This opens in a strip joint, with several bare pairs of breasts, just when you thought it might turn out to have class. The titular coroner, Leon Uraski(Dean St. Louis who gives it his all both when psychotic and when pretending to be innocent), kills young, attractive women who've tried to commit suicide. One night, he traps and tortures Emma(Jane Longenecker), the unconventional lawyer, but she may just prove to be in excess of what he can handle. Can she take him down, and how(maybe with her martial arts training, that doesn't at all look choreographed and underpracticed?)? And is she certain that he's the one, and that she isn't losing her mind? That one aspect not only shifts this the rest of the way towards being a psychological thriller than a horror(it was already far away from that, with its gore, blood and deaths few and far between, and how much we see the villain as opposed to his victims), it's the only potentially interesting element(and the decent ending does live up to that somewhat, though it could have been more ambiguous). At 70 minutes(not counting the short closing credits), it's unsettling just how much this needs to stretch its nothing of a plot to fill that time. Characters are introduced to be fodder or foils... and to add sex scenes(complete with complete female nudity), because with this little violence, that's the only common denominator left they can use to keep our attention. Did I mention our leading lady spends the majority of this in a short skirt, at times downright wearing a school girl uniform? The sad thing is that it's just not quite crap enough to be fun. Acting, writing, dialog, it's all rather inferior. The way this is shot screams direct-to-DVD, and the editing is sophomoric(you can show us those "grisly" images as many times as you want, since we have no connection to the dead bodies, it never increases the intensity). I feel the music in this would have benefited from them checking if there were disgruntled cats in the studio before recording. I recommend this solely to fans of B-movies. 1/10
Review of The Coroner
