accattone74
You're a young, intelligent, and of course, pretty blond post-doc medical student. You've got more than a bit of an Electra complex, as your silver fox, over-tanned daddy has always hugged you a little too tightly most of your life. This has, unfortunately, left you quite frigid in the sex department. Alas, it's the height of summer, and the heat is unbearable. Most people have vacationed to the cooler, milder beach towns and resorts. Sunspot activity is observed to be at an all-time high. Suddenly, there's a rash of violent murders and suicides sweeping the city – all without reasons or motives. You work as a pathologist in the central morgue. Besides that, you're also trying to finish up your thesis on the differentiations of psychological effects between suicide, natural deaths, and homicide. But the bodies are beginning to pile up. You're exhausted. But you're also incredibly passionate and invested in the work itself – cutting up body after body after body, dissecting and analyzing organ after organ, all the while dripping sweat inside your surgical gown. You begin to hallucinate from the exhaustion… the dead bodies are actually alive! They rise, stare at you, taunt you, force you to watch as the have zombie-sex with one another! Some awaken to the nightmare of being undead, and just scream and scream! But you snap out of it. It's just all that Freudian sexual frustration boiling up inside of you. Right?Such is the case with Autopsy's Simona Sana, played by one of giallo's better actresses, Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, The Black Cat). Poor Simona. When one of her father's young playthings ends up on the slab, Simona realizes that not only was she one of the last to see this young beauty alive, but that her own father might be a murderer! All the evidence leads to suicide though, right? But the girl's Catholic priest brother sets out to prove that suicide is the very last thing his sister would ever have contemplated, let alone go through with. In between the balancing act of withholding evidence to protect her father, lying to the priest to keep him off the right track, keeping her perpetually horny boyfriend at bay, and fending off one of her terrorizing ex-stepmothers, Simona's got more than her hands full. The priest (who Simona is now sexually attracted to) demands that they work together, but how can she look for the real killer, and keep her father safe at the same time? And her brain can't take much more of this either – the hallucinations keep popping up under the most startling and often horrific circumstances. Are the sunspots responsible for all of this madness? Is her father really the killer after all? Is the priest? Is she herself the killer? Could Simona be that far gone?Few Italian Horror films split the vote the way Autopsy does. Not really a giallo, and certainly not the zombie film most trailers, posters, and video art taken from it would lead you to believe. And just who the hell is the director of this hodgepodge, Armando Crispino? In a genre of filmmaking like Italian Horror, which is extremely and perhaps overly attached to auteur theory, why the hell should someone stop and notice a film made by a relative nobody? One time assistant director to the likes of Pietro Germi, Crispino directed nine films in nine years (1966-1975), and Autopsy is one of his last. In fact, besides this film and a previous giallo from 1972, The Dead are Alive (aka The Etruscan Kills Again), most of his own work is forgettable, forgotten, and not worth finding – although his last film, Frankenstein: Italian Style, sounds like it might at least be a hoot in the camp department.So again, why Autopsy? Yes, its story is convoluted (see above). It's got its fair share of non sequiturs, deus ex machinas, and red herrings like all the rest. Yeah, in some ways Autopsy's just another Freudian Psych. 102 class-cum-thriller, but there's something else here. Autopsy has a risky, devil-may-care, je ne sais quoi that separates it from almost all the others in its genre. Crispino took a chance with this highly unusual story, and I think it pays off in spades. The film's deliberate, unorthodox pace is stimulating, and the absence of the usual 'insert murder every X-minutes' structure just makes it that much more suspenseful. Autopsy is audacious in that it is at least trying to be different from the rest – something extraordinary and marked by brilliance, but not completely tangible or so easy to explain, or therefore, to explain away. Simona's truly bizarre sexual hang-ups, the doom-laden sunspots, the morally ambiguous priest, the creepy father-daughter subtext, and the big blown-up photographs of real corpses – it all makes for an unclassifiable film. And as we all learned in Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, people would just as soon kill you before taking time to try and understand you. Is this the case with Autopsy's mixed reputation?Despite the always-shocking opening minutes, the delightfully uncomfortable hallucinations that pepper the film, the 'death museum' sequence (which is one of the most beautifully structured and impudently repellant set pieces in all of Italian Horror) and the obligatory yet nail-biting showdown at the end, perhaps the idea behind Autopsy is greater than the film itself. Such a statement is contrary to most Italian Horror, as many of the films attributed to this genre are supposedly lacking in the idea department, but prove their worth visually and stylistically. This is precisely why Autopsy is one of the 'must-see' films in Italian Horror, for although it stays more than true to the tenets of visual flair and graphic sex/violence, it attempts to transcend the weaknesses of its own genre. And despite, in some people's eyes, the failure of said attempt, Autopsy unarguably gets an'A' for effort.
