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Two of the most notorious figures in the history of medicine, William Burke and William Hare were a pair of enterprising street thugs who provided anatomical specimens to the Edinburgh Medical College - often by robbing the graves of the recently dead, sometimes through even more nefarious methods. Derren Nesbitt and Glynn Edwards bring these two scoundrels to life in Burke & Hare, a colorful, early ’70s rendition of life in the taverns, brothels, and surgical theatres of 1820s Scotland. While other filmmakers have treated the Burke and Hare murders as a source of gothic horror, director Vernon Sewell offers a playful spin on the Irish body snatchers, blending dark comedy with bawdy eroticism, seasoning it with the grotesque, then crowning it with a playful theme song by the pop band The Scaffold. (Kino Lorber)
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Burke and Hare and their wives are scraping by as best they can. When one of their friends dies, they decide to sell the body to Dr. Knox for research. Finding corpses is difficult because the only bodies they can use are those of criminals or homeless people who died on the streets; the only condition is that it can't be murder. Both men soon realise that selling corpses is a way to get rich, so they carry out their first murder. After that, it's all downhill from there. At first, a rather light-hearted story with dark humour. The scenes in the brothel are probably the funniest, especially the various sexual perversions, and even when a house catches fire everything is rendered almost comically. Then things change when the main characters' lives start to be on the line. The time period is not told, I reckon it was the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, maybe at their turn. Nice period costumes, plenty of nudity, no gore despite quite a few dead people – for logical reasons. It's horror only at the end.
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