First up let me explain a little of the films background. It's a Spanish/Italian co-production, filmed in England. The screen-play was written by four people (Spainards and two Italians) with a cast made up of Americans, Brits, Italian's and Spainards with most of them dubbed into English. It's also a rip off of Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead'. It's also set in the Lake District but actually filmed in the Peak District. This film shoud be a hilarlious mess. But it is'nt.
Despite the films strange cocktail of nationalities working on it is a very effective horror film. It loosely takes the plot of Romero's film and actually makes something more interesting out of it. The main character of George (a dealer in New Age and occult themed art) is seen leaving his shop on motorbike and riding through the streets of Manchester. In this film Manchester is seen as a bleak, smog drenched city of the living dead full of people standing in bus queues looking dead-eyed, endless traffic jams of cars and buses belching smoke (even a naked woman running across the road does'nt cause anyone to bat an eyelid). Even when he leaves the city centre at enters the English countyside it does'nt get better. Usually when foreign filmmakers film in England they tend to give it a picture postcard took, not so the films director Jorge Grau. The English counrty side takes on a very bleak, almost empty look throughout the film. An when the fog comes in it becomes very claustrophobic indeed.
The plot is quite simple. George ends up taking a ride with a woman called Edna who is driving to see her heroin addicted sister in the Lake District (the dialogue in the drive is unintentionally hilarious) before they come across a government sponsered machine that kills crop harmful insects and pest through sonic radiation waves causing the pests to attack and kill each other. Unfortunately it has a few side-effects no-one was expecting on the newly born and the recently dead. Now we are in pure and bloody zombie territory. And if you thought the zombies were bad enough you hav'nt met the local police force yet. Led by the most bigoted police officer I've ever seen in a film played by American actor Arthur Kennedy with an Irish accent they seem less like British coppers and more like the ones that are active in a more Fasist state (proberbly the influence of the Spanish screenwriters as Spain was at the time in 1974 was sill under the Franco dictatorship). All in all this is a very effective horror film, sometimes untentionally hilarious in the first half but suprisingly scary and very gory in the second half. And personally I think there is something very prophetic about it too; a film about a government sponsered scientific idea in the counrtyside only to go wrong conjures up the images of BSE at it's aftermath and the growing of GM crops despite much oppostion. Was this film 20 years ahead of its time?