O Esquife do Morto-Vivo

Local people are mysteriously disappearing in a small community in Cornwall, England, and it's no secret that it's all down to one Peter Blood, son of the local doctor. I started watching horror movies way back in the 1980's when I was a kid & I remember seeing this great sounding title in the TV guide, however for whatever reason I missed it and it's taken 30 odd years to finally watch it. And it didn't disappoint, though it's hardly a classic either. It is really nicely filmed in colour, with great coastal Cornish locations. The cast, which includes scream queen Hazel Court, is good. In particular I liked the character of Mr Mortimer, the drunk undertaker. There a few moments of gore, including quite graphic heart transplants, plus the zombie near the end is one of the earliest examples of a decaying corpse, which were to become so popular over the following decades. The only thing that let's the film down is that it can be pretty slow at times, but it is worth sticking with because the finale is pretty shocking.

Kieron Moore plays Peter Blood (I had that same temporary condition after a biopsy). He returns to his hometown where his father (Ian Hunter) is the town doctor. Peter is also a doctor, but his specialty is taking hearts from the living and transplanting them into dead people - a procedure not covered by Blue Cross. Peter does his experiments in an abandoned mine, so apparently even the clowns at the Wuhan Lab wouldn't give this guy space. About the only thing normal about Peter is his attraction to his father's nurse Linda (Hazel Court). She finally realizes he not only has a screw loose, but also several nuts and bolts. Of course, we are treated to Peter's obligatory "so what if I kill a few people as long as science is advanced" soliloquy. He then proceeds to show off his method by bringing Linda's dead husband back to life - sort of.

If you watch the trailer, you've pretty much seen enough. Hunter brings a little respectability to the proceedings, but that's not saying much. Court is gorgeous as ever, with her tight white nursing outfit. She also wears a tight blue number highlighting the stuff that the tight white number covers up. Also, the coastal scenery is nice to look at.

As you watch this film your thinking that this is just another psycho doctor movie where he's hell bent on proving his experiments are correct but then the film becomes a minor Frankenstein entry, complete with a resurrected corpse. Good location shooting in a small Welsh village add flavor to this story and good color in the type of film. You would also think that this is a film from Hammer studios, but it is not. Hazel Court is good as the nurse but veteran actor Kieron Moore who has worked in other science fiction films is pretty good also. This is one of the few times he's played the villain and not the hero that saves the day. This does have its share of blood and the overall mood of the film is effective in a grisly way. Future director Nicolas Roeg is one of the cameramen on the film. Horror film fans should check this eerie little film out.

Saw this one (again) on (Chicago's own) "Svengoolie" this weekend, and was amazed how interesting and well-done it was, considering the preposterously bizarre and grotesque underlying story. Also, how they make sympathetic, and almost get you to root for, the main character -- a guy who makes Dr. Mengele look like Hippocrates.

Meanwhile, it's striking how appealing Hazel Court is. Definitely a woman with a quality, she's developed nicely since "Devil Girl from Mars" (1953).

So, if you're up for a movie about a warped physician performing hellish experiments on (unwilling) human subjects, this is definitely the one to see. Mellow and affectionate.

People sometimes complain that horror movies nowadays lack originality, and that most of them are uninspired and blatant imitations of just a few half-decent films. Well, that may be correct, but it's definitely not a phenomenon that only popped up now. Shameless rip-offs always existed, and here's an example of the late 50s/early 60s to prove it! Sidney J. Furie's "Dr. Blood's Coffin" clearly got made to cash in on the tremendous success of Hammer Studio's first real horror production; - "The Curse of Frankenstein". It must be said that, in spite of the obvious budget restrictions, "Dr. Blood's Coffin" is a grisly little flick with reasonably gruesome make-up effects and quite a bit of violence. On the other hand, "The Curse of Frankenstein" was gruesome as well and, unlike "Dr. Blood's Coffin", it also had a solid screenplay, terrific scenery, great acting and a continuously tense atmosphere. Furie's film is rather incompetent and overall boring, to be honest. The film opens with a feeble attempt to keep the identity of the mad doctor secret, but after ten minutes or so, they realize that idea was just dumb and unfeasible. Dr. Blood Jr. (with a name like that, you're just destined to make a career in mad science) gets kicked out of the medical university in Vienna for conducting unorthodox experiments on deceased patients, although he personally prefers to think of them as revolutionary and courageous. He returns to his hometown in Cornwall, where he settles at his father's small doctor's practice and flirts with the widowed nurse. His main objective naturally remains to complete his research, and thus Peter Blood paralyzes unsuspecting villagers with curare and subsequently drags them to an improvised laboratory in an abandoned mineshaft. Personally, I don't think it's very smart to kidnap people in a town with a population of barely 50 people and I also don't really see the added value of killing people only to revive them via primitive heart transplants. But hey, the idea is sick enough for a horror film and there are filthy make-up effects, especially during the utterly grotesque climax with a revived zombie husband! The rest of the film is unfortunately dull and endlessly repetitive. One of Blood's victims escapes, for example, and the poor sucker spends the next fifteen minutes crawling over the ground. Dr. Blood himself whines so much about his cowardly fellow scientists that he forgets to seduce the nurse! "Dr. Blood's Coffin" is passable Brit-horror from the early sixties, only worth seeking out in case you already watched all the much more superior Hammer, Amicus and Tigon productions from the same era/decade.