Pathology (2008)★★★★☆

Poster

This is an interesting one. It’s not for the faint of heart, though. It’s far more disturbing than it is terrifying, though. And you can’t even close your eyes to get away from it, since the group details (excruciating detail in some cases) aloud each cause of death.

But if you can stomach that kind of movie (no pun intended, I swear?), this might keep you entertained for an hour and a half. It’s a little slow to start but it picks up quickly and keeps that pace all the way to the final scene. I guess that’s unsurprising from the writer of Crank (and Crank: High Voltage!), though.

There are quite a few familiar faces in the cast, some more surprising than others. I watched this one tonight because I knew it starred Milo Ventimiglia, as opposed to last night’s movie in which he wasn’t so lucky. Michael Weston and Keir O’Donnell were great as doctors Jake Gallo and Ben Stravinsky, respectively. John de Lancie and Alyssa Milano were the most welcome and the most surprising familiar faces, though I didn’t feel either was spectacular in this.

It struck me as interesting that there’s a lot of careful detail in almost every scene of this film, and yet the name of the university hospital where they work is Metropolitan University. It’s like they wrote everything else and then said “oh crap, we need to name this! Umm I guess it’s in a metropolitan area, can we do something with that?” But maybe it’s a credit to this movie that that’s the complaint that sticks with me.

I also remember thinking that at least the music wasn’t overly dramatic during this one. Of course, it’s all this amped-up industrial sounding electronic dance music (I’m sure that’s not the technical term, but it’s not really my kind of music) and it does get me kind of amped up so maybe it’s still a bit too manipulative?

Anyway, there’s a whole lot of Milo in this film, along with a whole lot of graphic violence and irreverence for…well, pretty much everything. Watch with care, and probably not on a full stomach.