I’ve really been getting into the Unsung Horrors podcast and was overjoyed to discover a remake remix rip-off movie that I never knew about. Even better, it’s based on one of my favorite movies: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue AKA No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos (Don’t Disturb the Sleep of the Dead), Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, The Living Dead, Breakfast at Manchester Morgue and Don’t Open the Window.

Kang Myeong — the George Meaning of this movie — gets a ride from Soo-ji — Edna Simmonds — on his way to a seminar on the environment while she’s traveling to check up on her sister Jyun-ji. — Katie — and her husband Yeong-tae Jeong — Martin — only to learn that he’s dead.

Well, not for long.

One of Kang Myeong’s American teachers is now working at a supersonic transmitter that is removing insects in a more humane way, but it’s also animating the nerves of the newly dead. We learn this when the town drunk — who has been dead for several days — attacks Soo-Ji.

What’s different here is that nearly everyone has had their sharp edges smoothed off. Kang Myerong is never as mean to Soo-Ji as Geroge was to Edna, but then again, he isn’t as gorgeous as Ray Lovelock. But otherwise — up until three-quarters of the way through this movie — this is the same movie that you know and love under so many titles. It’s also missing the gore and when a movie is known for just how upsetting its moments of violence are, that’s a pretty big loss.

The other thing you might miss is that the cops come around a lot faster and the head officer is in no way as much of a real cop as Arthur Kennedy was.

Yet what makes up for this is just how weird it is that we have an alternative reality version of this movie and that the zombies are basically all painted silver, which is again in contrast to the very realistic dead bodies that populated Jorge Grau’s horror masterpiece. It attempts to make up for this with shocking photos of actual birth defects, as the movie goes further than its inspiration by stating that the machine is turning new babies into monsters.

Another title for this South Korean zombie xerox is Strange Dead Bodies, which is a fabulous alternative and one that would get me into the theater (or, you know, in front of my TV).

You can watch this on the Korean Film Archive YouTube channel.