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Peter Blood (Kieron Moore), son of country doctor Robert Blood (Ian
Hunter), returns to his hometown after having studied abroad for years,
and at first, things couldn't be better: He helps out in his father's
practice, even temporarily replaces his father when he has to leave town,
and he starts dating his father's nurse Linda (Hazel Court). And when
people start turning up dead, murdered, he even helps the police looking
for the killer in a system of caves he just happens to know like the back
of his hand, and conducts the post mortems.
Thing is, there is another side to Peter, over the years he has become
obsessed with heart transplantation (still sci fi in 1961), and he has
been thrown out of university because he had experimented on human
subjects - whom he killed for his cause. And of course, all the killings
and disappearances in the village are really his work, as he continues his
experiments, using curare to acquire his subjects, and he has a secret lab
in abovementioned caves. And in his position as the village doctor, he has
plenty of opportunity to cover up each and any clues leading to him.
However, eventually nurse Linda has to notice he's quite mad, and
eventually, the police find more and more traces leading to him all the
same - especially after Peter's own father notices some grave errors in
his post mortem reports -, but by now he has gone totally bonkers, has dug
up Linda's late husband Steve (Paul Stockman) - who is in quite a state of
decay by now -, has given him a heart to live again, and now he wants the
walking corpse to punish Linda for not believing in him ... but dead Steve
has other ideas, and soon he and Peter are at each other's throats, and
when Peter's lab goes up in smoke, they both die from the poisonous gasses
set free by the explosion, leaving only Linda alive to tell the tale.
On a pure story level, Doctor Blood's Coffin is of course pure
trash, and director Sidney J.Furie makes little attempt to hide that fact,
invariably going for sensationalism rather than for inventiveness. That
said, the movie certainly isn't all bad - if you like your movies trashy
that is -, it's a fun piece of medical horror that doesn't necessarily
make perfect sense but that entertains throughout, that is well-acted, and
that quite simply doesn't try to be more than it is. And sometimes, that's
all a trashfan like myself needs.
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