by XdarksparkX
Originally written: June 17th, 2009
WARNING: Due to the writer's inability to find alternative words that can accurately describe his emotions while viewing this movie, and the flat out Grade-A shit quality of said movie, strong coarse language is present throughout this review. Reader should venture in at their own risk of mental scarring after hearing a recount of such a terrible waste of film.
I like Jessica Lowndes. No, strike that—I effing love Jessica Lowndes. Ever since I saw her 4 years ago in Tobe Hooper’s abysmal contribution to the Showtime series Masters of Horror known as “Dance of The Dead”, I fell ass-over-teakettle for her potential as an actress. It’s sad, but its so rare these days to see a young woman who’s not only easy on the eyes but can actually emote believably. Seems like today everyone’s pining for the pretty, with talent just being a bonus. Talent is supposed to be the premium; the beauty is the bonus, but with a visual medium, our society naturally figures eye candy over substance. Oh, the state of this world… Anyway, Jessica doesn’t exactly set the world on fire with her performances, but if she continues to learn and grow and actually tries to hone and sharpen her range and consistency, I guaran-damn-tee you she’ll be accepting a certain golden statue for Best Leading or Supporting Actress somewhere down the road.
That being said, I’ve slowly began to realize that my fandom for young up-and-coming actors and actresses can lead me down a road full of shitty movies that have me saying “why the hell are you in this, [insert actors name], you’re so much better than this piece of shit.” As is the case with Autopsy. A member of the third After-Dark Horrorfest collection, I rented an HD copy of Autopsy roughly two months ago when I found it on the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, and I still wish I had those 480 Microsoft points back.
"Oh Jessica, why are you in this? You're so much better than this..."
Apparently someone forgot to mention to writers Adam Gierasch (who also directed), Jace Anderson, and EL Katz that you have to make your victim characters sympathetic. There has to be a trait or flaw within the character that makes the viewer want to root them on and see them survive the end. Throughout the opening credits we get a lot of home movie shot footage and candid digital pictures of the four principle characters out and about partying in good old “Nawlin’s” Louisiana. Only we find out that Emily (Jessica Lowndes) got behind the wheel totally hammered (proceeding to down more beer in the drivers seat before departing no less) and subsequently starts the movie by wrapping their car around a tree. Wow, within the first five minutes you’ve lost me, I don’t give a shit what happens to these characters. They were dumb enough to drink and drive, they’re fitting of whatever happens to them in the next 75 minutes.
The plot that plays out pulls a classic Hand-of-God tactic. The ‘Hand-of-God’ tactic is what I like to call it when a scenario is presented in a movie (usually horror movies) where it’s blatantly obvious that the writer wants the characters to get into a certain predicament. So rather that spend time finding a logical way to get them there, he or she makes up the biggest bullshit excuse that wouldn’t logically fly with anyone just to get them into said predicament. Case in point: the idiots find out that they’ve hit someone in addition to wrapping the car around the tree, and an ambulance arrives (how does it know where they are when we’ve established early in this post-crash scene that none of them have a working cell phone? It doesn't just pull up and see the accident, it has its sirens and shit on! The fuck man, the fuck!?) to take the human hood-ornament and the ass-clowns to the nearest hospital, Mercy Hospital (oh ha-ha, very nice, doctors killing patients in “Mercy Hospital”, yeah that little pun has never been done before). They arrive at the hospital, and the nurse in not being legit at all, refusing to let the guy who got some of the hood ornament's blood in his mouth get immediate examination opposed to the guy with a bump on the forehead due to the skeleton crew the hospital’s been running on since Katrina. Nice, way to bring up that BS excuse, by referencing a natural disaster! I’m not sure when this was filmed, but I believe it was filmed in 2007 and completed in 2008. If that’s so, Katrina happened like 2-3 years ago guys, almost everyone who wanted to go back had already. Jesus, what a fail. If I’m one of these characters I’m calling bullshit and getting the fuck out. I’ll walk, in the rain if I have to, I don’t give a damn. Then again, I wouldn’t drink and drive, get in a car with someone who’s obviously shit-faced, or let someone I know drink and drive period, so what I would do has really no merit on this movie anyway.
"No, please... no more! I'll leave a note next time, I promise! Just please for the love of God don't make me watch any more of this movie!"
