This grisly chain of events doesn't exactly sound like prime material for a black comedy, but the misdeeds of Burke and Hare have provided plenty of fodder over the years for films ranging from the horrific to the outright buffoonish. The first feature to actually bear the names of this pair as its title was Burke and Hare in 1971, which falls somewhere in between the two extremes as it juggles dark music-hall-style humor, mild sexploitation, and vicious murder scenes into a strange concoction that made it a TV mainstay for years.
This film marked the final directorial effort of Vernon Sewell shortly after previous two horror films, Curse of the Crimson Altar and The Blood Beast Terror, a pair of colorful but wildly disjointed supernatural outings for Tigon, one of several studios attempting to compete with Hammer Films. The screenplay by Ernle Bradford (who wrote little else) certainly isn't one of the genre's strongest, but Sewell manages to compensate by laying on the period atmosphere thick right from the beginning with a vignette illustrating the methods of body-snatching via covert exhuming of bodies at night in graveyards, setting the stage for the social landscape in which the two criminals would soon make history.
In this variation, Burke is portrayed as a handsome but scheming ne'er-do-well played by Derren Nesbitt, an actor with credits ranging from Hollywood films like The Blue Max and Where Eagles Dare to saucier offerings like Not Now Darling and The Amorous Milkman. His partner in crime is inhabited by Glynn Edwards, a character actor from many British TV roles but perhaps best remembered as Albert from the original Get Carter. However, the most familiar face for many viewers here will be this particular Dr. Knox, Harry Andrews, an Old Vic veteran with credits ranging from rugged films like Paratrooperand The Hill to The Agony and the Ecstasy, Death on the Nile, and The Ruling Class. However, horror fans will most likely best know him as one of the ill-fated stage critics who falls prey to a Shakespeare-spouting Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. The part here may not demand his usual level of thespian energy, but he certainly manages the tricky level of gallows humor demanded of his handful of scenes.
On the other hand, the female cast sports two actresses from different ends of the horror pool at the time, both cast as cheerful prostitutes and providing a little bare flesh to justify the R rating. Danish-born former model Yutte Stensgaard had appeared in such films as If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium and Scream and Scream Again, but it was her carnal lead performance in Hammer's Lust for a Vampire that assured her screen immortality. She has less to do here, obviously, but her fan base will certainly appreciate her surprisingly winning and cheerful appearance here. A little more wooden is her onscreen coworker Françoise Pascal, a British TV veteran who starred in Jean Rollin's The Iron Rose along with sexy romps like School for Sex and Keep It Downstairs.
Released in the United States by New World, Burke and Hare has remained available in every major video format since the 1980s including a handful of tape releases and even a laserdisc. After Redemption broke off and went independent for a while, they brought the film out on DVD in a rather ragged open-matte transfer along a new featurette, "Grave Desires: Corpses on Film," with articulate goth-garbed horror commentator Dr. Patricia MacCormack using this film as a prime example of the cinema's fixation on dismantling and reconstructing the human body in all its horrible visual fascination. She doesn't go into a huge amount of detail on other adaptations of the same true story, but for the record, Burke and Hare also inspired several other films including the Tod Slaughter film The Greed of William Hart, John Gilling's classic The Flesh and the Fiends, Freddie Francis' The Doctor and the Devils, and most recently, John Landis' comedic Burke and Hare from 2010.
That video extra reappears on the Redemption Blu-Ray and remastered DVD issued through partner and distributor Kino Lorber, complete with superior cover art finally representing the original theatrical poster design. The HD transfer easily, ahem, buries all of the previous ones by a mile, looking much more fresh and colorful with only a little inherent damage and debris flickering by here and there. Most of it is presented hard matted at 1.66:1, but the opening and closing credits as well as a handful of shots apparently shot with a different camera are wider and fill the left side of the screen with visual info or have a soft-matted left black bar on the side. The menu blasts the bizarre but catchy theme song, while other extras include the theatrical trailer (and that song again), additional trailers for more Redemption titles (Virgin Witch, The Asphyx, Killer's Moon), and a brief but hilariously candid HD interview with Pascal, who covers everything from her early acting days to her fun times with Stensgaard (despite her negative feelings about the script) and her amusing recitation of one critic's nasty appraisal of her performance.
For more information about Burke and Hare, visit Kino Lorber. To order Burke and Hare, go to TCM Shopping.
by Nathaniel Thompson
