This is a very British zombie movie (although Grau was Spanish, it was shot in Manchester and Sheffield with British actors). Most of the runtime is spent investigating one suspicious murder, which we the viewers know was committed by a lone reanimated corpse, but which a hardnose inspector is certain was the work of our "long-hair" leads. The long-hairs do their own investigating and find that an experimental pest-control device that uses "ultra-sonic radiation" to make insects kill each other is also agitating the recently dead into homicidal undeath. As one long-hair puts it, while barricaded against the fiends in a church rectory, “When a person dies, perhaps the nervous system goes on living for a while, perhaps in some very basic, crude way, like an insect or a plant." This kind of detailed but ludicrous deduction is often found in British horror films of the 60's and 70's, such as Quatermass and the Pit (a 1967 remake by Hammer Films of a 1959 BBC TV movie) and The Creeping Flesh (1973). So, it's interesting to see it applied to 70's zombies. The patient, cerebral approach here is very different from American Romero-style zombie flics of the time.
Nevertheless, the brutal orgy of zombie action in the last half hour really works as a payoff in contrast to the preceding bucolic serenity. Also, it has a good message: the police will always ignore the real problem, whether it's poverty or an outbreak of zombie-ism, and blame the victims instead--ACAB!
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