From Twitter 11-05-2010

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[film] Burke and Hare

I didn't have especially high expectations of this, given lacklustre reviews, but enjoyed it rather more than I'd feared. The pacing's off: the first half felt very slow, and then suddenly the film began to sparkle and became much more interesting. The script isn't as funny as it would like to be -- anachronisms are not intrinsically humorous -- and some of the visual humour (worm-ridden corpses, spurting arteries etc) falls flat. The all-star cast was largely wasted on me, since I'm very bad at recognising faces: luckily, the credits came with screenshots. (Ronnie Corbett, Bill Bailey, Christopher Lee, Jenny Agutter, Ray Harryhausen, Michael Winner, Hugh Bonneville ...) But Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are an excellent team, and their characters (especially Pegg's Burke) were surprisingly sympathetic: bodysnatchers as likely lads, just trying to make ends meet.

And it passes the Bechdel test (not least for the world's first all-female Macbeth).

Burke and Hare at IMDB.