Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fantastic!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

An excellently made and acted British film that retells the true story of the Burke and Hare horrors of the 19th century. An atmosphere of old Edinburgh is effectively evoked to enhance the brutal tale. And brutal it is, as was the actual true story.This is certainly one of Peter Cushing's finest performances. He is totally focused, energetic and delivers a fascinating characterization of his aristocratic, hypocrite-defying, unintentionally cruel and very determined Doctor Knox. He is not at all Doctor Frankenstein in this film- he is Doctor Knox.Donald Pleasance is chilling as the sociopath Burke. This is one of the performances that made him almost a cult actor way back in the 1960's, which is when I began to notice and seek out his film work. There is almost no way to describe British stage and film actress Billie Whitelaw's work in this film except to say that it is so powerful that she bursts from the screen. One of the most impactful actors ever to appear in film, she performs with a high level of skill and force, almost going over the top as necessary to portray her loud low-class character trapped in a downtrodden life. A violent film depicting a brutal era and the unsavory days when medicine began to stumble ahead toward modernity, this film is the real deal, solidly and seriously produced with ability and skill by everyone involved.

Dr. Robert Knox (Peter Cushing) is an arrogant professor who is in need of fresh corpses to dissect. He buys corpses from lowlifes William Hare and William Burke. They engineer a scheme of killing the poor who stays at Burke's house then selling the bodies to Knox. This gets out of hand and Knox must face judgment.This is an old black and white British horror. It's slow and not scary compared to more modern fare. The horror is more of the mind than of the gory variety. It is the horror of Dr Knox's ambition. Peter Cushing has nailed this character without making him a cartoon. He isn't evil but what he does has led to much evil. In the end, the system itself is shown to be complicit. It is horror with poetry.

The notorious exploits of 19th century cadaver peddlers Burke & Hare have been the inspiration for numerous films, but none perhaps as faithful to the facts as 1959's "The Flesh and the Fiends." Although other movies have depicted the pair as grave robbers, here they are correctly shown to be not so much ghouls as brutal murderers who think nothing of slaying any drunkard, trollop or easy mark they come across to make a few extra guineas, selling their "fresh as a new-cut cabbage" wares to Dr. Robert Knox at a nearby Edinburgh medical school. Though the pair's murders took place from 1827-28 in real life, here, the action is compressed to the span of a few days' time, and whereas in actuality Burke was a lodger at Hare's home, this picture reverses those roles, strangely. But the film hews closely enough to the true story, and George Rose and Donald Pleasence are top-notch as the seedy duo. Playing the real-life Dr. Knox, Peter Cushing gives one of the finest performances I have ever seen him contribute; he is truly superb here in his morally conflicted role. Kudos also to Billie Whitelaw, "The Omen"'s nanny from hell, here playing a tragic pub girl. A literate script, handsome production values, striking B&W photography, some unflinching murder scenes and a few gross-out sequences really do put this picture over. One would think, with Cushing's presence and director John Gilling at the helm, that this might be a Hammer film (Gilling later went on to give us such extraordinary Hammer fare as "The Plague of the Zombies" and "The Reptile"), but in truth it was shot at Shepperton, and its creators have done a good job at pastiching the Hammer style. The nice-looking widescreen DVD that I just watched, from the fine folks at Image, also contains the racier "Continental" version of "The Flesh and the Fiends," which adds little more than a few topless tavern floozies and a slightly more explicit hanging sequence; not much of an improvement. Whichever version the viewer chooses to watch, however, a highly entertaining and, yes, educational time is almost guaranteed. I really did enjoy this one.

Shocking, surprisingly potent horror feature about the possible downfall of Edinburgh anatomy professor Dr. Robert Knox(Peter Cushing with one eyelid collapsing)who illegally accepts murdered bodies from supposed graverobbers Hare & Burke(Donald Pleasence and George Rose).Burke and Hare's scheming of killing and supplying works until they murder Knox's apprentice Chris Jackson(John Cairney), Chris' prostitute lover Mary(Billie Whitelaw), and especially well-liked young Jamie(Melvyn Hayes).Cushing as the cold, logical doctor who abandons emotion because it just gets in the way of his work, and Pleasence as cruel scoundrel Hare are both chilling in their own way.This film should be quite an interesting pairing with the 1987 film, "The Doctor and the Devils" because both films deal with the same themes yet change in certain ways. In "Flesh" there's a positive outlook for Knox who comes to the understanding of what he was doing wrong because he had abandoned any emotion when it came to accepting any corpse those two brought him only thinking about science and leaving away the conscience. In "Devils", Timothy Dalton's anatomy professor was always sympathetic to the plight of those around him and always had emotion present on his face. Yet, Dalton's doctor's outlook is a bit gloomy in that film.Also Julien Sands and Twiggy(representing the characters played by Cairney and Mary in the "Devils" version)have a much better outcome in their film than the pupil and prostitute in "Flesh and the Fiends." This is quite a well made chiller, atmospheric and quite stunningly violent for the time it was a made.