Verdict
Summary
Supposedly based on some truth, Burke and Hare is a lighthearted sex comedy in the guise of a macabre horror film with all its sex and nudity amidst its gore free killing. The girls are very pretty and often naked (no complaint), and yet the film has an under baked quality to it that left me feeling wanting more of a plot or a conflict to make the film more compelling. The acting and sense of time and place are all adequate, but the film lacks a central focal point and a purpose. It’s far more concerned with all its sex farce material than what it’s actually trying to relate, which is a story of two low life characters who are basically ghouls, and how history has somehow remembered them in this way.
Plot:
Two street thugs kill so that they have fresh bodies to sell to medical science.
Review:
Edinburgh Medical College needs human cadavers for their anatomical displays for their incoming doctors in training, and the usual cadavers brought in are (by then) rotted and beyond study. Two enterprising street thugs – Burke and Hare (Derren Nesbitt and Glynn Edwards) – figure that they can make money by grave robbing freshly interred corpses and delivering them to the college, which pays good money for said cadavers. But in order to keep the money train rolling, they come up with the brilliant idea to kill people who are still alive to deliver the freshest corpses on the market! And where better to get fresh corpses than from the whorehouse where they spend most of their time? With all their carousing and whoring, they gain the trust of some willing whores and easily smother them, selling the bodies to the college!
Supposedly based on some truth, Burke and Hare is a lighthearted sex comedy in the guise of a macabre horror film with all its sex and nudity amidst its gore free killing. The girls are very pretty and often naked (no complaint), and yet the film has an under baked quality to it that left me feeling wanting more of a plot or a conflict to make the film more compelling. The acting and sense of time and place are all adequate, but the film lacks a central focal point and a purpose. It’s far more concerned with all its sex farce material than what it’s actually trying to relate, which is a story of two low life characters who are basically ghouls, and how history has somehow remembered them in this way. I also saw the remake from John Landis that came many years later, and ironically, I felt the exact same way about that film that I do about this one. This film was directed by Vernon Sewell.
Kino Lorber has just released a Blu-ray edition of Burke and Hare, and it comes in a perfectly adequate high definition transfer, with an audio commentary by a film historian, plus a feature on “corpses on film,” as well as an interview with one of the actresses, and the trailer.
