After Dark Horror Fest 2009: ‘Autopsy’

My favorite film at this years Horrorfest (I saw 7 of the 8 films) was the gore-drenched black comedy AUTOPSY. The hospital-set shocker was, after mostly serious horror at the fest, just the kind of gruesome fun I was looking for.

AUTOPSY opens with a   montage of 5 young attractives partying in New Orleans. Driving back across Louisiana, they hit a patient who has escaped from nearby Mercy Hospital (the film originally had the more ironic title MERCY). An ambulance, attended by two unlikely EMTS, arrives and takes the group back to Mercy where hell quickly breaks loose and the rest of the bloody action takes place. They’re the typical dumb horror movie group of teens as they’re slow to notice that there seems to be no other patients and that none of the four colorful employees at Mercy acts like they work at a real hospital. Orderly Scott (familiar tattooed character actor Robert LaSardo) takes a pot-smoking victim on a humorous tour of the facility’s drug closet before feeding him hallucinogens. The only staff nurse (cult actress Jenette Goldstein, almost unrecognizable from NEAR DARK and ALIENS) is rude, loud, obnoxious, and homicidal. Orderly Travis (Michael Bowen, doing a even nastier riff on his similar character Buck from KILL BILL VOL.1) barely pretends to be anything but a bloodthirsty psycho. Robert Patrick (B-movie stalwart Robert Patrick, still best-remembered from TERMINATOR 2) is the spinal fluid-guzzling Dr. Benway   who runs the clinic for his own diabolical purposes. These four deranged villains take the teens to various hospital rooms for gleeful bouts of torture, lobotomies, vivisection and murder. Emily (Jessica Lowndes), a med-school dropout herself, is the fleshed-out and most level-headed of the youth and the only one that generates any sympathy. This is just as well as it makes the gruesome fates of her four expendable friends that much more fun to observe.

AUTOPSY is 90 minutes of sadistic, critic-proof silliness. There’s a ridiculous amount of cheap scares as killers suddenly lunge from behind doors and cabinets, out of body bags, under cars, and even during autopsies.   There’s not much logic (We’re supposed to believe the fully-functioning clinic has been abandoned for years) but, in this type of slaughterhouse horror film, there really doesn’t have to be. Robert Patrick, a demented doc in the Herbert West mold, has all the best over-the-top lines and the other three baddies are broadly portrayed lunatics. The lighting and art design, with it’s heavy use of colored gels and primary colors, reminded me of the look of Dario Argento’s crazier films and indeed, director Adam Gierasch wrote the screenplay for Argento’s recent MOTHER OF TEARS.

AUTOPSY is certainly not for everyone. Though realistic, the gore effects are so outrageous and the humor so coarse that the film plays more like BLOODSUCKING FREAKS than a less harmless gorefest like HOSTEL. AUTOPSY is a wild ride and a lot of fun. There are screenings at Ronnie’s 20 Cine at 3:10 and 9:50 on Tuesday and 5:30 on Wednesday.