Classic Horrors Club

As I popped The Doctor & the Devils (1985) into the ol’ Blu-ray machine, I wondered why in the world I owned a copy of The Doctor & the Devils on Blu-ray in the first place. It only just now dawned on me that I probably had it confused with The Flesh & the Fiends (1960), which occupies a spot on my physical media wish list. Such is the price you pay for not stopping to smell the… dead bodies.

Therefore, instead of Peter Cushing, we get Timothy Dalton, and instead of Donald Pleasence and George Rose, we get Jonathan Price and Stephen Rea. Not that there’s anything wrong with a perhaps more modern cast, but it distinguishes The Doctor & the Devils as a different kind of film than The Flesh & the Fiends. It’s more drama and talk than horror and thrills (I assume; I’ve never seen The Flesh & the Fiends.)

Interestingly, other than the fact that they cover the same subject matter, there’s another connection between the movies that’s behind the scenes. Freddie Francis directed The Doctor & the Devils, and we know him from several other films in which he directed Peter Cushing, including The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), and The Skull (1965.) Francis is a multiple Academy Award winning cinematographer…

…who was nominated, but didn’t win, for The Elephant Man (1980), which was produced (I’ve always thought strangely) by Mel Brooks, who… produced The Doctor & the Devils. I didn’t mean to play “Seven Degrees of Burke & Hare,” but I love how everything is connected. And it’s all to say, again, that The Doctor & the Devils comes closer to an art film than it does a horror movie. And that’s… OK.

Not only was I not expecting this, I didn’t necessarily appreciate it. It looks beautiful, in its dirty, grungy, Victorian era way. It’s not that it’s too serious, but it’s repetitive in the points it’s making. We clearly understand that Dr. Thomas Rock (Dalton) believes that the end justifies the means if we want to move out of the dark ages of science. He’s constantly butting up against the medical board and the law.

What good are they [my hands] handcuffed, bound by ridiculous laws that shackle them? I am only allowed by law to dissect the corpses of hanged criminals. Do you know what my quota is, if I’m lucky? Five!

The compelling part of his seemingly single-minded motivation, is that he really doesn’t want to be an accomplice to murder to obtain bodies that are more “fresh.” However, he sticks his head in the sand when it becomes more clear as the bodies become fresher that Robert Fallon (Pryce) and Timothy Broom (Rea) have stopped excavating graves and are eliminating lives.

While the movie seems singularly focused, there’s contradictorily too much else happening. The worst violation is a subplot with Dr. Murray (Julian Sands), Rock’s assistant. He inexplicably falls in love with a whore, Jennie Bailey (Twiggy.) She rebuffs him, but he doesn’t relent. Just as we think we’ve seen the last of him (I literally wrote in my notes, “What happened to Murray?”) he returns for the climax, a search and rescue mission that feels out of place for the pace we’ve experienced so far.

I don’t provide these criticisms to say The Doctor & the Devils is a bad movie. I provide them to explain why it’s not a good one… only average. It almost feels cursed. The screenplay was originally written by Dylan Thomas in the 1940s! Brooks wanted to dust it off 40 + years later to make a straightforward horror film, but Francis convinced him to go the historical drama route. Ronald Harwood updated the script to do so.

What would have made the film more enjoyable for me? First, a more consistent pace would have helped the ending feel more organic to the story. Then, a less repeatedly preachy story would have been more subtle and easy to swallow. Finally, more evenly spaced scenes focused on the different characters and their trials and tribulations would have kept the tone consistent. Oh, and how about a little horror?