Burke and Hare

That's right, a second random movie trailer for the week!  Hell, I'm on holiday and can't be arsed to come up with proper posts!  Give me a break!  Anyway, getting to the trailer: a hilarious black comedy about body snatchers, complete with a theme song by The Scaffold, (look them up or ask your Grannies kiddies) - it must be the early 1970s!  As the traditional British gothic horror movies began to lose ground at the box office to the more explicit, contemporary set, US and continental equivalents, producers began to experiment with the format: Hammer gave us lesbian vampires, Kung Fu vampires and curious hybrids like Dracula AD 1972, which tried to force their gothic characters into the modern world.  The independent producers of Burke and Hare decided to go for a combination of bawdy comedy and crumpet.

Fittingly, the film features a number of favourites (or soon-to-be favourites) from British TV sitcoms of the period: Yootha Joyce (Man About The House, George and Mildred), Francoise Pascal (Mind Your Language) and Yutte Stensgaard (not only Doctor in The House, but also cult movies Zeta One and Lust For a Vampire).  Burke and Hare themselves are played by Derren Nesbitt - a fixture in British movies of the time, usually playing a sneering hard man - and Glynn Edwards, now best remembered as Dave the barman in Minder.  Apart from its comedic approach, Burke and Hare is notable as being the first colour film of their exploits and also the first to actually use their names in the title, (apparently, as late as the 1950s the British censors wouldn't allow their names - in common with those of other real-life criminals - to be uttered in a film for fear of glamourising them and their crimes).  The director, Vernon Sewell, was a stalwart of the British film industry, directing numerous low budget movies over the decades (including the magnificently barmy Blood Beast Terror for Tigon).  I believe this was his last feature before retiring (he was nearly seventy) and sailing his yacht around the world.  He lived well into his nineties.  Whilst rarely given positive write-ups in critical histories of the horror film, Burke and Hare has nonetheless garnered a cult following and has been issued on VHS and DVD several times in recent years.  It was effectively remade by John Landis in 2010, with Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis in the title roles.