एनाटोमी

You know how (especially US) horror movies start off with quite the shocker? Something scary and most likely bloody? Well in this case we have the exact opposite happening ... we get a class and a lot of jokes about death and other stuff. After that character introduction we get the scary scene ... the scene that might haunt you.

With an actor by the way whom I've come to learn and love in a comedy series - movies based on books. And he plays quite the funny character in them. But here he only has a small (guest) role if you want to call it that. The main focus is on Franka Potentes character and her ... well adventures. Her story and her experience - her will to achieve something and to become somebody ... she will get sidetracked and lose focus of her studies (which says something considering she says she is here to learn and not have fun) ... but it makes sense in the overall scheme of things.

Well played by all involved and a german horror movie that actually is quite scary. It has its good and bad moments of course, but overall I'd say it is more than a decent "teen-movie" effort. It may not have aged great (especially to those understanding what is being said), but it stays a really good movie overall.

1st watched 6/24/2007 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Stefan Rujowitzky): OK thriller, but a little too predictable. This story is based in Germany, which is also where the movie is made. It is about a young medical student who gets a shot to go to a premiere school in Heidelberg and arrives seeing some strange things occurring. Someone she met on the train there and saved, shows up on the school's experimentation table and she's suspecting foul play right away. She does some investigation and the disappearance of her friend leads her to a secret society called AAA(and no it's not Alcoholics Anonymous) that has something to do with the anti-Hippocratic oath and is used to perform experimentations on live people that doctor's wouldn't normally be able to do. She finds out her grandfather(who was a dean at the school) was a big part of establishing it and it's pretty readily filled by members of the school. It's an interesting story but the problem with this movie is how quickly the audience is told what's going on and then it's kind of a horror movie with the heroine fighting off the bad boy of the group that's taking things to the next psychotic level. Although this movie was made in Europe, it plays to a young American audience with it's focus on gore, sex and the horror film premise(which is really it's big downfall) and explains why it probably made good money and spawned a sequel but doesn't necessarily make for a good movie.

ANATOMIE is a German horror thriller which main topic is an interesting issue: the ethic and the limits in medicine. The plot isn't very different from the typical horror flick but this specific thematic turns it a bit more interesting. In the film it's described a secret Masonic organization called A.A.A (Age Actabile Antihippocrate) - which I suppose to be fiction – that denies the Hippocrates's ideals of helping and healing. Medicine is a science, and it must be developed without caring about ethical thoughts they say. It's precisely this "implicit debate" what I found more attractive in this film and different from other flicks. I'm not telling it's completely original or brilliant, I just say it's a bit different, in good way... Apart from that it's a typical movie from the "psycho chasing victim type". It has nice suspense scenes, mainly in the last 15 minutes, but nothing outstanding... I score it 6/10.

"Anatomie" is an OK movie if you have nothing better to do, but it promises a lot more than it delivers. It follows Paula, a brilliant student of anatomy and granddaughter of a famous doctor, at her new, elitist school. The gloomy atmosphere at the school is well made, and the sequence that reveals early on what is really happening there is very effective and chilling.

Unfortunately, the narrative tension goes down quite soon, and the rest of the revelations, the action scenes, etc. come along in blurts. I believe even in horror stories -or maybe especially in horror stories- there must be at least some character development, so that the viewer really relates to the victims and feels the tension, but there's none of that here; and the climatic ending suffers from the poor narrative and the unidimensional nature of characters.

"Anatomie" had potential for a lot more; it was a small disappointment.

Before Franka Potente became famous with the Bourne trilogy she made this German movie. As a student in, you guessed it, anatomy she has to go to the most important school to learn that but there is a secret. Some people joined a kind of mason. She notices that something is terrible wrong in the school and she starts to investigate. Wrong. What happens next isn't really horror it's more some kind of thriller but you really have to watch it for the effects. A few years ago it was a hype to see the exhibition Kopferwelten. What you saw there is what we have here only they didn't used real bodies but it was so nicely done that it could be used in classes. It never becomes gory or even bloody, it is really the atmosphere that creates the movie. But it is one that you must have seen because, some people fears that it could happen to you....