User Reviews

Aside from Dario Argento gialli, Autopsy (or Macchie solari, which translates as Sun Spots) is my favorite giallo. It's truly weird, quirky, trashy and unlike anything I've ever seen. Some might be disappointed by the fact that it doesn't have a gloved killer or the murders aren't as spectacular as those in Argento's movies but I personally liked the fact that everything in this giallo was so uncommon. For once, the typically convoluted giallo story-line wasn't on cruise control.

What also stands out in this film is the sleaze factor and its almost machine gun delivery, which made me wonder what drug the director was on. The list of sleazy stuff is endless. There's nudity and several sex scenes. I've lost count on the number of up-skirt shots on Mimsy Farmer's dress. How many times Farmer's clothes were riped off. Farmer's boyfriend (handsome Ray Lovelock) trying to force himself on her. Her coworker trying to rape her, whom she ferociously attacks back at. Gratuitous shots of the young woman's beautiful naked body in the morgue. The hallucination in the morgue at the beginning (great!). The photos of real dead people in the museum. The slide show, which includes dubious erections. The tempestuous race-driver turned priest (the not so handsome Barry Primus) whom Mimsy falls in love with (blasphemy!). Everyone in the movie is sorta crazed and on edge. The suicides during the opening are startling in it's rapid-fire delivery. In fact, the whole film's direction teeters on delerium. It feels like the sun had affecting everyone, including the director, the screenwriter and the editor.

I love the fact that the director deliberately leaves out bits of information and as we watch the movie, we quickly assume this and that, and then the director sneaks-in the missing info, we suddenly feel a bit silly or ashame over what we thought at first. For example, when we see the man swimming in the pool. We don't know who he is. As he swims to the edge, the camera pans up on Mimsy (and that quasi up-skirt shot) which makes us think that the man was trying to take a peek or is attracted to her in a sexual way. The next scene, the man is shown to be Mimsy's father. Okay! The director continuously pulls the rug from under us, throws-off our expectations throughout the movie with EVERY little detail imaginable, which makes for a trippy experience. We're never sure who's who or what's what. The really funny part about all of this is the director deliberately mixes and remixes everything as to create confusion but when the killer's identity is revealed, it's done in the most calm, concise and matter-of-fact way. The killer is the sanest person amongst the sun-stroked bunch.

Does this quirky direction automatically make AUTOPSY a great movie? Not really but it IS unique. I've never seen a deliberatly chaotic direction like this. There were so many dull giallos made in the 1970s, all of which look too glossy and artificial, like the dreadfully kitschy CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS or boring TORSO, that AUTOPSY stands out because of its sleazy and gritty direction. It's not your typical giallo. If Joel Schumacher is to CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS, then Martin Scorcesse (of the 1970s) is to AUTOPSY: Brash, over-the-top, lurid and with a chip on its shoulder. There are several stand-out scenes in AUTOPSY, including the suicides, the hallucination scene at the morgue, and the whole moment at the museum, where there's a booby trap rigged to kill Mimsy. The dialogue is at times uproariously bad. And when you think you lost track of the story, everything eventually falls together. AUTOPSY is a whirlwind of images, sounds (great Ennio Morricone soundtrack!) and questionable stuff that makes for a memorable viewing experience. In the end, it's not really great but its unique direction sure makes up for its obvious shortcomings. If you're game, you'll enjoy it. If you're not game, well, you'll be annoyed or turned-off by it.

Since having been kindly passed the DVD of the film a few weeks ago from a friend,I have sadly been constantly pushing it to the back of my "must view" pile.Thankfully,I recently decided that I should put the film right at the top of my "to watch" pile of DVDs/Videos ,so I could at last say that I have seen it,which has led to me discovering a marvellous Giallo,which features a gripping screenplay,interestingly off-centre performances and brilliant nervous energy directing from screenwriter/director Juan Logar.

The plot:

Due to recently seeing "visions" of corpses at a local morgue "taunting" her,pathology med student Simona Sana begins to wonder if she is becoming a bit too obsessed with her study.As SImona attempts to take a step back,her city experiences sudden suicides,that men and women are doing seemingly from out of no where.Attempting to figure out a reason,it is eventually suspected that the mass suicides may be getting "set off" by "Sunspots" in an intense heatwave.

Trying to relax a bit in her flat,Sana gets a sudden knock at her door from a neighbour who she has never seen before.Passing the pleasant-sounding neighbour an envelope,Sana finds out that the new neighbour lives on the same floor of the flats as her father.Strangely,the neighbour tells Simona that she has something to tell her which she must keep quite about.Before she tells her the secret,the woman gets a phone call and runs away into the night..

The next day:

Feeling more relaxed Sana returns to the morgue and finds out that her new neighbour has been brought in,with a suspected self- inflicted gunshot wound to the head!.Whilst the police declare it to be an open and shut case,Simona's instincts starts to make her feel that something foul may have led to the girls death.Sniffing around for clues,she begins to suspect that her father may have been dating the woman.Returning to the morgue to check on the body,Simona is confronted by an extremely aggressive priest,who tells her Sana that she must follow him,so that he is able to show her some very interesting clues.

