What invokes the genre when you think of a movie called “Pathology”? Is it a murder mystery? Thriller? Flat out horror? No to all of these. It is in fact a very lazily written exploitation movie with a unique premise (although a very, very stupid one).
What makes this movie exploitative? Oh I’ll get to that later. Let’s just describe the opening scene for a minute. The movie starts off in grainy handy-cam (because that’s always the mark of excellent cinema) with a bunch of goof offs in a morgue playing with the cadavers. Hey, when I plan my next unsupervised romp in a morgue I sure want to have video evidence of it! These intelligent individuals are opening the mouths and propping the bodies up in sexual positions, all while moaning to make it appear the corpses are having sex. One of them then remarks “We are so going to hell for this.” Yes you are filmmakers, for making such a ridiculous scene that is neither disturbing or shocking as its intentions are so clearly meant to be, but just rather incredibly dumb. But who are these odd degenerates; surely just some bored teenage juvenile’s who somehow got into a morgue? The answer to that is even more mind boggling.
Fast forward to the credits, and now we get to the real movie. At least the handy-cam is gone but now replaced with a made for TV vibe in film quality. Not really a shock as the main stars of the movie biggest credentials pertain to TV shows. The main star is Milo Ventimiglia of Heroes fame, who played the character Peter Petrelli. I’ve never seen Heroes but from what I understand he plays the exact same character he does there as he does here. From what I gathered in his role in Heroes, he plays a Ma-Ti variant that has the power of overwhelming empathy. Here he’s a promising medical student who just got done with some humanitarian work in some non specified area of Africa to study pathology in the big mean city (which is also unspecified). Man, is this guy one dimensional. Simply named Ted Grey, all we know from him is he’s a nice upstanding moralistic do-gooder who has an attractive fiancé to boot. Attractive fiancé played by Alyssa Milano of Charmed fame who is just as one dimensional.
The filmmakers simply made Ted a boy scout merely so he can be converted to the dark side. The transition here is even more unbelievable to that of Anakin in the Star Wars movies. You see, the people who like to spend their free time playing with corpses are actually other medical students that Ted must work with, in the pathology department at this hospital. The head doctor is somehow oblivious to their silly antics while working such as throwing livers on the one nerdy guy that isn’t part of the group. Because all medical students are as wacky and zany as something you would find in Animal House right? It’s like they didn’t do any research for this movie at all! On wait, the DVD extra feature proves otherwise, but they simply researched the instruments used in pathology to open up the bodies and not the behavior of actual pathology workers or medical students. Makes sense considering the overall exploitative nature of the film.
When Ted meets spiky haired “that’s how you know I’m evil” Jake Gallo and his crew of miscreants Ted quickly becomes allured by their strange antics. I don’t know why, they are complete jerks to Ted and all-around unlikable people. Somehow Jake convinces Ted to go barhopping with the gang one night as Ted quickly impresses the gang with a totally unprovoked speech of how we are all just animals and have the desire and will to kill within us all. Silly Ted doesn’t know how much his speech actually gets these guys off, because they actually have a little secret club where they kill people in oblique sometimes creative ways and try to challenge each other to find out how they did it. This is seriously why they became medical students?
If you haven’t realized where this movie is headed by this point shame on you, but I’ll explain further in case you haven’t. They invite Ted to the club, Ted is initially disgusted, eventually he realizes how morally decayed society is and joins, etc, just add in orgies and drug use to symbolize his fall from boy scout to evildoer and Ted is immediately a convert to this weird club. Of course he does have moments where he realizes he’s in too deep and now his fiancé is in trouble because the psycho med students are targeting her now…have you realized how stupid this movie is yet?
If you haven’t realized where this movie is headed by this point shame on you, but I’ll explain further in case you haven’t. They invite Ted to the club, Ted is initially disgusted, eventually he realizes how morally decayed society is and joins, etc, just add in orgies and drug use to symbolize his fall from boy scout to evildoer and Ted is immediately a convert to this weird club. Of course he does have moments where he realizes he’s in too deep and now his fiancé is in trouble because the psycho med students are targeting her now…have you realized how stupid this movie is yet?
One thing I will give credit to this movie, it just made me feel dirty for watching it in pure exploitation fashion. I wondered who the hell this movie was targeted toward and somewhere out there, there’s an audience who are entertained by watching people smoking crack, having sex, and cutting up bodies. That’s pretty much the main content of this movie and the plot is so flimsy, the characters so one dimensional, that’s there’s really no justification for it at all.
