DOCTOR BLOOD’S COFFIN (1961)

In Vienna, young intern Peter Blood (Kieron Moore, at left) is furtively carrying out an experiment on a corpse when he is discovered by a furious older doctor and is booted out of the prestigious clinic where he has been studying biochemistry. He heads home to a small village in Cornwall to stay with his father Robert (Ian Hunter), the town doctor, under the guise of taking a well-deserved break from his studies. However, what he's really doing there is continuing his experiments which involve taking people he deems to be worthless, injecting them with a poison that simulates death, spiriting them away to the abandoned tin mines in the hills, and attempting to take out their living hearts which would eventually be transplanted into more worthy people who are ill or near death. Villagers are disappearing and some of Robert's medical supplies go missing, but Peter, who is squiring his dad's lovely widowed nurse Linda (Hazel Court), keeps up a good façade and no one suspects him—until the local undertaker catches him doing a post-mortem on a body that is still alive. Soon, Linda figures out what's going on and Peter decides the best way to win her over is to dig up her dead and decaying husband to give him a living heart.

This low budget horror film was shot in 10 days, and shows, though the location shooting in Cornwall helps. It follows the Frankenstein template predictably: a young hothead is tampering in God's domain, is shot down by traditional scientists and continues his work in secret only to face a tragic ending. What's a little different here is that the scientist is young and attractive and, for a time, escapes suspicion from the villagers. The "God’s domain" cliché is emphasized here when, after Linda finds out what he's doing, she invokes God several times, as in, only God can create life, so only God should be allowed to end life. She also says that Peter is exhibiting "the pride of Lucifer" in his unholy dabbling. None of this matters to him, of course, so the film ends the way many of these tales do, with the scientist destroyed by one of his own creations. Moore (one of the heroes of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS), Court (a horror movie scream queen in the 60s), and Hunter (a busy and respected character actor from the mid-30s on) are all fine, but the script and the budget let them down. This was considered quite gory in its day for a couple of scenes involving the handling of human hearts, and some critics have tried to claim this as an early entry in the zombie genre, though locomotion of the undead is limited to the climax.  It is a bit slow and repetitious (there's a gruelingly slow chase involving Peter and one of his almost-dead victims) but the ending isn't bad. [DVD]