::A Geek in Korea::

….before tonight. (WARNING. EXTREME CONTENT.)

Pathology is one of the most horrendous movies I’ve ever watched. I’ve got a tolerance for bad movies. I sat through D-War and barely flinched. I buy Rifftrax and sit through bad movies to laugh at them. Pathology was so bad I walked out, and I pulled both my wife and brother-in-law out with me. It’s the first time any of us had ever walked out of a movie, and I spent the entire car ride home apologizing for the terrible, terrible film I took them to. If I subject myself to a film that is bad, no big deal, but forcing others to watch something that bad I feel is a social crime most hard to forgive.

I picked the movie based on it’s RottenTomato score (which has now tanked). There has been relatively few movies with positive scores coming to Korea recently. We haven’t seen a movie in a while, so when I got off work early, I suggested we all go out to see a the highest scoring film. When I had last checked, it was in the “positive”, with a few critics saying “edgy” and “dark.” I like my occasional edgy dark film, though I’ve mellowed out from my Clockwork Orange watching days in college.

Clockwork Orange is a movie about horrible people doing terrible, terrible things. It’s also watchable, because the main character is forced to change his ways. You may hate him, but at the same time you care about what happens to him because he pays for his actions and his punishment is a critique of society. Did society hurt him? Was his price to society too high? He suffers for what he did, and while he isn’t redeemed, there is something behind the world hating nihilism.

Pathology starts with a group of forensic medical students recreating the sex scene from “When Harry Met Sally” with cadavers. No joke. It was as distasteful and completely over the top as it sounds. I held out hope that all the people involved would get caught by an astute criminologist, and the day would be saved.

We are then introduced to “Dr.Grey”. Instead of being a plucky do good, he is in fact an egotistical ass who wants to prove how smart he is to everyone. He quickly falls in with the wrong crowd. This group of fellow students happen to be of the sadomasochistic, bitterly nihilistic, crack smoking, mass murderering variety. They are generally known as “bad apples” to guidance counselors.

After a night on the town with their “leader”, Dr. Grey ends up at a man’s house who is pimping out his grandmother. Dr. Grey runs away, while the ring leader killer does his thing. When the pimp ends up on the morgue table in front of the class, Dr. Grey offers up a few suggestions as to how he was killed. This impresses the leader that knows he got to solution absolutely correct, because he was the one to have done it.

The group’s “game” is to see if they could kill someone and slip the murder past their fellow students without anyone knowing. The bring their kills to an abandoned wing of the hospital and try to stump each other through their dissections. This premise, while dark, is somewhat interesting. However, there is so much shocking shit going on, I couldn’t get into it.

While the film had been treading water, if there had been a cat-and-mouse sort of game, where the Dr. Grey character had refused to join in, but had tried to figure out, or stop what was going on, I could have walked away at the end of the movie.

Instead of trudging a line of questionable morality, Dr. Grey immediately jumps at the chance to start killing in subtle ways to impress one of the bi-sexual murderesses in the group. He didn’t even need very much prodding. It was like he was WAITING for an opportunity to show off all the dark evil stuff he knew, and this group was the excuse. He had a bag full of killer chemicals to use on his first victim, and when the girl asks him to help him with a kill, he is anxious to kill again. She uses him, they have sex on the floor in front of a corpses in the throws of murdering glee. Frequently the people in the group smoke crack and have orgies on the floor in the dissection room while cracking open chest cavities.

Yeah. Shock value.

There was no “shades of grey” that the main character’s name implied. Everyone is immediately as evil as possible ALL the time. It’s impossible to imagine any of the characters as surviving in their day to day lives. There is a scene where, while cracking open someone’s skull, the leader of the group pines that the world needs more corpses, because there isn’t anyone worth caring about.

The cynical detachement the characters displayed was so over the top and offensive it was amazing I sat through 10 minutes of the film. I hated EVERY single character instantly.

No one in the film, save Alyssa Milano who bookends the film, had any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Half of her lines are ill timed uses of the phrase “I love you,” that are probably supposed to be ironic, because she “feels” something. Haha, look at someone that believes in redemption. The movie seemed to be saying, “We’re all going to die, so let’s kill everyone because we can get away with it. Isn’t that AWESOME?”

All the other main characters were irredeemable murdering assholes. After the second crazy, disgusting sadomasochistic sex scene, the couple in front of us walked out. I think it was when Dr. Grey started using a scalpel to cut bisexual murderess’ tongue before they made out. I turned away during one of these scenes after the sex-violence levels got so out of control that even I couldn’t take it anymore.

I sat through Clockwork Orange because, while it made me uncomfortable, there is ultimately a point. This movie was so nihilistic and people hating, it wasn’t even fit to be watched. NOTHING the characters in the film could have done could have justified their actions. Nothing they could have said or done would have made them redeemed. The film hates the characters as much as it hates the viewers.

It does everything to get a reaction out of people, and for me, I’m not so numb. I was disgusted and repulsed. Is that supposed to make the film “edgy” and “dark”? Make something so disgusting people feel bad about watching a single second of it?

I can handle a movie that doesn’t end in rainbows and a song at the end, but Pathology was fucking terrible because it was ultimately pointless. Am I supposed to forgive the sins of the characters because they were murdering only “bad” people? EVERY character on the screen was TERRIBLE.

I had been contemplating how much longer I was going to stay as the film kept getting worse and worse. We lasted one more scene, where the head evil character had butchered several hookers before we left. Hating bad people, sure, but killing working girls is like one of the classic horror movie cliches I can’t stand. It was the last excuse I needed.

It crossed SO many lines, but for some reason I couldn’t watch any more. Shock, shock, more shock, then I was finished. I was only 10 minutes away from the conclusion of the film when we left, but there was NO possible way it would have ended well. There would be no “twist” at the end. No point.

This movie disturbed me deeply, and I’m sorry I exposed anyone to it. If you have any sense of taste, do not see this film. Consider this a warning. If you enjoyed this film, wow, seek help.