Six years before the world's first human heart transplant, Dr. Blood's Coffin saw Kieron Moore star as Dr. Peter Blood, a biochemist determined to bring a man back to life by giving him a new heart. Of course, this being a horror flick, Blood is seriously deranged, his procedure requiring the donor to be still alive while the transplant takes place.
In order to carry out his plans, Blood returns to his rural home village in Cornwall (where absolutely no-one has a West Country accent), and proceeds to drug and abduct locals, taking them down to the tunnels of a nearby disused tin mine where he has set up a rudimentary operating theatre using medical supplies half-inched from the local surgery run by his unsuspecting father.
When he's not injecting victims with curare (which causes paralysis) and playing God in the mine, Peter spends his time wooing his father's curvaceous widowed nurse Linda (Hammer babe Hazel Court). As time goes on, Linda becomes suspicious of Peter, leading to a shocking climax that sees the demented doctor reanimating the nurse's decomposing husband.
While all of the above sounds like a lot of ghoulish fun, Dr. Blood's Coffin is less entertaining than it might have been, suffering from too many dialogue-heavy scenes and a lack of genuine horror, the only slightly disturbing scenes being the hasty removal of organs by a flustered Peter (he's a fast worker, completing the surgical procedure in minutes). The finale, in which Linda's mouldy husband comes back to life is incredibly silly, but easily the most enjoyable part of the film, director Sidney J. Furie finally delivering on the movie's macabre premise.