Initially not wanting to follow him,Sana changes her mind,when the priest tells her the his name is Father Paul Lenox,and that he is the dead womens sister.Feeling stressed out over the strange death,Simona's relationship with her boyfriend Edgar starts to become very strained.Things are not helped out that much,when some suspicious "sercurity" is placed at the front door of the flat to "protect her".Due to thinking that Sana's family is attempting to stop him giving her information about some strong evidence over his sister being murdered,Father Paul beats up Simona's "sercurity guard",and then makes a run for it,this then leads to both of them badly falling out.

Trying to put all the pieces together over the murder,Simona starts to feel that there may be no one at all who she can trust,which includes Edgar,who seems oddly interested in asking a lot of questions about what the now-killed woman wanted an envelope for..

View on the film:

Checking the IMDb credits for co-writer/director Armando Crispino, (who died just before he turned 74 in 2003)I was sad to see that he had only director nine films in a very short (66-75) time period.Thankfully-if Autopsy is anything to go by,it seems that the quality of Armando's directing easily makes up for the small quantity.

Whilst Umberto Lenzi's fantastic scatter-shot directing always gives the impression that this is a directer who is jumping up and down with excitement,desperate to show his next clever camera move or plot twist.Here,there is a gripping, very nervous mood to the film,which gives the film a tremendous strong feeling that Armando really does want the audience to be hooked by the film,whilst also being nervous that you might be left shocked by what pops out his jack-in-a-box.

From the early,almost Zombie-horror scene,Armando and co-writer Lucio Battistrada show the this is a Giallo that has gotten off the straight and narrow path right away,with a fantastic screenplay which cleverly uses well- placed flashbacks to give the story an interesting extra dimension,and also showing some of the lead characters to be not as "clean" as they have originally appeared.

For the second half of the film,Crispino shows a noticeable more calm,focus style with his directing,as the threads of the plot start to join up,to give the film an exciting conclusion (which disappointingly,has not much to do with the "Sunspots",that seemed to play a big part for the first half of the film)

Looking at the great cast,I have to say that the main person that really caught me by surprise was Ray Lovelock as Simona Sana's (played by a great Mimsy Farmer,who keeps Sana balanced by always showing that she is just half a step away from solving the murder)boyfriend Edgar.Having last seen Lovelock play a fresh face rebel in Lenzi's interesting Giallo Oasis Of Fear,I was completely thrilled to see Lovelock rip any chance of Edgar becoming a "loveable" rebel into shreds,with Edgar always having a chip on his shoulder,and being someone who is prepared to rip the face off of anyone who dares to criticise him,or get in his way.

Final view on the film:

A very distinctive Giallo,with a good twisting screenplay,terrific performances from the cast,and fantastic,speedy directing,which will leave you breathless.

You're a young, intelligent, and of course, pretty blond post-doc medical student. You've got more than a bit of an Electra complex, as your silver fox, over-tanned daddy has always hugged you a little too tightly most of your life. This has, unfortunately, left you quite frigid in the sex department. Alas, it's the height of summer, and the heat is unbearable. Most people have vacationed to the cooler, milder beach towns and resorts. Sunspot activity is observed to be at an all-time high. Suddenly, there's a rash of violent murders and suicides sweeping the city – all without reasons or motives. You work as a pathologist in the central morgue. Besides that, you're also trying to finish up your thesis on the differentiations of psychological effects between suicide, natural deaths, and homicide. But the bodies are beginning to pile up. You're exhausted. But you're also incredibly passionate and invested in the work itself – cutting up body after body after body, dissecting and analyzing organ after organ, all the while dripping sweat inside your surgical gown. You begin to hallucinate from the exhaustion… the dead bodies are actually alive! They rise, stare at you, taunt you, force you to watch as the have zombie-sex with one another! Some awaken to the nightmare of being undead, and just scream and scream! But you snap out of it. It's just all that Freudian sexual frustration boiling up inside of you. Right?

Such is the case with Autopsy's Simona Sana, played by one of giallo's better actresses, Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, The Black Cat). Poor Simona. When one of her father's young playthings ends up on the slab, Simona realizes that not only was she one of the last to see this young beauty alive, but that her own father might be a murderer! All the evidence leads to suicide though, right? But the girl's Catholic priest brother sets out to prove that suicide is the very last thing his sister would ever have contemplated, let alone go through with. In between the balancing act of withholding evidence to protect her father, lying to the priest to keep him off the right track, keeping her perpetually horny boyfriend at bay, and fending off one of her terrorizing ex-stepmothers, Simona's got more than her hands full. The priest (who Simona is now sexually attracted to) demands that they work together, but how can she look for the real killer, and keep her father safe at the same time? And her brain can't take much more of this either – the hallucinations keep popping up under the most startling and often horrific circumstances. Are the sunspots responsible for all of this madness? Is her father really the killer after all? Is the priest? Is she herself the killer? Could Simona be that far gone?

