Continuing my trend of fun movies, here's an overlooked gem. William Burke (Andy Serkis) and William Hare (Simon Pegg) are a couple of grifters trying to make ends meet in 1828 Edinburgh when they stumble upon an incredibly lucrative venture: supplying corpses to Dr. Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson) for dissection. Dr. Knox has been stymied by a rival, Dr. Monro (Tim Curry), in the acquisition of criminal bodies for medical research, and is therefore willing to pay top dollar for fresh bodies. Burke and Hare luck out when an old man kicks it at the boarding house run by Burke's wife (Jessica Hynes), but subsequent bodies are thin on the ground. So the enterprising duo create supply to meet the demand. By murdering people.
Burke and Hare were real men who really murdered sixteen people in order to sell their bodies to the medical college. The movie makes them as sympathetic as it possibly can but they were straight-up killers. History is kinder to Knox, who used these bodies to further medical research, but the movie is more critical, presenting him as being fully aware of how these bodies came into his possession and not really caring that they were assisted off this mortal coil. There's also a subplot about how it parallels to Macbeth that is just pandering.
Keeping in mind that this is not a documentary, it is an extremely fun dark comedy with some major cameos (Jenny Agutter! Christopher Lee!). Plus, it's nice to see Andy Serkis without a mo-cap suit.
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