“I fail to see the genius here.”
A young pathologist falls in with some real psychos. It doesn’t take long before he’s a full-fledged murderer. Think CSI gone bad, as the murderous pathology students try to create the perfect crime so that the others in their game won’t be able to figure out the mode of death.
Ted Grey (Milo Ventimiglia) is a medical student that has just joined a prestigious pathology program. To do so he’s had to leave his fiancée Gwen Williamson (Alyssa Milano) and move to the big city. Ted seems like a nice enough fellow and has spent the last year helping volunteering.
The head of the program, Dr, Morris (John De Lancie), introduces Ted to Dr. Jake Gallo (Michael Weston), one of the hot shots of the program. Jake in turn introduces Ted to his band of whiz kids and his girlfriend Dr. Juliette Bath (Lauren Lee Bath). It seems that this Jake is the head of an exclusive group of students that meets in an old section of the hospital.
It’s there that they have all sorts of deranged extracurricular activities. They pick criminals or others that are deserving of their special treatments and murder them. The catch is that they murder them in an attempt to perform the perfect crime and it’s up to the other pathologists in their special group to figure out how they did it.
When Ted and Juliette start fooling around, the discovery of the affair causes Jake to go bonkers and start killing the rest of the group.
Pathology seems so far fetched that it strains credibility. However, I doubt that gore hounds will be looking for much credibility. The first thing that struck me odd was that Dr. Grey is supposed to be such a good student and even worked with poor children in Africa.
He seems to turn pretty cold-hearted pretty quick. I hope there were some kids left alive in Africa when he left. Perhaps it did harden his heart seeing man’s inhumanity to man, but sheesh he’s awful quick to kill and start sucking on the meth pipe.
It sure makes me wonder about doctors though. You may never want to set foot into a hospital again after watching this one.
The effects are top notch and the corpses are realistic enough that you might wonder if they used some real ones. However, once we move out of pathology school and into the underground lair of the nutjob renegade students it seems to go to outlandish horror mode.
It reminded me of what it might be like if we had an evil William Petersen stalking the denizens of Vegas and killing in creative ways to throw off the cops.
Milo Ventimiglia isn’t much of a lead and seems to be off mentally and brooding from the moment we see him. They also use some jump cuts and camera effects trying to be hip, but it doesn’t work in my opinion. The story seems a bit meth-ed up and over-the-top.
Pathology is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features include a commentary by director Marc Scholermann and screenwriters/producers Mark Neveldine And Brian Taylor.
The 15-minute “Creating the Perfect Murder” is a making of and the 8-minute “Cause of Death” is a chat with pathologist Craig Harvey. There’s also a music video, an extended version of the final autopsy scene, and trailers for other Fox flicks.
I suppose I’m doing a postmortem on the film, but it’s a bit far-fetched. Gorehounds might like the gory finale and guts galore, but don’t expect a good story to go with it. Some more subtlety might’ve been just what the doctor ordered.
Pathology is now available at Amazon and AmazonUK . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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