Coventry People sometimes complain that horror movies nowadays lack originality, and that most of them are uninspired and blatant imitations of just a few half-decent films. Well, that may be correct, but it's definitely not a phenomenon that only popped up now. Shameless rip-offs always existed, and here's an example of the late 50s/early 60s to prove it! Sidney J. Furie's "Dr. Blood's Coffin" clearly got made to cash in on the tremendous success of Hammer Studio's first real horror production; - "The Curse of Frankenstein". It must be said that, in spite of the obvious budget restrictions, "Dr. Blood's Coffin" is a grisly little flick with reasonably gruesome make-up effects and quite a bit of violence. On the other hand, "The Curse of Frankenstein" was gruesome as well and, unlike "Dr. Blood's Coffin", it also had a solid screenplay, terrific scenery, great acting and a continuously tense atmosphere. Furie's film is rather incompetent and overall boring, to be honest. The film opens with a feeble attempt to keep the identity of the mad doctor secret, but after ten minutes or so, they realize that idea was just dumb and unfeasible. Dr. Blood Jr. (with a name like that, you're just destined to make a career in mad science) gets kicked out of the medical university in Vienna for conducting unorthodox experiments on deceased patients, although he personally prefers to think of them as revolutionary and courageous. He returns to his hometown in Cornwall, where he settles at his father's small doctor's practice and flirts with the widowed nurse. His main objective naturally remains to complete his research, and thus Peter Blood paralyzes unsuspecting villagers with curare and subsequently drags them to an improvised laboratory in an abandoned mineshaft. Personally, I don't think it's very smart to kidnap people in a town with a population of barely 50 people and I also don't really see the added value of killing people only to revive them via primitive heart transplants. But hey, the idea is sick enough for a horror film and there are filthy make-up effects, especially during the utterly grotesque climax with a revived zombie husband! The rest of the film is unfortunately dull and endlessly repetitive. One of Blood's victims escapes, for example, and the poor sucker spends the next fifteen minutes crawling over the ground. Dr. Blood himself whines so much about his cowardly fellow scientists that he forgets to seduce the nurse! "Dr. Blood's Coffin" is passable Brit-horror from the early sixties, only worth seeking out in case you already watched all the much more superior Hammer, Amicus and Tigon productions from the same era/decade.

Leofwine_draca DR BLOOD'S COFFIN bears all the hallmarks of a classic slice of British Gothic horror: it's got an eerie setting in the deserted Cornish tin mines (also put to good use in the similar PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES), it features an actress many consider to be Britain's best scream queen (the delectable Hazel Court), and the Frankenstein-style plot features a misguided scientist who performs experiments on the living and the dead in a bid to become a pioneer heart transplant surgeon. What's not to love?Quite a lot, it actually turns out, and not least the clunky script, which routinely AVOIDS every moment of possible excitement in favour of talky, talky, boredom. A full twenty minutes or so of the running time is taken up with a guy CRAWLING – incessant, repetitive, and yawn-inducing. The potential horrors of the script are diluted and avoided, with a single snippet of bloody surgery the only horror we get until the climax, in which a fine-looking zombie (that would look great in a Hammer or Italian zombie film) shows up for some last-minute action.Before then, we get a staged romance between Kieron Moore and Hazel Court, who can really do better. There are some locals with silly accents and some nice locations in then-contemporary Cornwall, but that's about it. Sidney J. Furie, who later on made the supremely scary THE ENTITY, doesn't distinguish himself in this forgotten outing. Kieron Moore is miscast as the protagonist: we needed someone of Cushing's calibre to make this guy likable, but Moore is just a schmaltzy jerk and Court's the sole decent actor mired in a sea of muddle headed wrongness. Funnily enough, the execrable script was written by Nathan Juran – the director responsible for colourful fantasy classic THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD!

Movie Nuttball Doctor Blood's Coffin is a very good film that has a good cast which includes Kieron Moore, Hazel Court, Ian Hunter, Kenneth J. Warren, Gerald Lawson, Fred Johnson, Paul Hardtmuth, Paul Stockman, Andy Alston, John Romane, and Ruth Lee. The acting by all of these actors is very good. The thrills is really good and some of it is surprising. The movie is filmed very good. The music is good. The film is quite interesting and the movie really keeps you going until the end. This is a very good and thrilling film. If you like Kieron Moore, Hazel Court, Ian Hunter, Kenneth J. Warren, Gerald Lawson, Fred Johnson, Paul Hardtmuth, the rest of the cast in the film, Horror, Thrillers, Dramas, and interesting classic films then I strongly recommend you to see this film today! Movie Nuttball's NOTE: I got this film on a special DVD that has Doctor Blood's Coffin, The Brainiac, and The Fury of the Wolfman from Vintage Home Entertainment! See if you can find this winner with three bizarre but classic films on one DVD at Amazon.com today!

Poe-17 Set in a "Cornish village" (high marks for any film of this vintage set in "a cornish village" - those cornish villages went through the mill in the middle years of horror), Dr. Blood's Coffin checks in as a Frankenstein -ish offering. Got your mad scientist tinkering with humans, more lurid and atmospheric lab scenes than the graphic and in your face stuff current movie viewers are used to.Creepy scenes. In the old days, I loved movies that gave me one creepy scene that made closing my eyes to go to sleep a challenge.Old horse, corny now but from that impossible to resist title to the whopper denouement, one of the knighted efforts to keep horror alive when 99% of cinema thought horror undignified and unworthy. If you like Freddy, Scream and Jason, you owe a nod of thanks (though not necessarily a viewing) to films like Dr. Blood. If you're a fan of creepier things like "The Ring" and remakes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Dawn of the Dead", you also owe a nod of thanks to films like this one. You guys, might even find the "loyalty to the cause" in a viewing of this film.