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Contains strong violence, sex and gory images Heroes star Milo Ventimiglia turns villainous in Pathology, a cynically sensational medical thriller that tries to shock but ultimately bores. Set among the half-dissected cadavers in a forensic pathology lab, it has new intern Dr Grey (Ventimiglia) discovering that his fellow sawbones are using their skills to commit motiveless murders. Drunk on the power - plus copious amounts of crack cocaine and kinky sex on mortuary slabs with a fellow doc (Lauren Lee Smith) - Grey slides down a slippery moral slope into Hippocratic hypocrisy.
Ripping off Flatliners and German thriller Anatomie, Pathology wants to be dark and edgy. It gets the first half-right, gunmetal grey visuals as pallid as a three-week old corpse: it's as if all the film's hues had been sucked out by colour vampires. The visual darkness is presumably meant to represent the obnoxious characters' black hearts as they pick random people to murder and then regroup in the lab to try and guess how the deed was done. But really it's hard to care when anti-hero Ventimiglia has all the emotional range of an empty cereal packet.
"CADAVERS ARE BRUTALISED AND DESECRATED"
Bodies pile up quickly, letting German helmer Marc Schoelermann delve into chest cavities and bloody wounds with clinical realism - it's a new kind of torture porn in which most of the violence is post-mortem as cadavers are brutalised and desecrated by the heartless docs. The grossest moment comes when a scalpel slices into a corpse's intestines releasing bubbling brown liquid ("You don't wanna be cutting into the poop pipe"), yet the sadism is largely faked making this the cinematic equivalent of pulling wings off plastic flies. Worse still, no amount of designer nihilism can detract from the lifeless characterisation, anaemic plotting and a final twist that's as braindead as one of the movie's cadavers.
Pathology is out in the UK on 11 April 2008.
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