B-Movies: Anatomy

B-Movies & Couch Classics
Reviews of Movies Often Overlooked or Forgotten

Anatomy
2000, Columbia/Tri-Star
Home Video

by Arik Ben Treston

It’s only a matter of time until an American studio remakes the German thriller Anatomy. While packaged as a horror film, this is a thriller that walks the fine line of being similar to a teen slasher film while retaining enough originality to sidestep being just an I Know What You Did rip-off. Run Lola Run’s Franka Potente is Paula Henning, a medical student who has won a place at the prestigious Heidelberg medical school. This opportunity for a brilliant career is put in jeopardy when Paula begins to discover certain things about this institution that would make the Alumni Association blush with shame and endanger her Dean’s List chances … and her life.

Paula begins to suspect trouble a-brewin’ when a fellow traveler on her train ride to Heidelberg ends up dead and on the medical slab in front of her. Things don’t seem too kosher and in the process of snooping (“Nancy Drew Goes to College?”), she finds a secret society operating (pun intended) within the school. This mysterious group belongs to an anti-Hippocratic oath society that perform experiments on people (while they are still living, no less). That’s as much as I can tell you without giving the whole film away.

There isn’t a whole lot that makes this film stand out from similar fare from this side of the ocean, though the characters are fleshed out more and there is further dramatic thought put into the events occurring than in its American counterparts. But it is enough to elevate it to an entertaining scare.

It was inevitable that Potente, with her doe-like soulful face and earnest demeanor would be co-opted by an American film and low and behold, she is going to co-star in not one but two major Hollywood productions: Blow, with Johnny Depp and The Bourne Identity with Matt Damon. She is a skilled young lady who has a very strong presence on screen and is bound to become a forceful figure in Hollywood.

Anatomy is not as memorable as Mute Witness or as scary as Nightwatch, two films in its genre, but it holds its own. It isn’t often that a ‘slasher’ film tries to throw in social commentaries, raising questions about ethics in medicine and life in general in the bargain. This movie manages all of that and, in the process, frightens us as it does so. Not a bad package.