Autopsy

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.

Armando Crispino, the director and co-writer of 1975's "Autopsy" is considered to be an Italian "maestro" but did not have that long of a career in films before he went exclusively into television. He made an interesting and unusual "spaghetti western" in the late sixties called "John the Bastard" starring John Richardson which sorely needs to have an official DVD release. In 1972 he directed "The Dead Are Alive" with the unbeatable casting of Alex Cord and Samantha Eggar which was a very good horror/giallo; more a traditional giallo that 1975's "Autopsy" starring Mimsy Farmer (who had made the also unconventional "The Perfume of the Lady in Black") and Barry Primus with Ray Lovelock, Carlo Cataneo, Angela Goodwin, Gaby Wagner and Massimo Serato. As written by Crispino and Lucio Battistrada, the film is Crispino's tour de force as it blew me away as I could not tell where it would go and , quite frankly, all the distracting comments in reviews about the film's attention to "sun spots" or more accurately, the effect of the sun of people's behavior, quite natural, considering how many people attribute much bad behavior to the lunar pull of the full moon, still could not ruin for me the completely fluid pull of this film's plot and its execution on film. Everything comes together in this film, the cinematography, editing, music; all expert, but the film definitely succeeds in the hands of Crispino. Thanks to Blue Underground we get to see "Autopsy" (Internationally released as "The Victim;" for which both releases there are trailers as extras) uncut for the first time in the U.S. in widescreen, color and inexpensively. "Unconventional" is the key word to Crispino's work. I am not sure "Autopsy" is the best title for it, perhaps the original Italian is translated correctly may be more conclusive, but, considering as anything it has been called, it does not take away the film's power as a piece of art and a thrilling piece of film-making.

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!

「炎のいけにえ」です。真夏のローマを舞台にして、太陽の異常気象（？）による暑さで自殺者や殺人が増えているといった現象や主人公であるモルグで働く女医の妄想（死体が動き出してセックスを始めたり・・・）を味付けにした推理劇です。ただ、どれもこれも中途半端で何か思わせぶりな雰囲気だけが先行していて話の辻褄があっていない。まあ７０年代のイタリアンＢ級ホラーの典型みたいなものでしょう。この映画の魅力は、その何か思わせぶりな雰囲気にあります。最近のリアルなスプラッター描写なんかに較べると、死体など素朴なメイクアップなのですが、何か薄気味悪さを醸し出すものがあります。その薄気味悪さの中で女医役のミムジー・ファーマーが清楚な美しさ（行動は清楚とはいえませんが）㡊??奇妙な魅力を発散してます。掃き溜めに鶴と言ったら、この映画のファンの方に怒られるかも知れませんが、不思議な魅力を持った女優さんです。ワイドスクリーン、デジタルリマスター、予告篇付、音声は英語です。

Simona Sana is a young pathologist working in a morgue in Rome, Italy. When a huge heat wave leads to several shocking suicides, one corpse that is brought in is recognised by Simona and she becomes convinced that she was murdered. Her suspicions are backed up further when Father Paul Lennox identifies the body as that of his sister, and insists his sister would have never killed herself. As in all good gialli, Simona and Father Lennox team up to investigate the murder, but a determined killer has no intention of allowing them to solve the puzzle.I really liked Mimsy Farmer as Simona, even if her character is a little difficult to warm to at first. Farmer is another actress where I don't really know any of her American films, but she did make several Italian films I really like, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, The Black Cat and Code Name: Wild Geese. Barry Primus is pretty good as Father Lennox, he's especially good at not letting us know whether he's good or evil. I don't know if he's friends with Robert De Niro, but he's appeared in at least six films with him, New York, New York, Guilty by Suspicion, Night and the City, 15 Minutes, Righteous Kill and Grudge Match. The great Ray Lovelock gives another good performance as Simona's sexually frustrated boyfriend, but I think Lovelock is always great. He'll be very familiar to Italian film fans for his roles in such films as Oasis of Fear, Almost Human, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue and many more.Autopsy was directed by Armando Crispino, he didn't make many films, but of the two that I've seen, I think he was pretty talented. I like the way he shot the film, there's some great scenes and the mystery is kept interesting throughout. My one major complaint is that the film is quite convoluted and I really wasn't sure what I'd seen after my first viewing, even on repeat viewings there's still parts of the film that seem confusing. The suicides at the beginning of the film are brilliantly done and quite shocking, but we're supposed to believe that the reason they killed themselves was because of sunspots or flares or something, and this is also given as the reason why Simona is having strange and creepy hallucinations along with exhaustion. The film seems really strange and confusing, but if you stick with it, the reason behind the killings made to look like suicides is explained quite well. It did take me a second viewing to really put the pieces together, and I found the film a lot more fun to watch the second time. The film contains some nudity and violence, but it's not nearly as gratuitous as many other similar films. There are moments during the film where we get to see some photographs, and some of the photographs are fairly shocking. Like many Italian films like this, there's some hilarious dialogue. At one point when there's an attempted rape, the boyfriend comforts her by saying "you can't blame the poor bastard for trying". The cinematography by Carlo Carlini is really nice, though it's hard to make Rome look bad. Carlini was a veteran of Italian cinema starting out in the late '40s, but it's perhaps many of his later works that are better known. The Big Gundown, Death Rides a Horse, The Blood-Stained Butterfly, Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye and Street Law. The now legendary Ennio Morricone gives us yet another excellent soundtrack, after five Academy Award nominations, he was finally given a honorary award in 2007.The Blue Underground DVD is as good as always, the picture quality is nice and crisp with very decent sound. Extras are extremely slim, there's just a US trailer and an International trailer where the film was called The Victim. The disc is region 0 and will play just fine on any UK player.Autopsy aka The Victim, Sunspots, The Magician, Corpse and Tension, is essentially a giallo, but it's far stranger than what many people will be used to when approaching a giallo. There's the standard killings, and we follow people attempting to unravel the mystery, but the sunspots and hallucinations are something different. If you love gialli, especially the slightly stranger ones like Short Night of Glass Dolls, Footprints or The Fifth Cord, then I highly recommend it. First time viewers may be left scratching their head after a first viewing, I know I was, but it's a film that warrants and rewards further viewings.

Spitzen Giallo ! Schnelle Lieferung !