The authorities turn a blind eye knowing that stemming the crime would lessen the medical training.The pair of "resurrectionists" are paid £7 10s for their first body – a truly large sum at that time.

However, when graveyard supplies run low, the industrious pair turn to murder to keep the business going and simply claim to have robbed the bodies.

Mary fails to turn up for her rendezvous with her medical student lover... who is shocked when he sees her next on the anatomy table.

He calls the City Guard who break up the fight and find the dead body of Mary Docherty.

Vernon Sewell had a script written by Ernie Bradford and said Kenneth Shipman wanted to make it.

The eponymous theme song, which opens and closes the film, was written by Roger Webb with lyrics by Norman Newell, and performed by English comedy/musical trio The Scaffold, with uncredited vocal assistance by Vivian Stanshall.

[citation needed] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote:It's sad to see the talents of Vernon Sewell (he was responsible for such fine thrillers as The Man in the Back Seat [1961] and House of Mystery [1961]) being frittered away on a project as incoherent as this one.

Unlike John Gilling's excellent treatment of the same subject in The Flesh and the Fiends [1960], Ernle Bradford's screenplay seems less concerned with Dr. Knox's character than with presenting a series of anaemic fetishistic interludes in the local brothel.

Burke and Hare themselves are reduced from the memorable psychotic fiends of Gilling's film to a pair of garrulous Irish comedians, while the Scottish accents affected by most of the minor players are somewhat on the level of Home Counties amateur dramatics.

Admittedly, there is some compensation in the glimpses of Dr. Knox's milieu, which allows Sewell to exercise some of his old flair for eccentricity and atmosphere.

And Harry Andrews gives one of his best performances to date as Knox, a sinister but dedicated old man whose pompous delight in the more gruesome details of medicine contains something of what the film might have been.

[4]Allmovie wrote, "the producers opted for sexploitation over gruesome horror, but the end result is decidedly dull.