There’s probably a thesis to be written about how Hammer subverted the traditional horror picture by inserting lashings of nudity. The studio’s female vampire trilogy, beginning with The Vampire Lovers (1970), was presumably made with an eye on attracting bigger box office rather than upending the status quo and taking the exceptionally feminist approach of making females the predators. Although in the first of the series, men were the eye candy, for the second and third it appeared to make more sense for the prey to be disrobed females, a double whammy, if you like, of female nudity.
That formula then appeared to be applied to any movie roughly in the horror genre, sometimes, as here, with just awful results. Young starlets who might previously have been expected to restrict their titillation to cleavage, were now going all-in. It helps if for no apparent narrative function you can set half the tale in a brothel and also ensure part of the attraction of such premises is voyeurism, peep-holes through which the clientele can view a couple having sex.
Two of the damsels on ample display were Francoise Pascal, hitherto one of those trapped into risque roles such as School for Sex (1969), and Yutte Stensgaard, who’s marquee value appeared to have been terminated despite all her nudity in Lust for a Vampire (1971) and now reduced to a supporting role.
Apologies for concentrating on the licentious, but the movie has little more to offer. Burke and Hare preceded Dr Jekyll as Edinburgh’s most famous villains, but it’s hard to get worked up about their activities. Audiences were inured to grave-robbing since without an steady supply of body parts Frankenstein would have struggled to make his monsters.
The idea of people donating their bodies to medical science was hardly a hidden secret in the 1970s and the idea that you could build a movie exposing the hypocrisy of doctors seeking to use corpses for anatomy lesson seems far-fetched. There was no law against using corpses. As eminent surgeon Dr Knox (Harry Andrews) explains in supercilious tones it was not a crime to cut open a dead body.
So we are left with our graverobbing tag team of Burke (Derren Nesbitt) and Hare (Glynn Edwards) and various other low lifes in Edinburgh in the 1820s whose main preoccupation seems to managing a Scottish accent. There’s little that’s particularly gruesome about the graverobbing and given the victims are all dead a complete lack of gore. Even the one legitimate opportunity to add frisson, the extraction of a heart by Dr Knox during a class, is ignored.
Graverobbing, however, doesn’t supply all the needs of Dr Knox, so our pair resort to murder. That has the specific advantage of delivering fresher corpses. Suffocation is the murderer’s tool, since already slashed bodies might suggest even to Dr Knox that the corpses had met a different kind of end.
Where does the brothel fit into all this you might wonder? Is Dr Knox a regular? ‘Fraid not. For our entrance to the brothel we have to rely on sketchily-drawn medical students. Sex worker Marie (Francoise Pascal) ends up on Dr Knox’s slab after an unwelcome encounter with Burke. At some point, a little bit of detective work takes over, as Marie’s medical student lover is not satisfied with the post mortem declaring she died of alcohol poisoning.
But since you hardly care about any of these characters, it’s more like a documentary with sex and nudity thrown in.
Derren Nesbitt (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) didn’t enhance his reputation but Glynn Edwards rolled out another of his sneaky characters that provided a lifetime of supporting roles.
Directed by Vernon Sewel; (Curse of the Crimson Altar, 1968) from a script by historian Ernle Bradford making his debut.
A bit better than Orgy of the Dead (1965) but not by much.
The Magnificent 60s 