Autopsy

Description

Product Description Presented Uncut For The First Time Ever In America! When the city of Rome is rocked by a wave of violent suicides, a young forensic pathologist (Mimsy Farmer of FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET), wracked by hallucinations of the living dead, and a priest (Barry Primus of NEW YORK, NEW YORK), running from his dark past, begin an investigation. Together they uncover a deadly secret… and a chilling slab of unspeakable horror.Directed by Armando Crispino (THE DEAD ARE ALIVE) and featuring a sinister score by Ennio Morricone (THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE), this Euro Horror classic was cut by over 15 minutes upon its 1975 American release. Now AUTOPSY has been restored from original negative materials and presented uncut and uncensored. Review "A Twisted, Unconventional Giallo Packed With Creepy Set Pieces And A Truly Novel Setting!" -- Mondo Digital Review: Great giallo/horror/splatterfest. Top-shelf Eurosleaze! - This stars two American exports: Mimsy Farmer, the ice queen from Riot on Sunset Strip and a brilliant hip turn as a heroin addled temptress in Barbet Schroeder's More - fairly explicit for its time - an art house hit with accompanying Pink Floyd soundtrack. Playing opposite Mimsy is Barry Primus, a popular character actor who appeared in Scorcesse's Boxcar Bertha. Mimsy plays a medical student who works in a morgue, her job is getting to her. She starts having hallucinations of grinning black men rising off slabs and having orgies with other stiffs, most disturbingly an overweight woman covered in scars. Not especially helpful to Mimsy's mental state is a greasy, bum-pinching co-worker - ubiquitous in the giallo genre. This particular greaseball's gig is to reconstruct and make up corpses after the autopsy(s) are complete, taking a sadistic Glee in his task. Needless to say, having accepted a ride from this troublemaker, he tries to rip her clothes off in the car. After Primus identifies his sister (the cops declare her a suicide) he sets out to find her killer - Primus isn't buying the suicide rap. Primus is a priest with weird psychic powers, and he's one of the biggest fireballs of a clergyman seen in movies - a brawling, bullying wildman who makes Jason Miller in The Excorcist seem merely sulky in comparison. Pushy and heavy, Primus slugs it out with anyone in his way. For added nuttiness, he's got the hots for Mimsy. Could the killer be Mimsy's dandy of a daddy, who greets her like some chick he met at a singles bar? Mimsy's jet-trash layabout boyfriend? (With whom she has long, graphic sex with.) The guilt- ridden priest himself? Watch and see! An off-kilter balance between it's grotesque necrophiliac subtext, well-executed, graphic sex scenes, and an effective mystery/drama. And, of course, gore-fest. Some unintended laffs as to the over-amped sexual frustration. Great Stuff! Review: Nice mixture of horror and giallo - Warning SPOILERS!!! Downright weird Italian thriller that mixes elements of giallo with horror. The film opens with close-ups of sun flares (the film's Italian title is MACCHIE SOLARI, which translates to "Sun Spots"), as we watch several people in Rome commit suicide. A topless woman slits her wrists with a razor blade. A businessman puts a plastic bag over his head, tightens the drawstring and jumps into a river. Another man lights a match inside his car, which is doused in gasoline, and blows himself up (we see a shot shot of him burning to death). A father kills his two young children with a machine-gun before turning it on himself. Just what is the cause of these suicides? Is it a case of mass hysteria (Rome is going through a sweltering heatwave) or are there more sinister causes at work? The job of finding answers falls on pathologist Simona Sanna (Mimsy Farmer; FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET - 1971), who is interning at a teaching hospital until she finishes her college thesis on "simulated and authentic suicides" (try not to think too hard about this!). Simona, who is over-worked and over-heated, has a freak-out scene where she imagines all the dead bodies in the morgue come to life and have sex with each other (it must be seen to be believed!). Simona is a new resident at an apartment complex, where she meets her upstairs neighbor, red-headed Betty Lenox (Gaby Wagner), who knocks on Simona's door to borrow an envelope. Betty hears her phone ring, runs upstairs and we can tell by the look on her face that the phone call is trouble. She runs out of the apartment complex, nearly gets raped by two drunk pedestrians, goes to church and then is picked up by someone she knows (but we don't see) . The mystery begins. The next day, Simona is in the morgue when the newest "suicide" is brought to her. It is the body of a young woman who stuck a pistol under her chin and pulled the trigger (We see her face which is missing teeth and one eyeball is hanging out of the socket!). We then watch as demented morgue assistant Ivo (Ernesto Colli; THE TEMPTER - 1974) fixes her face with putty so the police can take a picture of her for the newspaper (Ivo makes sure that his hand brushes against her cold naked breast). It turns out that this female stiff is the body of Betty Lenox without her red wig. A priest named Father Paul (Barry Primus; THE DION BROTHERS - 1974) shows up at the morgue and insists that Betty was murdered and could not have possibly committed suicide because he gave her absolution from her sins the night before. You see, Father Paul's last name is Lenox and Betty was his sister. Simona's photographer/race car driver boyfriend, Riccardo (the late Ray Lovelock; LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH - 1978), recalls that Father Paul was once a famous race car driver that was committed to a mental institution after