Burke and Hare

… were notorious grave robbers and body snatchers in 1828. Medical researchers in Scotland at the time were desperate for cadavers to learn on, and a new law and a drying up of the most plentiful source of stiffs, people who had been hanged, prevented them from getting what they needed. When there is a demand, a supplier will be found, and for a short time William Burke and William Hare and his wife, Margaret, flourished by knocking off the most vulnerable members of society. They were credited with sixteen victims, but there may have been more.

But this is not a horror movie, it’s a comedy, and it worked pretty well for me. Simon Pegg, who has amused me greatly in the past, and Andy Serkis, the most under-appreciated actor in the movies (he has been Gollum, King Kong, and the chimpanzee Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, play the murderers, a pair of bumblers who botch most of their intended “painless” killings. It’s not up there with Pegg’s best, like Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, but it’s damn good.