The plot that plays out pulls a classic Hand-of-God tactic. The ‘Hand-of-God’ tactic is what I like to call it when a scenario is presented in a movie (usually horror movies) where it’s blatantly obvious that the writer wants the characters to get into a certain predicament. So rather that spend time finding a logical way to get them there, he or she makes up the biggest bullshit excuse that wouldn’t logically fly with anyone just to get them into said predicament. Case in point: the idiots find out that they’ve hit someone in addition to wrapping the car around the tree, and an ambulance arrives (how does it know where they are when we’ve established early in this post-crash scene that none of them have a working cell phone? It doesn't just pull up and see the accident, it has its sirens and shit on! The fuck man, the fuck!?) to take the human hood-ornament and the ass-clowns to the nearest hospital, Mercy Hospital (oh ha-ha, very nice, doctors killing patients in “Mercy Hospital”, yeah that little pun has never been done before). They arrive at the hospital, and the nurse in not being legit at all, refusing to let the guy who got some of the hood ornament's blood in his mouth get immediate examination opposed to the guy with a bump on the forehead due to the skeleton crew the hospital’s been running on since Katrina. Nice, way to bring up that BS excuse, by referencing a natural disaster! I’m not sure when this was filmed, but I believe it was filmed in 2007 and completed in 2008. If that’s so, Katrina happened like 2-3 years ago guys, almost everyone who wanted to go back had already. Jesus, what a fail. If I’m one of these characters I’m calling bullshit and getting the fuck out. I’ll walk, in the rain if I have to, I don’t give a damn. Then again, I wouldn’t drink and drive, get in a car with someone who’s obviously shit-faced, or let someone I know drink and drive period, so what I would do has really no merit on this movie anyway.
Anyway, Jessie’s boyfriend discovers he has a piece of glass stuck in his sternum. Against everyone's protests the dumb-ass says “oh it’s just a little piece” and starts to pull it out. He pulls… and pulls... and pulls, and its at this point we realize that the entire fucking windshield must be inside this guy, yet he keeps pulling! I’m sorry, but if I think it’s a small little piece and try to pull it out (which I wouldn’t do anyway, but again… drinking and driving…) only to find it’s really a shard, I’m stopping immediately and not touching it with a ten foot pole. Hell I’m not even moving for fear of raping my internal organs. He gets the entire thing out, and then proceeds to spas out in the most comical way. I didn’t know having glass shards in you made you twitch like you were having a seizure.
"No, please... no more! I'll leave a note next time, I promise! Just please for the love of God don't make me watch any more of this movie!"
Of course, due to the “skeletal crew” we’ve got to separate the group slowly as each one is admitted into their checkups, and only when people aren’t coming back do we realize that shit has hit the proverbial fan and that the best idea would be to get the hell out of here.
Gierasch, for some reason, feels the need to show us Jessica and Co. descending and ascending the stairs between floors multiple times after he establishes that the elevator is 10-7 (out of service). He shows this, even though there are floor numbers at the ends of the hall on EVERY GODDAMN FLOOR! Now, when it comes to editing I don’t like to put the full blame on the director unless I know for a fact that he was the editor himself. That being said, I assume (and I hate to, but I really have little choice) that he did at least have a say in whether or not the final cut was acceptable. Showing Jess run up and down the stairs is a pathetic way to stretch this paper thin movie out to an 80 minute runtime. What I do know though is that Gierasch shot enough varied cuts of various groups of the victims all going up and down stairs to actually allow the editor to not repeat the same shot twice. And when you see that there are about 10 - 15 of these stairway shots, that’s a pretty damn scary thought.
I’ll admit, I like smart horror. Like really smart horror. I feel it’s the only way the genre can be called such anymore. Everyone’s a dumb-ass in these movies now-a-days, and this seems to be because the writing is so weak that if someone were to do something even remotely rational or logical, the whole movie would have no place to go but to the end credits. That being said, while it’s frustrating in Autopsy to watch the characters be so compliant with splitting up, it seems somewhat justified in a hospital. What isn’t justified is that Jessica’s character Emily had supposedly gone to med school (dropped out after her first year) and yet when the police officer she called from one of the lackey’s cell phone arrives and isn’t sure if she’s a patent in the mental ward or not due to one of the hooligans BS cover stories, she doesn’t bring up the perfectly logical question of “if I’m a patient, then why the fuck am I not in a hospital gown? So the patient who’s supposedly crazy thinks to wander around and find clothes before trying to escape the hospital?” (Holy run-on sentence Batman!) Again though, it would actually take a while to figure out a legit way out of this, because naturally the cop would look at this like something really is up and possibly call for backup. Now what? Oh, logical plot point? My bad…fail! It’s not like you can’t half-ass your way out of this by having another lackey come up from behind the cop and smack him in the head with the brick of failure that was shit out when this movie was conceived , but at least the victim was smart enough to bring up the point.
