Directed by John Landis Starring Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Isla Fisher, Tom Wilkinson, Jessica Hynes, Christopher Lee 15A cert, gen release, 91 min
It's directed by John Landis and it stars Simon Pegg. You can tell what they're going for here. The film-makers are clearly hoping to cobble together a comedy horror that multiplies the former's An American Werewolf in London by the latter's Shaun of the Dead. Quite a prospect, you'll agree. If that calculation comes off we'll end up with the most entertaining film of all time.
It hardly needs to be said that Burke and Hare is somewhat less than its bloodily disembodied parts. The picture is, of course, a retelling of the reasonably true story about a pair of Irishmen who, in the mid-19th century, took to murdering innocent Edinburghers and selling the bodies to inquisitive surgeons. As an amusing prologue from hangman Bill Bailey suggests, the Enlightenment did not illuminate every one of the Scottish capital’s darker corners.
Pegg (Burke) and Andy Serkis (Hare) play the body snatchers as a pair of cheeky, easily led, but far from diabolic, corner boys. Initially involved with cheap confidence tricks, they conceive the plan for more serious mischief when
Dr Tom Wilkinson looks favourably on a body – a neighbour who died of natural causes – they deliver to his consulting rooms.
There is obviously a great deal of goodwill behind this project. Any number of familiar faces turn up to scuttle down alleyways or fall from great heights. Blink and you could miss Stephen Merchant, Jenny Agutter, Christopher Lee or Paul Whitehouse. Even Michael Winner turns up to engage in the class of bad driving that looks – are we reading too much into it? – like a nod towards his car insurance commercials.
The film is stagey, one-note, only intermittently funny and somewhat slippery in its morals. But it remains a modestly enjoyable sort of beast. Simon Pegg’s Belfast accent is so good one hardly minds that the character is supposed to be from Donegal.
The story cracks along at a mighty pace and that mass of cameos helps dispel any brewing tedium. Only marginally horrid, full of Celtic good cheer, Burke and Hare plays like a Sunday-evening classic serial juiced up with a modest flagon of gore. It’s Greyfriars Bobby with added viscera.
