John Landis...once the king of the film comedy world with classics like Animal House, Trading Places and The Blues Brothers...is now something of a cult director whose comedy sensibilities will either confound and bore, or delight and amuse. Take the Landis directed Beverly Hills Cop III...on the surface it's a generic, unremarkable cop thriller...but if you're tuned into Landis' comic sensibility there's tons of well timed gags and character moments (that admittedly don't fit too snugly with the rest of that blockbuster franchise). Alas, because that sensibility is a rather daft and silly one, more common in a Road Runner cartoon than the latest American Pie sequel, many people just don't get it.
His work on Burke and Hare is afflicted with a similar silliness (great for me, not so much for the poor sods who don't get it) and it's compounded further by the fact that he's also dealing with a true story (which demands a degree of seriousness and respect) and in the horror genre (it's the story of a couple of murderers, after all.) With such liberal use of black humour, audiences may be unsure whether to laugh or not, but to be fair, the laughs are there. It's not all good news though...the script could be funnier, the central characters could be better defined and it's a little inconsistently paced.
But the cast are uniformly excellent, the photography and design are fantastically moody and Gothic (thanks to some Edinburgh location work) and it ends on a nicely judged, thoughtful note. Much like John Carpenter's The Ward last moth, this is not a return to classic form by any means, but it is a showcase for a talent which has still something worthy to express.
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