Doctor Blood’s Coffin
His heart’s in the wrong place
Release Date: OUT NOW! 1961 | 15 | 92 minutes | £ 14.99 ( DVD) Distributor: Final Cut Entertainment Director: Sidney J Furie Cast: Kieron Moore, Hazel Court, Ian Hunter, Kenneth J Warren, Frederick Johnson
A rather unfortunately named doctor gets the jump on Christiaan Barnard by six years in this wildly implausible heart transplant horror from the director of The Ipcress File. He injects victims with curare to simulate death, then steals their organs to bring corpses back to life – all for the good of mankind, of course. The coffin? One does feature, but it’s of so little significance that Doctor Blood’s Sports Car would be equally appropriate.
Like Hammer’s far superior The Plague Of The Zombies, it involves nefarious goings- on in an abandoned tin mine. Quite why ends- justifies- the- means surgeon Peter Blood ( Kieron Moore) thinks that’s the ideal place to conduct his gruesome operations is one of many bewildering elements. Others include the remarkable speed at which he works – swapping human hearts seems to present little more challenge than replacing a pair of AA batteries – and with which he romances a local nurse ( scream queen Hazel Court).
There’s some attractive Cornish scenery, and the surgical sequences were surely shocking for the time, with their close- ups of still- beating hearts being lifted out of chest cavities. Sadly, in between these eye- openingly explicit episodes, this British horror tends towards either the plodding or the risible.
Extras: None. Ian Berriman
Filming took place in the village of Zennor, six miles north of Penzance. Fancy a visit? Here’s a location guide: http:// bit. ly/ drblood.