Alyssa Milano Best Thing in Dreary 'Pathology'
Director Marc Schoelermann's Medical Thriller Has Gore But No Sense
Aug 7, 2008
Milo Ventimiglia plays Dr. Grey, a privileged, straight-arrow Harvard med grad who finds himself thrown in with a tight-knit group of fellow pathology residents in the Los Angeles county morgue. Soon after being introduced to their scene of heavy drinking, meth smoking, and kinky sex (what's not to like?), the hotshot is intiated into the group's outre hobby: a game by which one of them commits the perfect murder and the rest have to determine the method.
Diabolic Premise Gets Lost
It's a shame 'Pathology' doesn't exploit its premise enough; it just exploits excess. The film does sport a gloomy atmosphere and appropriately muddy cinematography, but the film just grows unpleasant. Somewhere in the execution, director Marc Schoelermann and the screenwriters make no sense of the story and throw their hands up, reveling in gratuitous cadaver gore and fetishistic sex. In more than one scene, 'Pathology' seems to be topping 'Saw IV's icky autopsy sequence. With this being a thriller, you don't have a single person to root for: they're all stamped with a pretentious God complex and they never shut up. That even goes for protagonist Dr. Grey who goes from cocky know-it-all one minute to a murderous, drug-using nympho the next, all because of peer pressure! Talk about overnight transformation.
Med Thriller Gets The Knife
Fortunately, Alyssa Milano exists in the picture--and boy, what a gorgeous specimen Ms. Milano is. She's handed the only pure role as Dr. Grey's fiancee, but with only about fifiteen minutes of screen time, it seems like a waste. Sorry dudes, she keeps her clothes on in one of the film's sex scenes. Leading man Milo Ventimiglia gives a boring performance as Dr. Grey; he shows as much of a pulse as a block of limber. The rest of the actors try their best, especially a creepy Adam Weston and a seductively dangerous Lauren Lee Smith. But since we're not able to identify with any of the characters, the adequate performances are all for naught.
If the opening segment of the "orgasm/diner scene" from 'When Harry Met Sally...' performed with corpses isn't depraved enough, you have pathologists having sadomasochistic sex with needles in their skin, adjacent to a dead body on a medical table. This is a world no one will want to enter, evoking vaguely familiar memories of 'Crash' (1997), which depicted people's erotic fetishes for automobile accidents. Yuck.
94 min., rated R.
1 and a half stars out of 4.