Few Italian Horror films split the vote the way Autopsy does. Not really a giallo, and certainly not the zombie film most trailers, posters, and video art taken from it would lead you to believe. And just who the hell is the director of this hodgepodge, Armando Crispino? In a genre of filmmaking like Italian Horror, which is extremely and perhaps overly attached to auteur theory, why the hell should someone stop and notice a film made by a relative nobody? One time assistant director to the likes of Pietro Germi, Crispino directed nine films in nine years (1966-1975), and Autopsy is one of his last. In fact, besides this film and a previous giallo from 1972, The Dead are Alive (aka The Etruscan Kills Again), most of his own work is forgettable, forgotten, and not worth finding – although his last film, Frankenstein: Italian Style, sounds like it might at least be a hoot in the camp department.

So again, why Autopsy? Yes, its story is convoluted (see above). It's got its fair share of non sequiturs, deus ex machinas, and red herrings like all the rest. Yeah, in some ways Autopsy's just another Freudian Psych. 102 class-cum-thriller, but there's something else here. Autopsy has a risky, devil-may-care, je ne sais quoi that separates it from almost all the others in its genre. Crispino took a chance with this highly unusual story, and I think it pays off in spades. The film's deliberate, unorthodox pace is stimulating, and the absence of the usual 'insert murder every X-minutes' structure just makes it that much more suspenseful. Autopsy is audacious in that it is at least trying to be different from the rest – something extraordinary and marked by brilliance, but not completely tangible or so easy to explain, or therefore, to explain away. Simona's truly bizarre sexual hang-ups, the doom-laden sunspots, the morally ambiguous priest, the creepy father-daughter subtext, and the big blown-up photographs of real corpses – it all makes for an unclassifiable film. And as we all learned in Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, people would just as soon kill you before taking time to try and understand you. Is this the case with Autopsy's mixed reputation?

Despite the always-shocking opening minutes, the delightfully uncomfortable hallucinations that pepper the film, the 'death museum' sequence (which is one of the most beautifully structured and impudently repellant set pieces in all of Italian Horror) and the obligatory yet nail-biting showdown at the end, perhaps the idea behind Autopsy is greater than the film itself. Such a statement is contrary to most Italian Horror, as many of the films attributed to this genre are supposedly lacking in the idea department, but prove their worth visually and stylistically. This is precisely why Autopsy is one of the 'must-see' films in Italian Horror, for although it stays more than true to the tenets of visual flair and graphic sex/violence, it attempts to transcend the weaknesses of its own genre. And despite, in some people's eyes, the failure of said attempt, Autopsy unarguably gets an'A' for effort.

An unrelenting severe heatwave causes a rash of shocking suicides throughout the city of Rome. Stressed-out, overworked buttoned-down forensic pathologist Simona (winningly played by the lovely Mimsy Farmer) and intense, uptight, aggressive priest Paul Lennox (a fabulously fierce and forceful performance by Barry Primus) decide to investigate one of the suicides. They put themselves in considerable jeopardy when they uncover a vicious killer. Director Armando Crispino, who also co-wrote the crafty and twist-ridden script, ably creates a morbidly upsetting atmosphere, stages the murder set pieces with commendable brio, and maintains a constant snappy pace throughout. The opening montage of random suicides is truly jarring. The movie reaches its gloriously sick and jaw-dropping zenith during the delirious sequence where Simona imagines that the corpses in the morgue are coming back to life and copulating with each other. Ray Lovelock contributes a solid supporting turn as Simona's smooth playboy race car driver lover Edgar; their major sex scene is pretty graphic and genuinely erotic. Carlo Carlini's lively, polished cinematography, Ennio Morricone's creepy, throbbing, unnerving score and the truly startling, yet exciting climax are all likewise up to par as well. A pleasingly perverse and warped giallo outing which overall rates as essential viewing for hardcore Italian horror buffs.

Autopsy is a weird and ugly mess of a film.

I know who the killer was, but I didn't know why he was doing it. It's all low quality, unengaging drivel anyway.

Armando Crispino really only did two horror films, 1972's The Dead Are Alive and this 1975 giallo, which is a shame, as this is a pretty decent entry in the genre. Known in Italy as Macchie Solari (Sunspots), it does indeed feature sunspot footage from space before we see any major murders. And if you're looking for a movie packed with autopsy footage, good news. It totally lives up to its title.

Simona Sana (Mimsy Farmer, who is also in Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet and The Perfume of the Lady in Black) is a pathology student who is trying to work on a theory about suicides, one that's disputed by a young priest, Father Paul, whose sister -- Simona's dad's latest fling -- has recently killed herself. It turns out there's been a whole series of self-killings which are being blamed on, you guessed it, sunspots.

I mean, what can you say about a movie that starts with several of said suicides, like sliced wrists, a self-induced car explosion and a man machine gunning his kids before turning the gun on himself? Obviously, this is a rather grisly affair, with real corpse photos spread -- quite literally -- throughout the film.

In between all of the gore, corpse penises, two bodies falling to their deaths and crime museums, there's also Ray Lovelock (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) as Simona's boyfriend, an out there Morricone score and a heroine who hallucinates that the dead are coming back to life.

The plot gets pretty convoluted, but if you're on this site, you obviously appreciate films like this and will get past it. This is an Italian 70's murder movie, though, so if you get easily upset about the way men behave, well, be forewarned.