Scalpel please, nurse. Yes, the patient is doing fine. All her vitals are normal, her reflexes have stabilised and we’ve managed to remove that horrible beard she used to wear for a closeted Hollywood celebrity who liked playing with more than just Two Towers, if you catch my drif… Clamp please, nurse. Yes, I’m confident that Franke will come out of this operation here in her native Germany with flying colours- not like that ghastly experiment she made a few years ago, trying to give herself a Hollywood transplant. We diagnosed her with early stage Bourne Identity, you know. Nearly lost her to Americanisation, but she pulled through. Power drill please, nurse. Of course she’ll survive it, she’s done it once already, hasn’t she?! Now come on nurse, we have to stop the patient from developing a secondary case of Sequel-itis. So get all the male med students naked, make sure the blood transfusion cart is set to ‘splatter’ mode and give me those forceps so I can stuff my Hippocratic oath where the sun don’t shine, as we open up and operate on ANATOMIE 2 (Fri Nov 19, SBS2- 12:45am)
The original ANATOMIE (English title, funnily enough, ANATOMY) was a 2001 German horror/thriller that owed a lot to Wes Craven’s SCREAM, in that it dealt with a bunch of college student friends being picked off one by one by a mysterious killer who seemed to have a twisted obsession with one of the girls in particular. The main difference between ANATOMIE and SCREAM (apart the fact that the kids speak German a lot in one of them) is that ANATOMIE was set in a medical school rather than a generic college, so the killings had a twisted medical flavour to them and revolved around a secret society- The Anti-Hippocratics- rather than an individual maniac. Plus there was a surprising degree of male nudity on display- if you tuned in halfway, you would be forgiven for thinking it was an infomercial for some kind of German gay-for-pay site, or at the very least a Bratwurst restaurant.
The film starred Franke Potente (RUN LOLA RUN) as heroic medical student Paula Henning, who runs around a lot again, but this time manages to survive to the end of the film, expose the evil doings of the Anti-Hippocratics and ace her final medical exams, all in the same week. I would think she’s a shoe-in for Valedictorian.
ANATOMIE 2 is set about five years after the first film, and this time introduces us to a male protagonist (still quite rare for horror films- it’s almost always a girl threatened by the knife/drill/saw/blowtorch-wielding maniac). The cute-in-a-weird-way Barnaby Metschurat plays Joachim, a medical student whiz on a scholarship to a prestigious hospital in Berlin, who hopes to help his younger brother, crippled by Muscular Dystrophy (and also by being a whiny emo bitch, but I don’t think that’s curable).
Quicker than you can say ‘Nefarious Secret Society Up to No Good’, Joachim is approached by the surviving members of the Anti-Hippocratics, a nasty bunch of surgeons who reject the Hippocratic Oath’s primary sound-bite (‘First Do No Harm’) in order to do a heck of a lot of harm to unsuspecting, ‘undesirable’ patients, in the name of making massive medical breakthroughs without pesky stumbling block of ‘ethics’ (not to mention also without anaesthetic- but with a lot of vivisection, amputation and not-exactly-voluntary organ transplants to make up for it).
Joachim has his doubts, but quickly falls in with the maniacal medicos when they reveal that this time, rather than abducting every cute male med student in Heidelberg and making them run around totally naked for ten minutes of screen-time before introducing them to Dr. Reaper, stat, the AH’s are operating on themselves, augmenting their own bodies into superior organisms by grafting bionic parts onto themselves- bionic eyes here, bionic hands there, and a bionic penis over there (seriously, one of the male AH doctors has a pneumatic penis, which he uses to bang the living daylights out of his conquests). Every single one of these new crop of deranged doctors has been watching the Cybermen episodes of DR WHO a bit too often and is now part-human and part-machine.
Joachim is seduced (literally- cue more male nudity) into the fold with promise that the AH will give his crippled emo brother new bionic legs, which he offers to test out himself. Soon he’s got a wicked new pair of cybernetic gams and is making Usain Bolt look like one of those statues on Easter Island, but he gradually realises that the AH is up to its old tricks of murdering patients for patents again, and that they have no intention of helping his brother (probably because of the aforementioned emo whining) and so he turns against them, with the help of another AH member who is having a crisis of conscience (he’s a closeted gay surgeon with super-strong bionic hands capable of crushing concrete; never ask him for an erotic massage). The pair are also helped by one Dr. Paula Henning, (Franke Potente, returning in what amounts to an extended cameo). Of course, the Anti-Hippocratics aren’t just going to hang up their stethoscopes without one hell of a fight…
This is a pretty good sequel that doesn’t have as much gore spurting around as in the first instalment (that was a negative for me, but probably counts as a good thing for you normal people). Plus there’s dodgy doctors, sinister secrets, cybernetic closet-cases and again, a surprising amount of male nudity for a film without XXX in the title.
Take ANATOMIE 2 and call me in the morning!
Gavin Pitts
