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Autopsy (1975)

Dir: Armando Crispino

Uptight, frigid and generally strung-out Pathologist Simona Sana (Mimsy Farmer), while working on a thesis investigating the differences between real and faked suicides, begins hallucinating images of the corpses in the morgue coming back to life in throes of sexual pleasure and carnality.
At the same time a surge in sunspots seems to be driving people to acts of murder/suicide.

Her sexist, photographer boyfriend, Edgar (Ray Lovelock), accuses Simona of simply wanting attention and is getting frustrated at the way she always backs off from sex.
Her mysterious Father (Carlo Cattaneo) is also having Simona followed, as he carries out some shady dealings.

Simona continues her grisly work and one day she discovers that a young woman who supposedly shot herself was in fact murdered.
She teams up with the victim's brother, a troubled priest named Father Paul Lenox (Barry Primus), to find out the truth.

But who is to be trusted in Simona’s increasingly dark and troubled world?….

 

“Autopsy” opens with a bang. A surreal, disturbing, nightmarish bang.
Backed by one of Ennio Morricone’s most haunting scores ( all discordant chords, weird noises and the breathless, almost orgasmic, wails of the damned) we see a montage of suicide and murder before being thrown (via “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” style sun flares) into the cold world of the city’s morgue as the dead are wheeled in.

Uncompromisingly explicit in the clinical details of death, this sequence delivers up the nude bodies lying on cold steel slabs, organs exposed, the gory wounds that killed them on display as brains are slopped onto trays and blood is swilled past the naked flesh that once housed it into the gutters and drains.
When the said corpses then come ‘alive’ in Simona’s hallucination this rather depressing clinical explicitness becomes mixed with the genuinely macabre to ensure we are subjected to one of the finest scenes in any Giallo you could care to name. And not a gloved killer in sight.
The only downside is that you now worry if the rest of the film can sustain this superlative opening 10 minutes filled with the freshly dead, the cold dead, and the living dead.

Sadly it doesn’t always sustain such a peak but certainly we are given a few more moments of macabre grizzliness and the haunting atmosphere, thanks to Morricone’s score more than anything else, is ever present.
Even normal everyday things and activities carry a sinister air that keeps you on edge as you wonder if something is indeed about to happen to someone.

Farmer is much better here than she was in Argento’s all round lacklustre “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” and far less annoying, though she still pulls some irritating faces.
She also sheds all for her role during her love scene with Ray Lovelock.
Lovelock himself is good and he carries that perfect edge of 70’s male cockiness and barely controlled animal passions. He’ll forever by the marvelous George in the superb “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” to me, but he’s certainly memorable here.
American all rounder and TV stalwart Barry Primus seems uncomfortable in a non-English/mixed language film though and seems to think that going madly over the top will smash down any language barriers, whereas it just makes him look rather amateur. Italian cinema and how it’s made is certainly a long way from how Hollywood functions.

The main problem for the bulk of the film is due to the ‘suicide or not’ nature of the deaths, which means we don’t actually have any on-screen murder scenes.
Scenes which of course are normally the highlight of any Giallo.
At least the clinical, medical detail, explicitness we saw in the opening of the film is carried on over into the discovery of the bodies. Not least of which is the shockingly disfigured face of the gunshot wound victim that makes Simona suspicious.
This wallow in graphic death is further heightened by the use of crime scene/autopsy photos of real corpses as part of Simona’s research and as part of a really weird (and unlikely) display of death in a gallery. All of these real life images are extreme and some are full-on nauseating.

The copious amount of nudity on display (again in reality and photos) when mixed with all these visuals of gory death truly gives the film an exploitative edge that also manages to give it a power and an energy it would otherwise lack, even when the heavy plotting (and as said, lack of any actual murder scenes) threaten to bog the film down with that talking head, plot explanatory overload, styling and content that makes far too many Gialli (though Argento’s movies are normally the exception) seem like TV movies whenever sex or death (or both) is not on the screen.

The film also lacks a big reveal as far as the killer goes.
It’s in fact done in a rather throwaway (and initially confusing) dialogue scene and on top of that the motive is rather flat as well and possible reasons for Simona’s state of mind are not resolved either, only lightly hinted at.

The movie also feels rather pedestrian when we are not in the macabre presence of the morgue and it’s corpses as well (complete with that Euro Trash staple, the creepy, perverted, attendant) , but at least the role-call of universally damaged characters (all with dark personal hang-ups, and secrets) , the terrifically creepy and unsettling score and the almost constant fascination in naked and dead flesh means that the generally slow, murder sequence-lite, dialogue heavy, structure almost always has something hanging on it to keep the interest.
And certainly the opening 10 or so minutes is, as stated, outstanding.
It’s just a shame that the film never truly lives up to it.
Certainly worth a look though.