SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

just watch it!

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

For all intents and purposes, "The Doctor and the Devils" is a Hammer horror film. It might be produced by comedian Mel Brooks and his Brooksfilms imprint, but all signs point to this being made by the British house of terror had it been conceived during the 1960s or 1970s. A strong English cast directed by Freddie Francis while surrounded by a period piece atmosphere completes the successful formula for such a film.Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton) is a young anatomy professor who feels his hands are tied to make new discoveries for the advancement of science. Rigid moral laws of the day limit him to the amount of cadavers he can research on. He receives the rotting bodies of a few hanged criminals every year to work with. Rock needs fresher specimens to work with, and two grave robbers (Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea) will do what it takes to provide fresher corpses for the professor – at a hefty cost."The Doctor and the Devils" is rated R for sex and nudity, violence and gore, profanity, alcohol and smoking, and frightening and intense scenes. The sex scenes take place in a brothel where the prostitutes work. There's brief upper nudity in one part that takes place in the house of ill repute. The blood and guts are about the same amount you would expect from a Hammer horror film of the 1970s.Director Freddie Francis is no stranger to English horror films set in 1800's England. He helmed many a Hammer movie and uses the same ingredients to put together "The Doctor and the Devils." Screenwriters Dylan Thomas and Ronald Harwood takes the Burke and Hare tale and puts his own spin on it.

This is the third historical grave-robbing film I've watched after THE BODY SNATCHER (1945) and THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS (1960) – for the record, other cinematic versions of the same events out there are the Tod Slaughter vehicle THE GREED OF WILLIAM HART aka HORROR MANIACS (1948) and BURKE AND HARE (1972). While certainly the least of the three I'm familiar with (due perhaps to its graphic wallowing in the lurid details of the plot), it's pretty good for a product of its time (incidentally, the mid-1980s produced an unexpected but all-too-brief outburst of Gothic Horror which also included Franc Roddam's THE BRIDE [1985] and Ken Russell's Gothic [1986]).The film was produced by Mel Brooks' company which had also been behind David Lynch's THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980) – which, incidentally, had marked Freddie Francis' own return to being a director of photography! Timothy Dalton as the overzealous doctor has a couple of good scenes in the first half, but he is clearly overshadowed by the more flamboyant turns of Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea as the nefarious night diggers. The impressive cast is completed by Twiggy, Sian Phillips, Beryl Reid, Julian Sands and Patrick Stewart; Twiggy (as another whore with a heart of gold) gets to sing as well and, predictably, medical student Sands falls for her charms.I recall the film playing theatrically but, needless to say, I was too young to catch it back then. It's based on an original, unproduced script by celebrated Welsh playwright Dylan Thomas – adapted here by future Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood; curiously, the names of the characters have been changed from the real ones of Knox, Burke and Hare – so had been the case with THE BODY SNATCHER, for that matter, but that one had the excuse of being based on a Robert Louis Stevenson novella! Apart from the starry cast and the film's undeniably evocative look, its main asset is a spare, unusual but effective score provided by longtime Mel Brooks collaborator John Morris.

This movie is well acted and literate, and boasts a regular Masterpiece Theatre cast. So why is it not more satisfying? The miserable lives of the poor and homeless of 1828 Edinburgh are vividly detailed. I have seldom seen a more alcohol soaked movie. Practically every scene has people drunk already, getting drunk, or scheming to get more liquor. The pervasiveness of alcoholic excess as a way of driving off the demons of poverty and hopelessness has seldom been shown in more graphic detail.The truly appalling characters of Fallon and Broom are portrayed with utter conviction by Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea, with excellent support from other British television and movie stalwarts such as Patrick Stewart and Sian Phillips. Former model Twiggy turns in a very moving portrayal of a young prostitute ,hardened by life at too early an age to accept the love of an earnest young medical student (Julian Sands.) Where the film falls down is in its mixed presentation of gruesome historical reality, lurid horror movie story telling, and the desire to have the film be a class act like something for the BBC.The nasty reality of the real life crimes of Burke and Hare is hardly something that could be overdone, in even the most Grand Guignol of horror movies. This film does not flinch from portraying the ugly reality of the sordid murders, including the two jolly killers getting an old woman drunk, so they can murder her more easily later on. These are matters of historical record.But there's a sense that the movie wants to be more respectable and holds back a little, unlike the all out Gothic horror of the 1959 Flesh and the Fiends, which conveys the genuine horror of the murders, its chiller movie presentation somehow working to emphasize, rather than diminish, the dreadful catalog of greed and brutality.Oddly, the more conventional horror movie presentation of Flesh and the Fiends tends to work better than its more respectable successor.One reason might be the large amount of gallows humor and absurdity in it, unlike the extremely serious Doctor and the Devils. The script is very witty, with George Rose and Donald Pleasence delighting in their ghoulishly humorous characters.The Doctor and the Devils is a well made, serious movie worth seeing. It is a bit long and flat at times, and arguably a little too real for its own good, with a bleak and despairing tone prevailing, rather than the Gothic horror of Flesh and the Fiends. This somber approach may work against the film, in the long run, but it deserves to be seen by a wider audience.

The Dylan Thomas screenplay finally makes it to the screen with a few minor alterations. Based on the Burke and Hare vivisectionist murders, this film has a lot of the feel of the old Hammer movies though for the most part it is played quite a bit straighter. Credible performance by 1960's icon Twiggy. Very good, under-rated small feature.