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Can’t you see I’m eating lunch here?!
An unfortunate, if understandable, adherent to the God’ll Getcha genre of films is Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961). Dr. Peter Blood, freshly minted, returns to visit his father, who happens to be the village doctor, and his oh-so-attractive and freshly widowed nurse, Linda. But hiding behind Peter’s affable exterior is a ragingly ambitious scientist intent on achieving his goal of, well, being God, no matter what anyone says.
Taking advantage of local men he deems as wasting their lives, Peter uses them for his experiments, all the while misleading the village detective and the undertaker about the condition of all these corpses, even when the corpses still seem to be twitching and rolling their eyes.
But eventually Linda digs out his secret (or perhaps sleeps it out of him, him being dashing and she being without husband), which is basically heart transplantation, and accuses him of murder because the men he’s experimenting on are, for the most part, still alive – and who, incidentally, needs anesthesia? But Peter will have none of it, raging against superstition, while Linda invokes God’s will.
Linda escapes, and while the village detective amasses the customary mob to find the evil scientist, Peter, he, in an angry fit of rage that Linda would hold him back from his imminent achievement, tries to culminate his experiments by giving life back to … Linda’s late husband.
Six months dead.
This is where willing suspension of disbelief becomes scuzzy blanket rent with moth-eaten holes, because the late husband is quite the moldy mess. First, to suggest that the blood Peter is feeding into him will be able to get through the guy’s veins, if they even exist any more, is silly. And then brain death is really going to be hell on the guy’s personality.
In fact, it leaves him a drooling, murderous wretch who fortuitously takes out his anger (presumably for being dragged out of heaven) on Peter, while Linda, who had been invited to attend the big revivification, manages to escape. Again.
So the real problem here is consigning the moral question of why experimenting on living, sentient human beings is wrong to the divine realm. He’s rejected the divine; for him, morality should be driven from somewhere else. But, instead, not only is this ignored, but his decision to deny the supposed sacred word of God, only asserted by Linda, results in his rather grisly demise.
Oh, and conveniently (as my Arts Editor remarked), the late husband once again assumed his ‘late’ status after choking the life out of the guy who transgressed God’s will.
Up until the emotional theological argument, it was actually an interesting movie, but after that bit of silliness (Linda didn’t have a rational argument, just hysterical shouting), followed by the vengeance of God bit, it became a lot less interesting. Arbitrary rules are, after all, interesting only in that they can be terrifying to work with, rather than having some predictability about them.
It would have been far more interesting if Linda had been ready with some secular moral arguments that appealed to the audience’s interest in why Peter’s activities are more those of a narcissist than a scientist, but it’s fair to say the resurrection of Linda’s late husband is more or less just an opportunity to laugh. Or possibly get seasick, the cinematographer worked hard to bring the audience to the edge of illness in this fight scene.
Watch at your own risk.
