*
Milo Ventimiglia, Lauren Lee Smith, Michael Weston, Alyssa Milano. Written by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Directed by Marc Scholermann. Rated R. 93 minutes. MGM.

A depressing and tepid horror picture, Pathology stars Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia as a brilliant young medical resident at a prestigious Pathology program, indoctrinated to a sadistic inner circle of elite interns taking part in a clandestine game of playing God with the dead, and the living.

Tied to the purse strings of a beautiful, Ivy-League finance (Alyssa Milano), Ted Grey (Ventimiglia) graduates Harvard and enters residency, immediately confronted with a league of equally talented future doctors led by cocky Jake Gallo (Michael Weston) and comely Juliette Bath (Lauren Lee Smith). They spend their days in the morgue, competing to discover causes of death, performing autopsies in grim detail.

The film quickly establishes their fraternal one-upsmanship before revealing its underside—an off-hours game of mayhem, lurking the streets for victims and sneaking the corpses back to an abandoned wing of the school to perform secret autopsies. The film charts the kills and subsequent examinations as an orgy of violence, blood and hard drugs, often finding a hallucinatory tone that is intermittently effective.

Complicit in murder over worries about being accepted? Desecrating corpses for sport over issues of reputation? No one involved realizes his or her career will be over for participating? And no one has a doctor’s moral compass or compassion?
Yes, Pathology is a horror film, but these essential questions nag throughout a picture that treats murder and madness as simple hazing. I get it, all right, that these young doctors, who slice and dice corpses all day for a living, are desensitized to bodily mutilations and have developed God complexes. But are they also desensitized to murdering?

It is only a matter of time (or plot points) before the group begins infighting, winding up on the slab themselves, and pure Gwen gets inadvertently implicated (an excuse to get Milano out of her clothes) setting the stage for an effectively grisly final sequence.

Pathology’s biggest problem lies with underwritten Ted, never established as a real person and not helped by Ventimiglia’s bloodless performance. Not depicted a moral person corrupted by drugs and sadism so much as a vacuous, willing participant who too quickly caves into peer pressure, the film, like so many other horror pictures today, plunges a cardboard character into an abyss or gore. There is no suspense here, just punctures.

Pathology would like to be an examination of the dark impulses lurking within each of us, yet it jettisons this psychology in favor of increasingly silly contrivances as bodies pile up, blood flows and the young sadists are required to lose control by the final reel.

Director Marc Schoelermann pumps up the atmosphere, shooting a cold film that recalls the sterile, cool precision of David Cronenberg, and there are flashes of style in the art direction while the cinematography looks a stop or two underexposed. No doubt intentional, there’s a haunting shot of Smith lingering around a city street as Ventimiglia watches from the window in a moment more eerie than any of the film’s violence.

Cause of movie death? Shallow screenplay, empty character, unbelievable premise. Pathology is pretentious junk disguising itself as horror deep-think, existing only for the twisted pleasures of a knife slicing naked flesh, an image repeated over and over in an ugly, empty film.
Pathology is D.O.A.