burke and hare

You know, I have to say I found Burke and Hare more than a little disappointing.

It's difficult to really pin it down to one single thing, but if I was forced to do so it would be that it just wasn't funny enough. Comedy, of course, is a very subjective thing, but generally I like black comedy's, which this is - it could hardly be anything else, given its subject matter of two people murdering to feed the need for cadavers for medical training purposes.

There are of course many changes and omissions to the actual story. For example, some of the more unpalatable murdering of children is totally excised.

Additions include threads being added involving something akin to organised crime and the production of a play. I have to say, many of these, to me, seemed a little un-necessary and rather like the writer scrabbling around to add in more traditional narrative elements or to give elements of redemption to the characters, who were actually thoroughly unpleasant.

They also weren't particularly well developed, with the organised crime bit being rather slap-dash and not making a lot of sense. And I didn't get the whole photographing of corpses idea - why was that useful? And why, wanting to avoid spoilers, did the bit at the end happen, when they do what they do to the photos?

I also have to say that the Bill Bailey role of opening and closing narration felt a little ham-fisted to me. There were a few nice gags in his bits, but they felt very artificial and the into especially was something of an info dump, which is never a good way to start a film.

But as I say, the real failure was the humour. I dunno, it seemed to not want to tread too far was the problem. So it's a black comedy and you expect to be laughing at things that aren't really pleasant, yet it seemed to shy away from really going for it. So there seemed to be a lot of bits where they cut away or skipped ahead when really showing more of it and/or making the murders much more farcical would have given greater laughs.

With this being a John Landis film I was expecting it to be a little more gory too, and for laughs to come from that, but, while there were some gory bits, they weren't really played for laughs much and there weren't as many as I was expecting.

It also didn't really seem to capitalise on some of the key bits. So "Burking" is a name that's been given to how they murdered people - suffocating and smothering them, yet most of the people we see being killed aren't really killed like that. We also don't really see them kill that many people.

It all just felt like a bit of a damp squib, which was a shame.

The DVD also lacked any extras at all - there were only trailers for other films.