23. Autopsy (2008, Gierash)
By Eivind Langdal
24th November 2009

It must have been nice being a film director in the early 1900s. After all, you could name a film something as ordinary as The Great Train Robbery and no one would claim you stole that title, as there weren’t that many films around in those days anyway. Fast-forward to the 2000s, and the movie industry has grown to such proportions that over 300 films are released each year in Hollywood alone. Makes it a bit hard to find an original title, no? I’m guessing I won’t need to tell you that this is not the first film called Autopsy. But that’s not what my problem is. You see, this film shouldn’t have been called Autopsy even if there hadn’t been a film called that before it. Why? Because there are no autopsies in it! Yes, it’s set in a hospital, but if we’re going to follow that logic, The Lord of the Rings might as well have been called Smelly Feet because it features hobbits.

Do you know what the difference between tension and gore is? Gore can be bought. It can be paid for. All you need is a special effects guy. Tension, on the other hand, requires skill. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. Hell, you don’t even need to have money at all. Look at The Blair Witch Project. All it takes is a cheap camera and some trees to create some tension. Strange then, that Autopsy is set in an archetypical horror location, the creepy hospital, and yet is still so tame. Don’t throw any lack-of-budgets arguments at me either. After all, I’ve already established what’s most expensive of gore and tension, and the movie certainly could afford the former. Now, I don’t necessarily mind gore as much as I mind the fact that more gore seems to equal less tension. Is it really that hard to let the two exist side by side? Apparently not, if you judge by Autopsy. This film is bloody all right, but if you want be really creeped out, you should see something else.

After a long night of partying, three guys and two gals decide it’s time to go home. They get in their car and drive away from town, but as soon they’re in the middle of nowhere, they crash the car. Accident? Yes, but try telling that to the guy that got wedged beneath the car. Luckily, an ambulance comes and picks them up. As it turns out, the wedged guy was an escaped patient. However, once they reach the hospital, they get a strange feeling something is wrong, and before they know it, they are trapped in a hellish place where there is no escape.

Hold on, let me correct myself there. Yes, “hellish” is an apt description for the hospital, but to say there is no escape for the characters is just wrong; many of them gets the opportunity of escape handed to them several times in the film, but it always happens before the film has reached its climax, and so, a few dues ex machinas swoop in to save the day. Why give them the opportunity at all? It’s like buying air bags to your car because you know for certain that you are going to crash it later. Why not just not drive the car? Why bother with the air bags when you can just sit at home? Simultaneously, why bother writing scenes where the characters almost make it out of the hospital only for them to miss the opportunity in the last second? Is it to evoke a feeling of hopelessness and despair in the audience? Because if it is, the film certainly succeeds. I mean, I pretty much lost all my hope watching it.

Take that scene where one of the characters, Emily, strolls through the hospital on her own. Suddenly, she spots a patient with unkempt black hair and pale white skin. Emily asks if she should get any doctors to help her. The patient answers, “What makes you think they’re here to help you”? Gee, I wonder, what could make anyone believe doctors are in a hospital to help you? The fact that they’re doctors, maybe? I know it’s supposed to be a creepy foreboding line, but I’m sorry, you can’t be scary if you’re too busy crushing logic with a jackhammer.

You know, this film actually had me hoping it was going to be really creepy. I even got my hopes up as I realized Robert Patrick, AKA someone I’ve actually heard of, was going to be in it. But then I realized one of the unwritten rules of a horror film: if a famous actor is in it, it’s more a sign of the declining quality of that actor’s career than it is of any of the film’s qualities. And speaking of famous actors: is Michael Bowen playing a creepy orderly again? Was it so much fun in Kill Bill that he had to do it one more time? Is that really the type of character he wants to be typecast as?

I think Autopsy is a film made by skilled people. After all, it takes true skill to make a film set in a scary hospital so free of tension. With those long and stretchy corridors (not to mention the many creepy tools they use in operations), hospitals make the perfect horror location. So how the hell did this film get screwed up? It had potential, I’ll give it that, but that potential was apparently left behind by the ambulance in the film’s first part, and that’s just bad doctoring, man.