This is the type of film that should come with a surgeon general's warning on the cover of the movie box indicating that watching the film inside could be hazardous to your health! With a few exceptions, I have never, ever sat through anything so turgid and stupid in my life. Sure, there's the horrible horror movies such as `Bloody Murder,' `Nail Gun Massacre,' and `The Last Slumber Party,' but even they are somewhat consistent with their plot. `The Coroner' doesn't follow its base plan at all. But let me try to get to that in the next paragraph. First let me say that there are some SPOILERS in the rest of this review, and you should not read on if you don't want some minor details ruined for you if you see this movie.
The movie opens in a strip club. Naturally, you'd expect a strip club to be filled with doctors with scalpels to supply people with unnatural body parts, but you wouldn't suspect a coroner to be there, would you? I didn't, and skipped this part, thinking it was a preview from another movie. When I realized it was the beginning, I knew I was in for a bad ride. Our title character is of course a serial killer, which we find out in the next scene with a close-up of a newspaper. You see, they didn't really show the `murder' in the previous scene probably because they had no budget. We then shift gears to our central character, played by Jane Longnecker. .and don't expect that name to be reaching the big screen any time soon. She's a criminal defense attorney that looks as if she just graduated from junior high school. See, she defends criminal scum, and it is supposed to be totally ironic when out serial killer targets her. Using a blow dart, the killer kidnaps her and straps her in his basement where he plans to torture and then kill her. For all you strange people that eat up that stuff, they don't do any of that. For the next, oh, ten minutes, our heroine escapes from the killer, is captured, escapes, is captured, and then finally escapes for good. We could have ended the movie sooner had the police (acting way out of procedure) believed her story, but they don't because the suspect is the kindly coroner. So the lawyer decides to kidnap him and give him the same treatment. Problem is, she keeps screwing it up, forcing us to sit through more of the film than we should. In the meantime, the coroner picks up a woman he sees strip and seduce her very young boss. This scene is pointless, as we don't see what happens to this woman and she is never mentioned later. Of course, all the characters are pointless: there's the heroine's boyfriend who is an idiot that could have been left out, the mindless cops, a secretary to the heroine that serves no function, and a prosecutor that doesn't know whose side to take. Even our villain is wasted, as he doesn't do anything special, and his title profession is never even touched upon. He never uses a coroner's tools, works in the lab, or dresses up like he does on the box (and the guy on the box is definitely not the guy in the movie).
Now before you start pumping out creative juices and wonder about all the crafty things the filmmakers did, let me tell you to stop. Don't bother thinking about how a coroner would kill someone because you won't see him kill a soul. Don't think about the creative way in which he might get killed by the lawyer because there is nothing creative about the end. Don't, like I did, think that the director will throw in a creative twist to explain the lack of evidence the lawyer has on the coroner, like my theory that there was a twin brother, because there is no clever twist. And don't think that you will have a good time, because you most certainly will not. Thankfully, the film is only about 75 minutes long, and you will also be skipping a lot of bad and pointless scenes in order to find something relevant and good. You'll be wasting your time, because there are no relevant or good scenes. Instead, I recommend you practice being a real coroner. Dissect the video tape, remove the contents, throw the garbage away, and prepare what's left for permanent burial. Zantara's score: 1 out of 10, because there is nothing lower to rate it.
The movie opens in a strip club. Naturally, you'd expect a strip club to be filled with doctors with scalpels to supply people with unnatural body parts, but you wouldn't suspect a coroner to be there, would you? I didn't, and skipped this part, thinking it was a preview from another movie. When I realized it was the beginning, I knew I was in for a bad ride. Our title character is of course a serial killer, which we find out in the next scene with a close-up of a newspaper. You see, they didn't really show the `murder' in the previous scene probably because they had no budget. We then shift gears to our central character, played by Jane Longnecker. .and don't expect that name to be reaching the big screen any time soon. She's a criminal defense attorney that looks as if she just graduated from junior high school. See, she defends criminal scum, and it is supposed to be totally ironic when out serial killer targets her. Using a blow dart, the killer kidnaps her and straps her in his basement where he plans to torture and then kill her. For all you strange people that eat up that stuff, they don't do any of that. For the next, oh, ten minutes, our heroine escapes from the killer, is captured, escapes, is captured, and then finally escapes for good. We could have ended the movie sooner had the police (acting way out of procedure) believed her story, but they don't because the suspect is the kindly coroner. So the lawyer decides to kidnap him and give him the same treatment. Problem is, she keeps screwing it up, forcing us to sit through more of the film than we should. In the meantime, the coroner picks up a woman he sees strip and seduce her very young boss. This scene is pointless, as we don't see what happens to this woman and she is never mentioned later. Of course, all the characters are pointless: there's the heroine's boyfriend who is an idiot that could have been left out, the mindless cops, a secretary to the heroine that serves no function, and a prosecutor that doesn't know whose side to take. Even our villain is wasted, as he doesn't do anything special, and his title profession is never even touched upon. He never uses a coroner's tools, works in the lab, or dresses up like he does on the box (and the guy on the box is definitely not the guy in the movie).
Now before you start pumping out creative juices and wonder about all the crafty things the filmmakers did, let me tell you to stop. Don't bother thinking about how a coroner would kill someone because you won't see him kill a soul. Don't think about the creative way in which he might get killed by the lawyer because there is nothing creative about the end. Don't, like I did, think that the director will throw in a creative twist to explain the lack of evidence the lawyer has on the coroner, like my theory that there was a twin brother, because there is no clever twist. And don't think that you will have a good time, because you most certainly will not. Thankfully, the film is only about 75 minutes long, and you will also be skipping a lot of bad and pointless scenes in order to find something relevant and good. You'll be wasting your time, because there are no relevant or good scenes. Instead, I recommend you practice being a real coroner. Dissect the video tape, remove the contents, throw the garbage away, and prepare what's left for permanent burial. Zantara's score: 1 out of 10, because there is nothing lower to rate it.