"Oh God, not logic! Please anything but basic LOGIC!"
Gierasch, for some reason, feels the need to show us Jessica and Co. descending and ascending the stairs between floors multiple times after he establishes that the elevator is 10-7 (out of service). He shows this, even though there are floor numbers at the ends of the hall on EVERY GODDAMN FLOOR! Now, when it comes to editing I don’t like to put the full blame on the director unless I know for a fact that he was the editor himself. That being said, I assume (and I hate to, but I really have little choice) that he did at least have a say in whether or not the final cut was acceptable. Showing Jess run up and down the stairs is a pathetic way to stretch this paper thin movie out to an 80 minute runtime. What I do know though is that Gierasch shot enough varied cuts of various groups of the victims all going up and down stairs to actually allow the editor to not repeat the same shot twice. And when you see that there are about 10 - 15 of these stairway shots, that’s a pretty damn scary thought.
I’ll admit, I like smart horror. Like really smart horror. I feel it’s the only way the genre can be called such anymore. Everyone’s a dumb-ass in these movies now-a-days, and this seems to be because the writing is so weak that if someone were to do something even remotely rational or logical, the whole movie would have no place to go but to the end credits. That being said, while it’s frustrating in Autopsy to watch the characters be so compliant with splitting up, it seems somewhat justified in a hospital. What isn’t justified is that Jessica’s character Emily had supposedly gone to med school (dropped out after her first year) and yet when the police officer she called from one of the lackey’s cell phone arrives and isn’t sure if she’s a patent in the mental ward or not due to one of the hooligans BS cover stories, she doesn’t bring up the perfectly logical question of “if I’m a patient, then why the fuck am I not in a hospital gown? So the patient who’s supposedly crazy thinks to wander around and find clothes before trying to escape the hospital?” (Holy run-on sentence Batman!) Again though, it would actually take a while to figure out a legit way out of this, because naturally the cop would look at this like something really is up and possibly call for backup. Now what? Oh, logical plot point? My bad…fail! It’s not like you can’t half-ass your way out of this by having another lackey come up from behind the cop and smack him in the head with the brick of failure that was shit out when this movie was conceived , but at least the victim was smart enough to bring up the point.
"Oh God, not logic! Please anything but basic LOGIC!"
One thing I will say is that the cinematography and art direction is fairly good. The art direction is dark, dank and gritty, just how it should be in a horror film. I also love the color tone that was chosen, its right in between Saw’s “so high it’s sometimes retina burning” saturation and Hostel’s “so dim you wonder what the fuck is going on half the time” saturation, and it compliments the old / unused / rundown looking sets nicely. That being said there’s nothing else I can applaud this on, not even Jessica’s performance, which was mediocre to say the least. While she emoted well for the most part, I think the Gierasch may have screwed her up on some scenes. For instance, when she finds her boyfriend with his organs pulled out and hanging in pans all over the room (all of this done so he can remotely support the doctors corpse bride of a wife… yeah you heard me, I couldn't make that shit up) she goes to what I call “cry face” (you know, the look when your about to cry, when the tears are a-building, but you don’t break down due to say circumstance or self-image) only to abruptly pull back and go into a look of complete unemotional curiosity. It was as if someone said “you’re sad and now your like what the fuck is this.” No, you keep the cry face, you embrace the cry face, you go full out with the cry face in this scene. Then you slowly overlay the WTF curiosity onto the cry face, but you don't just drop it completely. You’re still emotionally distraught at the image of your boyfriend being the unlucky bastard who got the red light slapped on his nose for the real life version of Operation! She then breaks down out of NOWHERE when she unplugs her beau. Umm, where was the emotional fear and hesitation of actually KILLING the person you love? Just because you KNOW you have to do something doesn’t make it any easier, especially when it comes to killing a loved one. Jesus Oli Herbert Christ…
Oh, and to top it all off, Robert Patrick is the crazy doctor who’s behind all the shenanigans. That’s right, Robert. Fucking. Patrick. I know you less hardcore movie fans are like “who?” Let me ask you, have you seen Terminator 2? If you have, you remember that bad ass motherfucker who was made out of liquid and could form knives from his arms and shit? Yeah, that was Robert Patrick. Dear God man, I would’ve given you money if I had known you needed it this badly!