causing a major accident at a racetrack where people were killed (Riccardo tells Simona that it is not such a far leap from a loony bin to a man of the cloth!). Right away, we see that Father Paul is a sandwich short of a picnic, as he yells to Simona, "Show me some respect! Show me some respect!" when she questions his sanity after seeing him punch out the apartment complex's caretaker (Leonardo Severini) for calling Betty a prostitute. Making matter worse, someone is stalking Simona, trying to kill her. But why? There are many people who could be the stalker, as they are also hiding secrets of their own. Besides Father Paul and the caretaker (whom we see beating his dog for barking), there's Riccardo, who seems to know more than he is telling; Simona's father, Lello (Carlo Cataneo), who buys a pistol from the caretaker for reasons not yet made clear; Lello's former lover Danielle (Angela Goodwin), who is an artist of grotesque paintings of death (she works at a "criminal museum" that is full of photos of real-life death and wax figures of murderers); Simona's Uncle Gianni (Massimo Serato; DON'T LOOK NOW - 1973), who lies to Simona on when he arrived in Rome. Even Simona herself is a strange bird, as she cannot make love to Riccardo without seeing the bodies of corpses coming to life. It seems that everyone in this film has secrets they would kill for. Simona and Father Paul find the caretaker hanging by his neck in his bathroom (he used his belt as a noose). Father Paul tries to revive him (in one of the strangest resuscitation methods that I have ever seen, moving his arms up and down like some air pump!), only to witness him take a final breath before he foams at the mouth and dies. Then Lello jumps (or is pushed out) a window in Betty's apartment and he fractures his back, causing him to become a paraplegic, unable to talk. Just moments before, Lello and Gianni discover a letter written by Betty where she says she wishes she could become Lello's wife, but since she can't, she has taken the only action that makes sense. Yes, this could be looked at as a suicide note, but an important document (a revised will) is missing, which could prove Betty was murdered. Simona and Father Paul decide to hook up Lello with an experimental machine that will enable him to answer questions with his eye movements. Once hooked up to the machine, they ask him if he tried to commit suicide, but all he is able to communicate are the letters "SIMONASEI" before he convulses and dies, foaming at the mouth just like the caretaker did (The letters are part of a quotation in Italian, but it is not translated for English speaking audiences. It really doesn't matter, though.). The reveal of the killer is a cheat on the audience, as we are never clued-in on the killer's motivations until the film's final minutes. It seems that Riccardo was injecting people with a deadly paralytic agent to cover up the fact that he killed his father years earlier so he could inherit his father's fortune. Betty had his father's revised will, which disinherited Riccardo (which is why Betty wanted to borrow an envelope from Simona). He killed everyone to get his hands on that will to destroy it. His last act is to inject Simona and Father Paul with the agent, strip them nude, put them in Simona's bathroom and turn on the gas to make it look like a double suicide. Only God is on the side of Father Paul and Simona. They miraculously revive and ruin Riccardo's plans. He dies by falling off scaffolding on top of an old church after getting into a scuffle with Father Paul. Riccardo's final image is of tourists crowding around his crushed body. While we are never given a valid reason why some people are committing mass suicide, Simona theorizes that it has something to do with the solar flares that are causing the heatwave (It's a throw-away line that is the only part of the film that is in Italian with English subtitles). Every time someone kills themselves, we are shown close-ups of solar flares shooting off the Sun. Besides the sudden reveal of the killer and his motivations, this is an atmospheric and creepy delight. It has wall-to-wall full frontal male and female nudity and the music score, by Oscar®-winning composer Ennio Morricone (who wrote the my favorite score of all time, the soundtrack to DUCK, YOU SUCKER - 1971) adds immensely to the proceedings. Director Armando Crispino (THE DEAD ARE ALIVE - 1972; FRANKENSTEIN ITALIAN STYLE - 1975), who co-wrote the screenplay with Lucio Battistrada (RIPPED-OFF - 1972), fills the film with weird visuals which will get your mind off of some of the story's gaping plot holes. But that by no means distracts you from the fact that this is an enjoyable, twisted flick from those crazy Italians, whose country is shaped like a boot. This was one of a long line of Italian genre films that was released theatrically during the 1970's & 80's. AUTOPSY was released in 1975 (by Joseph Brenner Associates) in a severely-edited R-Rated print, shorn of 15 minutes of footage (Mostly nudity, including an attempted rape of Simona by Ivo, whom she stabs in the cheek with a fork. Which brings up the big question: What in the hell is a fork doing in a morgue?). The edited print was then released on VHS by Prism Entertainment in the mid-'80s, with an uncut widescreen VHS & DVD to follow from Anchor Bay Entertainment early in the New Millennium (long OOP). The only way to go now is the beautiful DVD from Blue Underground (No Blu-Ray at the time of this review). The DVD is short on extras (just a U.S. Trailer and an International trailer where it was known as THE VICTIM), but if your interests run towards strange, nudity-filled Italian thrillers, you won't be disappointed. Also starring Eleonora Morana, Giovanni Di Benedetto, Pier Giovanni Anchisi and Antonio Casale as clueless Police Inspector Silvestri. Not Rated.