Macchie Solari

MACCHIE SOLARI

AUTOPSY aka THE VICTIM

Italy 1975

D: Armando Crispino

P: Leonardo Pescardo//St & Sc: Armando Crispino, Lucio Battistrada//DP: Carlo Carlini//M: Ennio Morricone.

Cast: Mimsy Farmer, Ray Lovelock, Barry Primus, Massimo Serrato, Angela Goodwin, Gaby Wagner, Ernesto Colli.

All over Rome, people are committing suicide. Dr. Simona (Mimsy Farmer) is working on a method of study that will be able to determine whether a suicide was faked or not. When a neighbor of her's (who was also involved with her father, played by Massimo Serrato) is found dead on a local beach, a victim of suicide, Simona, along with her boyfriend Ed (Ray Lovelock), discover she was actually murdered. The victim's brother, Father Lennox (Barry Primus), is a creepy individual whom was a former race car driver. When his car spun out of control and killed a dozen people, he went temporarily crazy, only to become a priest after a  stay at an insane asylum. He becomes the main suspect as more and more people, including her father are done away with. By film's end, he will actually struggle with the real killer in an effort to save Simona from his clutches.

Farmer's performance can be likened to the sound made when dragging your fingernails across a blackboard. She's in a constant state of irritation and suffers from a bad case of frigidity (Ed refers to her as his "Little ice cube."). Ennio Morricone's score picks up on this as his constant use of a woman's voice to simulate an orgasm reinforces her state of mind. That said, when Mimsy does decide to do the nasty, she (and Crispino) cuts loose as the sex scenes are quite graphic. The gore is, as you might expect with a film centering around the exhumation of dead bodies, also no holds barred. In a perfect bit of type casting, my old favorite, Ernesto Colli (see the review of DEADLY INHERITANCE), plays Evo, the necrophiliac morgue worker to perfection. Finally, most reference books list the running time of this film as 120 minutes which I dispute. Although the version out here as AUTOPSY is cut at 83 minutes, the Euro- versions from France and Italy clock in at 100 and in my opinion are the full length ones.