There’s a scene where Ashley Schneider (Clare) runs away from a naked animated corpse that inexplicably unloaded all of its organs on to her, (which, during said scene doesn’t get her to scream ONCE. Uh…epic fail, sound department?) only to bump into one of the T-1000’s henchmen. She freezes for a second, and then proceeds to get punched squarely in the face. It was at this point, as I was rolling on the floor with tears of laughter streaming down my face, that I start to wonder if this was supposed to be a parody movie. There’s another scene where Ross McCall (Jude; who’s been drugged with halogens) walks through a door in the background, past the nurse and Robert Patrick who’re holding Jessica still so they can inject her with “teh serumz”, and acts completely non-chalant and worry free, even though previous scenes have led us to believe that the halogens were wearing off and he knows they’re after him too. And I can’t forget the scene where Jude decides to blow up one of the rooms since the doc’s got his face pressed all up against the door trying to get in. Yet when Jude blasts the room to hell and back, the door on the other side in the hallway where Jessica is doesn’t flinch, smoke, or do much of anything other than let out a meek muffled boom when the shot transitions to her immediately after the blast (the other door to the room however, gets blown clean off its hinges and smacks the Doc and Lackey #2 square in the face). You cannot put scenes as hilariously bad as these into the movie and tell me with a straight face that it was supposed to be serious.
"Hmm... yup, this movie has officially killed its potential to be taken seriously."
Oh, and to top it all off, Robert Patrick is the crazy doctor who’s behind all the shenanigans. That’s right, Robert. Fucking. Patrick. I know you less hardcore movie fans are like “who?” Let me ask you, have you seen Terminator 2? If you have, you remember that bad ass motherfucker who was made out of liquid and could form knives from his arms and shit? Yeah, that was Robert Patrick. Dear God man, I would’ve given you money if I had known you needed it this badly!
There’s a scene where Ashley Schneider (Clare) runs away from a naked animated corpse that inexplicably unloaded all of its organs on to her, (which, during said scene doesn’t get her to scream ONCE. Uh…epic fail, sound department?) only to bump into one of the T-1000’s henchmen. She freezes for a second, and then proceeds to get punched squarely in the face. It was at this point, as I was rolling on the floor with tears of laughter streaming down my face, that I start to wonder if this was supposed to be a parody movie. There’s another scene where Ross McCall (Jude; who’s been drugged with halogens) walks through a door in the background, past the nurse and Robert Patrick who’re holding Jessica still so they can inject her with “teh serumz”, and acts completely non-chalant and worry free, even though previous scenes have led us to believe that the halogens were wearing off and he knows they’re after him too. And I can’t forget the scene where Jude decides to blow up one of the rooms since the doc’s got his face pressed all up against the door trying to get in. Yet when Jude blasts the room to hell and back, the door on the other side in the hallway where Jessica is doesn’t flinch, smoke, or do much of anything other than let out a meek muffled boom when the shot transitions to her immediately after the blast (the other door to the room however, gets blown clean off its hinges and smacks the Doc and Lackey #2 square in the face). You cannot put scenes as hilariously bad as these into the movie and tell me with a straight face that it was supposed to be serious.
"Hmm... yup, this movie has officially killed its potential to be taken seriously."
The film ends as everyone expects it to, on a freeze frame (which NEVER work dramatically except in like… The Breakfast Club) of Jessica beating the shit out of the Doc screaming “DIIIIEEE!!” followed by a half-assed scene of the Doc opening his eye to say “ZOMG, SEQUELZZZZZ!!!” This whole “killer isn’t dead” thing is so goddamn old, seriously. Either have the villain win or have him die, this whole ‘look I’m not really dead so bring on the sequel’ thing grinds my goddamn gears, because everyone knows if you move in on the villains dead body that he will make some sort of movement saying “I’m not dead, see? I hear franchizzzeee!” You know what I want, I want the classic pan over the dead body, hold the shot for a few seconds and then smash cut to black and have the protagonist say “what? he’s dead, this ain’t a fucking horror movie” (bad grammar and all) and bam, cue end credits. Now that would be a bad ass ending!
In the end, Autopsy is really nothing more than the same formulaic crap we’ve come to expect from the horror genre. If you somehow still enjoy the tired horror movie cliché’s or would like to watch a hot Canadian chick run up and down the same flight of stairs, then by all means give Autopsy a whirl. But for those looking for something a little more interesting from the “indie” horror film scene, this one’s better off left in the 99 cent bin at Blockbuster.
In the end, Autopsy is really nothing more than the same formulaic crap we’ve come to expect from the horror genre. If you somehow still enjoy the tired horror movie cliché’s or would like to watch a hot Canadian chick run up and down the same flight of stairs, then by all means give Autopsy a whirl. But for those looking for something a little more interesting from the “indie” horror film scene, this one’s better off left in the 99 cent bin at Blockbuster.
1/5
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