Lovesusti
The Worst Film Ever
Platicsco
Good story, Not enough for a whole film
Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Coventry
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.
BA_Harrison
Six years before the world's first human heart transplant, Dr. Blood's Coffin saw Kieron Moore star as Dr. Peter Blood, a biochemist determined to bring a man back to life by giving him a new heart. Of course, this being a horror flick, Blood is seriously deranged, his procedure requiring the donor to be still alive while the transplant takes place.In order to carry out his plans, Blood returns to his rural home village in Cornwall (where absolutely no-one has a West Country accent), and proceeds to drug and abduct locals, taking them down to the tunnels of a nearby disused tin mine where he has set up a rudimentary operating theatre using medical supplies half-inched from the local surgery run by his unsuspecting father.When he's not injecting victims with curare (which causes paralysis) and playing God in the mine, Peter spends his time wooing his father's curvaceous widowed nurse Linda (Hammer babe Hazel Court). As time goes on, Linda becomes suspicious of Peter, leading to a shocking climax that sees the demented doctor reanimating the nurse's decomposing husband.While all of the above sounds like a lot of ghoulish fun, Dr. Blood's Coffin is less entertaining than it might have been, suffering from too many dialogue-heavy scenes and a lack of genuine horror, the only slightly disturbing scenes being the hasty removal of organs by a flustered Peter (he's a fast worker, completing the surgical procedure in minutes). The finale, in which Linda's mouldy husband comes back to life is incredibly silly, but easily the most enjoyable part of the film, director Sidney J. Furie finally delivering on the movie's macabre premise.
preppy-3
SPOILERS!!!! Story about people disappearing in a remote Cornish town. It seems the well-liked doctor Peter Blood (Kieron Moore) is killing people he thinks are not needed and transferring their hearts into the corpses of intelligent people. HOW this is supposed to bring them to life is never explained. Pretty nurse Linda (Hazel Court) begins to suspect that something is up. The plot is pretty stupid but this is an OK horror film. The scenery is beautiful (I believe it was shot in Ireland) and it moves fairly quick. Moore and Court are great in their roles which helps. If you're going to watch this for blood or violence forget it. It's not a gory film at all but there are a few shots of exposed beating hearts. The ending is silly but effective. All in all just an OK horror film. Great title though.
Michael_Elliott
Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961) ** 1/2 (out of 4) British horror film about a doctor (Kieron Moore) who is kicked out of his academy after wanting to do experiments on the dead. He goes back to his hometown where he begins working with his father but also killing so that he can work on the experiment of bringing the dead back to life. There are a few nice elements to this film but in the end you can't help but be somewhat disappointed. Like many British productions this one here has the unfortunate problem of being way too talky. I'm really not an expert on British horror, outside seeing hundreds of the films, but I've always been curious as to why many of them felt the need to add endless dialogue scenes and quite often one right after the other. This film goes a bit further and has various scenes repeated for no good reason at all and in the end we've probably got 15-minutes worth of stuff that could have been taken out and it wouldn't have impacted the story at all. We get countless scenes of the doctor explaining that other doctors are scared to take chances. We get countless scenes of the doctor trying to be romantic with the nurse (Hazel Court) working in his father's office. Outside the boring dialogue we've got a rather interesting movie. I thought the performances were a major plus with Moore doing a good job at being "civil" enough to have us believe him as a doctor and also eerie enough for us to believe he's crazy. I thought he did a good job playing the crazy bit and was effective doing it. Court is good in her role as well even though she doesn't have much to do except tell Moore how crazy he is. The supporting players are better than you'd expect even though none of them really jumps out at you. Director Furie does a nice job at building up the atmosphere and I thought the small town setting was a good one and that he did a very good job at bringing it out. The mine sequences are a bit too dark for their own good but they too contain some nice atmosphere. The ending is when things really start to pick up with the monster finally appearing and it was pretty much worth the wait. The monster looks extremely good, which is a plus. I think the police here are incredibly stupid because it's obvious who's doing all the killing but with that said, once you get past all the dialogue you're left with a mildly entertaining horror film.
