Dr Blood's Coffin (1961)

Another of those films I vaguely remember watching when it turned up in the late night schedules several decades ago.  Dr Blood's Coffin is one of a pair of low budget horror movies directed by Sidney J Furie when he first came to the UK from Canada.  (The other was The Snake Woman (1961) - the two were released on a double bill in the US, but played separately in the UK).  Nowadays Furie is probably best known as the director of The Ipcress File (1965), but early on in his career he directed all manner of movies, from these horror films, to Cliff Richard vehicles and court room dramas like The Boys (1962).  Later he would dabble in Blaxploitation (The Hit (1973)), biopics (Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Gable and Lombard (1976)), before settling into a long run of thrillers and action movies, interspersed with a couple of Rodney Dangerfield comedies.  A professional nadir was probably Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, (1987), directed for the notorious Cannon Films.  Basically a professional commercial director, Furie's films are unified not by genre, but rather by a distinctive visual style: unusual camera angles and points of view allied with the use of a bright colour palette. 

Other than Furie's  involvement, Dr Blood's Coffin is, in truth, not a notable film.  An everyday tale of a mad scientist trying to revive the dead, it locates its action in contemporary Cornwall, with the titular doctor locating his secret lab in one of those disused tin mines which proliferate in fictional Cornwall.  The trailer pretty much sums up the film's entire plot and contains most of its highlights.  It's basically a Frankenstein/zombie film.  Indeed, it even starts Hazel Court, the female lead from Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein (1956).  The title role goes to Kieron Moore, an actor who, for a while, looked as if he was on the verge of having a career as a leading man in A-pictures, but the breakthrough never came for him and, by the early sixties, his career was on the slide.  (He made his last film in 1967, playing an Indian chief in Custer of the West, before focusing on TV work.  In 1974 he gave up acting to become an activist on behalf of the Third World).  The film's highlight is probably the location photography in Cornwall.  It's one of those films that I keep telling myself that I should watch again and reappraise, but my recollections of watching it the first time are so desultory that I just can't bring myself to do it.