El forense

I must say that I am a little biased on this review as I heard about the production of this film from Dean St.Louis (Dr.Leon Urasky)three years ago and have wanted to see it ever since. Dean and I went to High School together and when I came back from Japan he related the story of the film but he said he lost his only copy and that it was 'in the can' never to be seen due to production issues at the studio (whole different story). So my other High School buddy Mike a mutual friend calls me last night and says I have to come to his house to watch his new DVD and that Dean was coming as well so we settled down in the basking glow of Mike's 52" TV and the movie The Coroner started and Dean almost vomited and I broke a rib laughing, finally I got to see the movie. The very first scene in the strip club was not Dean and I say he missed the best part of the shoot. This film is terrible but it was fun to hear Dean's commentary too bad it's not on the DVD so cut him some slack he got no direction what so ever and he's a theater actor and this was his first movie, how many of you have their name on a DVD as a lead actor? He doesn't get any royalties from this thing, too bad for him. So just rent it and if your local video store doesn't have it tell them to get it, it's just fun to watch.

A bad movie. The coroner thinks he's "World's Greatest Chef", then a god then he thinks he's "SuperDad". This guy has some funny aprons. Besides the aprons that are being worn by a naked overweight gentleman who is not the least bit attractive, this movie is not very amusing. The lawyer woman looks more like a kindergarten teacher or maybe a babysitter and she has a really awful sex scene where she flings her hair around and arches her back and it makes her looks really stupid. Who acts like that when they have sex? I just don't understand the whole head-flinging thing. anyway, the coroner goes after women who have tried to slit their wrists in the past. He thinks they were "Teasing" him by acting like they were gonna die when they actually survived. So he kills them so he doesn't have to go through the agony of waiting for them to die naturally. It's an ok idea, but it's not played out very well. I really hate lawyer movies.

Absurdity at it's finest form - where else could you see a bald-headed middle-aged horizontally challenged man debuting in a lead role and even get to see his naked butt? Fans of B-movies and people who receive pleasure in pain: pay heed to this movie or regret the rest of your life.

Personally I have a tad of twisted tendencies towards the latter one of the aforementioned - mental sadomasochism - and probably not very surprisingly does my DVD shelf consist of not only bad movies but also movies that are hauntingly awful in the vain of The Coroner. Yes, there is a thin line between a bad movie and a movie that is bad in a good manner. No, The Coroner isn't a good-bad, it's plain bad, and no, I haven't been on drugs while handing over my credit card to the video store clerk when buying this film - consider this flaw of mine as an extremely entertaining fixation.

Like said, one should never underestimate the mindlessness of nonexistent requirements for a film to be released and actually distributed throughout the world. I think a plot around a chief coroner illusioning himself as the right hand of God mutilating women who have attempted suicide yet survived, cynical policemen who almost laugh at crime victims' face and a couple of lawyers trying to track down a mass murderer makes out a very decent mixture that is - quite unfortunately - mostly digestible only to a very small audience.

Nevertheless, I can't imagine anyone not liking this movie. People who don't worship bad movies just simply leave this kind of flicks in the cut-out bin for a loving family to pick them up, simple as that. Surely no sane person could possibly think that The Coroner would actually possess any potential for a horror/thriller movie to be taken seriously, for even the cover is so grotesque that it would freak the living crap out of no less than the Beast of Yucca Flats himself.

I really wonder how they managed to get this one on DVD with all the random gratuitous breast shots in the opening scene, intro credits with a musical piece that would make Danny Elfman turn in his, well, armchair etc., but I'm glad they did, because the infamous blowdart scene is truly one of the most confusing moments I've ever seen on screen and the VCR couldn't auto-repeat these disturbingly amusing seconds. I was with my buddies when I first saw this film and I imagine we all stared like retards jaws open wide with a wonderful "What in the world?" look on our faces, and having read another review of the movie afterwards I think that's exactly what will happen to anyone who dares to see The Coroner without proper preparation (though in that case the glamour would have been already taken away from you and the whole film would seem like a mindless and dull low budget production).

Enough of the blabbering, go see it yourself if you're stupid (or drunk) enough. All in all rather entertaining experience, but not to be viewed alone: make sure you can share the tears of laughter caused by the unintended comicality.

If you enjoy:

Aprons Blowdart Stapler torture A severed finger (or is it just momentarily gone?) No plot whatsoever (with crappy sex scenes included) A very "funny" un-villain looking villain

Then perhaps this sleazy gore-less "film" is something you'd like. I didn't. And I never will.

1 out of 10!

This opens in a strip joint, with several bare pairs of breasts, just when you thought it might turn out to have class. The titular coroner, Leon Uraski(Dean St. Louis who gives it his all both when psychotic and when pretending to be innocent), kills young, attractive women who've tried to commit suicide. One night, he traps and tortures Emma(Jane Longenecker), the unconventional lawyer, but she may just prove to be in excess of what he can handle. Can she take him down, and how(maybe with her martial arts training, that doesn't at all look choreographed and underpracticed?)? And is she certain that he's the one, and that she isn't losing her mind? That one aspect not only shifts this the rest of the way towards being a psychological thriller than a horror(it was already far away from that, with its gore, blood and deaths few and far between, and how much we see the villain as opposed to his victims), it's the only potentially interesting element(and the decent ending does live up to that somewhat, though it could have been more ambiguous). At 70 minutes(not counting the short closing credits), it's unsettling just how much this needs to stretch its nothing of a plot to fill that time. Characters are introduced to be fodder or foils... and to add sex scenes(complete with complete female nudity), because with this little violence, that's the only common denominator left they can use to keep our attention. Did I mention our leading lady spends the majority of this in a short skirt, at times downright wearing a school girl uniform? The sad thing is that it's just not quite crap enough to be fun. Acting, writing, dialog, it's all rather inferior. The way this is shot screams direct-to-DVD, and the editing is sophomoric(you can show us those "grisly" images as many times as you want, since we have no connection to the dead bodies, it never increases the intensity). I feel the music in this would have benefited from them checking if there were disgruntled cats in the studio before recording. I recommend this solely to fans of B-movies. 1/10