Cheap Anatomy 2 (DVD) (Stefan Ruzowitzky) Price

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Customer Reviews of Anatomy 2

Awful. That's it. Like Last Year's Knee Surgery
This is supposedly the sequel to the reasonable German medical thriller "Anatomie" (2000), but apparently they didn't care the story this time, which is basically the same except for some minor points. You see again an aspiring medical student, a secret or two in a prestigious hospital, and so on and on. The director is the same person, who, it seems, is replaced by someone else somewhere behind the cutting room. And you can see Franka Potente, the original's star, for about ... er ... 8 minutes, I guess.

If you have seen the original, skip the story part, and skip the whole picture as well. There is nothing surprising about this newer film, in which, like I said, a medical student (this time, a male!) enters a medical institute, where the students and professors are engaged in some secret experiments. The film is so careless in presenting the "secrets" that you can see through everything in the opening section.

From that part, the film gets worse and worse. The film with its politically correct cast (you know, bad people are all white) is so intent on scaring or amazing us that we are allowed to see some very incredible shots, including very kinky kaleidoscopic "love scenes" and some laughably cheesy medical experiments.

The film tries to give more stress on actions, which are just risible. Imagine the cardboard characters (I mean, bad guys and good guys) running around the hospital, where patients and doctors are watching. And the good guy, being chased, didn't even think about asking for help from someone, or using cell phone to call the police! Even those TV horrors would avoid that silly situation these days.

You see the face of Franka Potente as police investigator very briefly, and that's the only place where you can remember the word, originality. Yes, she was good in the first one, and is still good even in this mess. But you have to wait for her to show up for an hour, which is way too long.

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'Less horror, more action'
ANATOMY 2 [Anatomie 2] (Germany 2003): An intern (Barnaby Metschurat) at one of Berlin's top hospitals is targeted by a charismatic doctor (Herbert Knaup) who's been conducting illegal experiments on some of his best students, involving the replacement of various muscle groups with all-powerful, synthetic substitutes. But the drugs needed to curb the various side effects are highly addictive, and lead to madness and murder...

Forged from the European success of its popular predecessor (ANATOMY [2000]), this unnecessary sequel - only tenuously linked to the previous film - is described by its makers as 'less horror, more action', and therein lies the crux of the problem. After a genuinely horrific opening sequence in which one of Knaup's former students (August Diehl) gatecrashes a swish medical gathering and leaves a trail of devastation in his wake, the movie foregoes genuine horror for a slow build-up of tension as our naive hero is first seduced by his newfound friends and then realizes their dreams of a 'master race' are no different from old-style Nazi ideology, and just as misguided and lethal. The Gothic setting of the first film is replaced here by the faceless corridors of an ultra-modern hospital, and aside from the opening scene, there are no truly memorable set-pieces to distinguish the movie from its run-of-the-mill US counterparts. Writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky and cameraman Andreas Berger conspire to make it look as slick and stylish as possible, but it simply doesn't 'click' the way it should. Marius Rohland's bombastic music score infuses proceedings with much-needed dramatic urgency, and the acting is uniformly excellent, but the film is pretty unsatisfying as a whole. Franka Potente (THE BOURNE IDENTITY) returns from the original, making a brief cameo appearance for marquee value alone.

Ruzowitzky and Metschurat provide an audio commentary on Columbia TriStar's special edition DVD, which is loaded with extras, including deleted scenes, trailers, a 'Making of', photo gallery, screen tests, and numerous other bits and pieces. Impressive stuff, but let's hope it's the end of the line for this particular movie franchise.

NB. The title 'Anatomy 2' isn't included on the print used here, and Columbia's disc provides no corresponding English subtitle when ANATOMIE 2 appears on-screen.

101m 8s
2.39:1 (Super 35) / Anamorphically enhanced
DVD soundtrack: Dolby 5.1
Theatrical soundtracks: Dolby Digital / SDDS
German with optional English subtitles
Closed captions
Region 1

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anatomy 2
The movie is in german with english subtitles. A bitter let down from the first movie. Not much gore.the storyline is kind of bland. Don't buy, if you must see rent.