1961 (UK)
Contains spoilers.
I'm going to
approach director Sidney J. Furie's rather tame and rather lame Cornish
Frankenstein-retelling in two ways. Firstly I'm not going to hold my punches,
despite undoubted charm and nostalgia, from a film that rather snoozes along
with a repetitious and vacuous story that takes way too long to deliver. And
second, I'm not going to underplay the significance of Paul Stockman's
decaying, macabre, soulless and homicidal zombie performance, some 5 years
before Plague of the Zombies, some 7 years before Bill Hinzman in Night of the Living Dead and most comparably, some 18 years before Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombie / Zombi 2).
Peter Blood (Kieron
Moore) has returned home to the small Cornish and fictitious village of
Porthcarron to a spate of strange disappearances, and several break-ins to his
father, Robert's (Ian Hunter) clinic. Offering his skills, as a medical
practitioner and biochemist, the case soon takes a dark and more sinister turn
as local drunk and tin-mine expert George Beale (Andy Alston) is kidnapped on the
eve of searching the coastal tunnels looking for the missing souls. What we
have in many ways is a quaint and
intriguing famous five mystery with a bumbling local bobby, Sergeant Cook
(Kenneth J. Warren), an old drunk but harmless mortician, an earnest Doctor and
the ever smiling and ever helpful nurse Linda Parker (Hazel Court) who, if we
needed any reminder this is a film from the late 50's, early 60's, utilises her
medical education to make coffee, carry boxes and act as chauffeur and love
interest for the returning Peter.
People have been
abducted, there's some old tin-mines, a mysterious syringe with an unusual
compound that drags Dr. Robert to the big city for analysis and all it's really
missing is Fred, Wilma, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby to unveil the faceless evil master-mind and save the day. The thing is, given the title, the obvious
similarities to the young over ambitious and morally duplicitous medical
student scolded and thrown from his Vienna scholarship in the opening scene, then seen bounding the
Cornish coves and heather, and the whodunit is all a bit of damp squib. Furie at least seems to recognise this though, revealing Peter as the mad scientist before the pretence becomes unbearable.
Sure the acting is
solid, the dialogue coherent and the scenery beautiful, it's just that for all intents and purposes the film is one long drawn out hour of incompetent police work, lacklustre chases and unconvincing romantic courtship. Not
only does nothing really happen, but the not-muchness that does happen is
painfully drawn out; an example being Peter's chase of the crawling George who's
somehow shaken off his paralysing drugs, back and forth over the Cornish cliffs a good ten
minutes or so too more than is necessary or wanted. It's also hard to suspend the necessary level of
disbelief that not only can no one can put two and two together to even suspect
that the returning stranger with the medical background, and the strange vials
of South American neurotoxin might be behind the stolen syringes and
abductions, but also put him in an unchallenged position to cover each and
every track.
At least after some intense dates and some major red-flags, the proverbial pebble drops leading Linda to a really
rather terrifying confrontation where Peter's now rather
entrenched and pathological position is provoked to increasingly desperate ends. An hour and ten, is a
long time to wait to be honest, for any kind of pay-off despite how good it
ultimately is, and I'd be hard pressed to recommend the film other than for the
fact the decaying, long dead person brought back to life, through Peter transplanting a beating heart, is easily one of earliest depictions of what we'd consider
the modern zombie. Dark, foul, rotten, and explicitly soulless and violent, the
creature is clearly not the kind late husband Linda spoke so fondly of, and is
clearly not happy to have been woken from its slumber. Furie is even good
enough to provide some origin; as during the argument that proceeded Peter's twisted actions she confronts his extreme secular and utilitarianism position that brilliant men should be allowed to live at the expense of bums and paupers, with religious and moral prediction and warning. Tampering such as he is
with life and death, she vehemently argues, is inherently wrong, evil and fraught with danger, and only God alone is capable of creating life. She tells him anything he, or
science brings back will be flesh only, without a soul. It's a
brilliant twenty minutes or so, well thought out, and I'd argue well ahead of
its time. It's just such a pity it took so long to get there.
Light on content and
laboured, this low budget British horror isn't without some redeeming qualities. Kieron
Moore convinces as Peter Blood cavorting around the beautifully captured
Cornish coastline every bit the crazed and rejected scientist, desperate to
prove his father and contemporaries wrong. Also individually many of the
incidents in the build up to the confrontation in the cavern are
engaging and foreboding; if, as said, all that bit drawn out and sporadic. As
a 60s British horror I'd be remiss not mention the hammer horror vibe which it
has with abundance, and also remiss not to at least mention some of the rather
glaring mundane distractions such as the drawings behind the
windows of the internal sets, or the clear chroma-keying utilised for the
driving scenes. But it's not these that ultimately detracts, and older films come, in my opinion with certain visual leeway. Doctor Blood's Coffin is ultimately a victim of its own failings; not brave enough to apply a thorough edit, and too content that thirty minutes of good content stretched to become an hour of okay, with a twenty minute brilliant crescendo would be good enough, which unfortunately it isn't - 4/10.
Steven@WTD.
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