Smilers never lose and frowners never win.

After doing this for eleven years, I'm still learning a lot about film, life and myself.  It's really surprising that it took me this long to remember not to eat while screening these movies.  Last night, this was engrained in me forever after watching The Autopsy of Jane Doe.  The opening scene we get shots of pretty grizzly corpses that made me put away my pizza for a little bit.  It reminded me of that time when I was eating a delicious turkey sandwich and then I saw the opening scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I haven't had a Ralph's sandwich since. In any event, this movie was suggested to me by a Buffalo and it's probably one of the best  horror/thrillers I've screened.

I would call this movie "Hitchcockian" in its masterful control of suspense.  We start out with so many questions, trying to piece together a gruesome crime scene, imagining the scariest and worst scenarios.  Once you have a theory, you get thrown off by a cut off tongue, a fly crawling out of an orifice and a wrapped tooth somehow stuffed inside a cadaver.  Then the radio starts getting processed and things start getting stranger.  Old Jim Hopper is a medical examiner who gets help from his son Huey Campbell.  A thunderstorm ensues outside and then it becomes like a reverse Frankenstein scenario where they try to figure out the workings of a cadaver that used to be alive. Suddenly, the lights go out and the freezers that contained corpses earlier are now open and empty.  At this point, not only are you trying to make sense of what's going on. but you're expecting some scary things to happen and out of nowhere you get a scare. This is brilliantly executed with the use of both foreshadowing and actual shadows.  Also, blood and zombies.  In the end, we do get some explanation of the events going on.

I would recommend this movie to anyone looking for a good scary thriller or anyone that works in a morgue just to see if they feel it makes their job different.  This is why I will not spoil the rest of the movie or the ending which I can safely say, not many will predict.  Unless you're a dork and are then going to tell me " what are you even talking about, that was so predictable, they did this in a giallo film in 1977."  If you're going to do that, go kick rocks and whine about it in your little horror blog...wait.  Anyway, an interesting note, at the end of this film, the sheriff doesn't want to deal with the case and passes it to a different county, so Ward Lamon (or Lamont) can deal with it.  In my head I thought, "he's probably just going to have the Black county deal with it, that's messed up" and then the car taking the stuff away is being driven by a Black officer, the only Black person in the entire film.  So sad and realistic.