Teresa Reviews Caribbean Mystery (2016)

Teresa reviews Caribbean Mystery (2016), an episode of Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie titled “Albert Major Talks Too Much” (Albert Major parlait trop) and thinks that even without the voodoo, there’s enough creepiness going around.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Fidelity to text: 2 scalpels
There’s added body snatching, illegal surgery, animal experimentation, and cat murder, but you’ll still recognize the core plot and the key players.

Quality of film: 3½ scalpels
What a bizarre yet still reasonably coherent wild ride. But you’ll question French hospital standards from staffing to sanitation to maintenance.

Yeek. It’s a dark night (amazingly, Les Petits showed some restraint and didn’t add lightning bolts). The camera zooms in on a screaming blonde in a white nightgown hovering over the bloody corpse of a hacked-up white Persian cat. Kitty carnage in the opening minutes and then you move on to body snatching, illegal surgical experiments on subjects who didn’t sign a consent form, and dogs being used for more experimentation! A dog dies too as a result of the surgery.

You’re probably guessing that our three amigos didn’t get a voodoo-infused Caribbean vacation. Instead, the action centers around a French hospital. I assume it is in Lille, but when I see Marlène speeding across the countryside on a stolen scooter and Laurence zooming across similar countryside to reach the hospital, I’m wondering if Lille has a hospital at all. Wouldn’t it be in the center of the city? Sometimes it looks like it is and other times the plot implies you must drive twenty miles to get there.

It also seems severely understaffed, grim and bare, no ADA accommodations to the point of leaving patients in wheelchairs at the top of staircases. There’s also zero attention paid to correlating patients with their medical records, and endless filthy, empty catacombs that are perfect for setting up unsanitary surgical suites for experimenting on homeless people and accident victims without families to claim their bodies.

The ethical violations are not limited to the docs. Dr. Vidal (Greg Dyson) and Dr. Bouchard (Edward Hillingdon) confer with the ambulance crew about where to drop off fresh bodies: the ER? Or the secret basement lair? And if the accident victim belongs to the correct category, it doesn’t matter if they’re not dead yet! They must be paying off the crew.

You can only experiment with dogs and cadavers for so long before moving to live human beings, preferably ones without annoying relatives who complain and threaten lawsuits. Thus, Jojo the hobo, a homeless man Marlène befriended, has a heart attack and is whisked off to the hospital but not the upper floors. No, he gets the catacombs.

Dr. Vidal employs more henchmen than the ambulance crews. There must be orderlies and nurses because someone changes those bedpans and delivers the meals to his recovering experiments and cleans out the animal cages. It’s certainly not him.

It’s not his hot, blonde wife Lucette (Lucky Dyson), either. She was his nurse before she moved up in the world. She’s also bedding Dr. Bouchard, partly because he helped her murder Dr. Vidal’s first wife and leaving her an opening. Yep, that’s from the novel, folks. Whatever film name she’s given, Lucky Dyson isn’t a scrupulous woman.

You’re probably wondering by now where the novel’s plot went because it sure isn’t enjoying a Caribbean vacation. Let’s see. Right! Alice Avril is teaching Marlène how to ride a scooter because mobility is the key to a woman’s freedom. Avril (but not Marlène) would strenuously disapprove of a woman moving up in the world by marrying her boss like Lucette did. Marlène is having a bit of trouble and can’t avoid the oncoming traffic. They end up in the creepy hospital, Marlène with some bruises and Avril in a wheelchair with whiplash (based on her cervical collar) and a broken leg.

Avril decides to remain when she spots a fresh victim, er, new patient. It’s famous true-crime writer, Albert Major (Major Palgrave). He’s in for minor surgery that has nothing to do with glass eyes. He hints to Avril that he’s about to publish a new book about a perfect crime he witnessed, a death that he didn’t realize at the time was murder.

Albert Major turns up dead the next morning with a large horse syringe shoved into his brain through his eye. But that’s not what killed him. It was the neat, surgically precise slice across his jugular vein. Avril insists on remaining to investigate the murder despite Laurence and Marlène pleading with her to come home for the rest of her life. Due to a nurse misfiling her records, they think she’s dying of cancer with only weeks left, and the doctor treating her injuries never noticing that one set of records didn’t match up with another.

Meanwhile, Dany Courelle (Molly Kendall) was admitted for being a crazy cat killer. Yet her loving husband, Dr. Courelle (Tim Kendall) refuses to admit her to a proper psychiatric facility despite the urgings of Dr. Vidal. She gets blamed for Albert Major’s death.

Nurse Victoria figures out whodunnit and tries to blackmail the killer. She’s promptly murdered, her body discovered by Avril. At about the same time, Jojo the hobo gets admitted but no one on staff admits to admitting him.

At the hospital, Laurence meets Mr. Rafil (Mr. Rafiel) and his secretary, Esther. Mr. Rafil is very rich and dying of heart disease. He shows Laurence his dog, Pheonix, who had a heart transplant performed by Dr. Vidal. The dog’s doing great! Esther’s a good secretary but while she knows Mr. Rafil is dying, she doesn’t know that he plans to leave his millions to her.

But Dr. Courelle knows.

He needs another rich wife to replace rich wife #2 (Dany) who replaced rich wife #1; this is the wife Albert Major saw die an apparent suicide brought on by psychosis at a Caribbean resort years ago and didn’t recognize — at the time — as murder. Why does a respected doctor need the money so badly?

Because he wants to emigrate to South Africa, open a hospital of his own, and pioneer heart transplant techniques on humans! If you remember Dr. Christiaan Barnard (1922-2001), you win the gold scalpel. He pioneered transplant techniques and performed the first reasonably successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967 where the patient lasted eight days after the surgery. Where? In South Africa where they accepted brain death in a functioning body as dead. What makes this weird is you never see Dr. Courelle assisting Dr. Vidal and Dr. Bouchard in their nefarious experiments on dogs or hoboes.

In ’50s France, brain death didn’t mean the patient was dead; not if the heart still pumped blood. Thus, Dr. Vidal’s illegal surgery would have been much more legal if he’d moved to South Africa with Lucette.

She comes to the same bad end as Lucky Dyson in the novel. She’s blonde and hot and for no discernable reason is wandering the hospital at night in the same white nightgown that Dany Courelle wears. Since one blonde in a white nightgown looks much like another, Dr. Courelle strangles her and makes it look like suicide.

Oh, and Mr. Rafil? He dies before Dr. Vidal can illegally transplant a fresh young heart in him. So does his dog, Phoenix. Esther inherits millions and learns the true nature of Dr. Courelle before it’s too late.

You won’t miss the voodoo with this episode because there’s more than enough creepiness going around.