Movies
Burke & Hare (VOD)
“Burke and Hare is poorly constructed and painfully unfunny, underutilizing Pegg and depending on funny faces to carry the entire film.”
Back in 2009, I got a chance to chat with John Landis for our podcast and it ended up being one of the best interviews I’ve ever done. Landis is extremely straight-forward and cantankerous in the best way possible; he’s the only person I’ve ever had refuse to answer a question not because his hands were tied, but because he just didn’t feel like it. It was around the time he was in the midst of pre-production on Burke And Hare, his first feature-length narrative film since 1998’s Susan’s Plan. On paper, it sounded like a geek’s wet dream: Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis starring as grave robbers in a horror comedy directed by Landis, who’s directed some of the greatest comedies of all time as well as dabbling in the genre with An American Werewolf In London, Thriller, and Innocent Blood. It’s really shocking that, even with all this going for it, Burke And Hare is as unfunny as the real-life case it’s based upon.
After discovering they can turn a profit for selling corpses to progressive anatomist Dr. Knox (Tom Wilkinson) when one of their elderly tenants dies, entrepreneurs William Burke (Pegg) and William Hare (Serkis) realize their primitive 19th century pharmaceuticals hocking was the wrong racket for them. While slightly hesitant to begin down a path of moral impropriety, the two entrepreneurs quickly change their tune when they realize they can make enough money to fund Hare and his wife’s (Spaced alumni Jessica Hynes) and Burke’s would-be girlfriend’s (Isla Fisher) all-woman stage production of Macbeth. As the bodies and money begin to pile up, so do Burke and Hare’s problems as a group of opportunists and the police begin to catch onto their scheme, putting their vision of a cushy future in jeopardy.
Having a charismatic villain that audiences latch onto isn’t anything revolutionary, but Burke and Hare completely misses the mark by taking two devious murderers and turning them into romantic-comedy leading men. Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft’s screenplay tries to create sympathetic, identifiable characters out of Burke and Hare, and although I’m sure everyone can relate to having financial issues, especially in this economy, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone approving of premeditated murder as means for monetary investment. The film, however, finds it hilarious, and somehow tries to make light of knocking off old women for money, and then decides it wants to be straight-faced once the men are prosecuted.
The terribly dark and unfunny sense of humor doesn’t end there, as the bulk of the comedy revolves around Burke and Hare making awkward faces at each in other in disgust of hauling around dead bodies, or being in the same vicinity as a cauldron of feces. When the actors and script fail to deliver any chuckles, the editing takes a swipe at it but stumbles even harder as Hare plows his wife in bed, only to have her stare off and moan apathetically before it quickly cuts to the next scene. Burke and Hare wears its cultural appreciation on its sleeve with fantastic production design and an endless parade of character actors from across the pond, but fails to deliver any actual dry, British humor.
After two great Masters of Horror episodes, I thought Landis was back on track, returning to a subgenre that he practically turned mainstream all by himself. But Burke and Hare is poorly constructed and painfully unfunny, underutilizing Pegg and depending on funny faces to carry the entire film. The whole is not as great as the sum of its parts, putting it in the same boat as Beverly Hills Cop III.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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