Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961)

What a waste of my time!!!

Crappy film

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Pretty straight forward little thriller, one I've always wanted to see, that interestingly makes a monster out of a doctor who wants to do heart transplants! And this was about 4 or 5 years before it actually happened for real! I wonder how Christiaan Barnard felt about that! OK I just checked the first heart transplant was 1967.Dr. Blood himself is pretty over the top not hesitating to sacrifice the useless and unworthy to further his pursuits.It's close and a little clammy when down in the mine tunnels but the location work is good and I want to add my praises for Hazel Court who is too attractive for her role. There's a great bit in the first two minutes. She's a nurse and when the village Dr drives up she runs over to help with his packages. He loads her up with an armful of five or six boxes then wanders off to jaw with the locals. Pretty funny bit no matter how you parse it from a period or contemporary perspective.I wouldn't recommend it. It's OK of its kind but the ending, which the whole movie builds up to, is ludicrous and let's all the steam out of the slowly, but effectively, developed tension.

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.

(Some Spoilers) Thrown out of the prestigious Vienna Medical Academy for his illegal experiments Dr. Peter Blood, Kieron Moore,is now back home in the lovely and scenic coastal town of Port Carron England to continue his work undercover and underground. Using his fathers position as the town doctor Robert Blood, Ian Hunter Peter builds a laboratory in the deserted coal mines outside the town to do his business undisturbed. While vacationing in the South American jungles Peter discovered the drug Curare from the local native tribesmen and has been using it in his experiments in his theory of eternal life. A brilliant but arrogant student Peter felt that he's smarter then all the professors and teachers in the academy put together. Which lead to him being run out of town, Vienna, on a rail. Still not learning his lesson Peter is back on the road to destruction with him kidnapping people in and around town and after knocking them out working them over, in his secret lab,by taking organs out of one and putting them in another to keep the one receiving the organ going until he needs a new transplant. Looking and acting normal on the outside the tall dark and handsome Peter attracts, his fathers Dr. Robert Blood's assistant, pretty nurse and recent widow Lnda Parker, Hazel Court,who at first falls in love with him. Peter putting on an act that he's in love with Linda takes her to his secret lab in the coal mines to, what seems to me, knock her out put her under the paralyzing drug Curare. Peter then use her in his experiments of involuntary organ donations. Lucky for Linda Peter's mad scheme is interrupted by the local town hobo Tregaye, Fred Johnson, who unknowingly to himself, and Linda, saved her life by popping up just at the right time. Actually the brilliant Peter didn't come across that smart at all in the movie with all his experiments falling flat on their faces. All of Peter's victims from mine inspector George Beale, Andy Alston, to the local town undertaker old man Morton, Gerald Lawson, to the before-mentioned hobo Tregaye didn't produce the results that he hoped for. In the end Peter ended up being the victim of one of his experiments that went very wrong for him but just right for the town and people of Port Carron. That experiment finally put and end to his insane actions once in for all.

Set in a "Cornish village" (high marks for any film of this vintage set in "a cornish village" - those cornish villages went through the mill in the middle years of horror), Dr. Blood's Coffin checks in as a Frankenstein -ish offering. Got your mad scientist tinkering with humans, more lurid and atmospheric lab scenes than the graphic and in your face stuff current movie viewers are used to.Creepy scenes. In the old days, I loved movies that gave me one creepy scene that made closing my eyes to go to sleep a challenge.Old horse, corny now but from that impossible to resist title to the whopper denouement, one of the knighted efforts to keep horror alive when 99% of cinema thought horror undignified and unworthy. If you like Freddy, Scream and Jason, you owe a nod of thanks (though not necessarily a viewing) to films like Dr. Blood. If you're a fan of creepier things like "The Ring" and remakes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Dawn of the Dead", you also owe a nod of thanks to films like this one. You guys, might even find the "loyalty to the cause" in a viewing of this film.