DOCTOR BLOOD'S COFFIN

When the doctor says, "Do you know that I had analyzed the protein value of an acorn by the time I was six???" you know he must be smart.

You know that brilliant Dr. Peter Blood (Kieron Moore) is a creep because the first thing he does upon returning home to his dad's small-town practice is to leer at the nurse's ass. Everyone in the small Cornish town is thrilled to see Peter. He is young, and handsome, and has a weird accent, which I suppose is due to the fact that he had studied medicine in Austria. But his arrival home has coincided (not so coincidentally) with the mysterious disappearances of some locals.

Peter works his charms on the nurse (Hazel Court), his dad, the local cop (who is investigating the disappearances), and the undertaker, who is so rickety he looks like he has one foot in the grave himself. But in the meantime, in the catacombs of the old abandoned mines, Peter is doing some labwork of his own. He has a Frankenstein-esque theory about life, death, and life again... his theory is so controversial that it actually got him booted from the research labs in Austria. But now that he is home, well, no one will miss a few farmers and local drunks to use as guinea pigs, will they?

Doctor Blood's Coffin is a slow-burning creep-fest with a campy title. It's actually not half bad. Once you figure out what Peter is up to (shudder), you know that this is a trip to surgical crazy-town. Sure, the effects are cheesy and low-budget... for instance on one unconscious victim, you can actually see the edge of his gray face paint that is supposed to give him a deathly pallor. In another scene, a re-animated corpse grabs a man's neck in a death-grip, and you can clearly see the painted fabric of his "corpse skin" gloves.

But this movie is as dead serious as much as it is improbable. The earnestness of the cast, and the bonafide oily bohunk factor of Peter himself, keeps the story floating just a notch above sheer camp. The story would have fit right in with any late-night sci-fi series that would keep you up at night when you were a kid.