about anyone they can lay their hands on. By the time George has escaped from the police and arrived on the scene, Edna is back as a zombie and joins the rest of the living dead in George's inferno as he torches the hospital. As our hero makes good his escape, the police arrive and gun him down in a hail of gunfire, much to McCormick's delight - one less hippie, junkie Satanist for him to worry about.

But he hasn't seen the last of George just yet. As McCormick returns to his hotel room, he finds a dead, but very annoyed George waiting for him. And as the credits roll, the ultrasound pest control machine is being improved - it's range is now much wider than it was before...
KEVIN LYONS