The Coroner (1999)

Many years ago I was hanging at a video store in my old home town. I knew the owner and also a lot of the nerds running around there. One of the movies that the nerds talked about was a little production called The Coroner they said it was incredible bad! I never saw it, but a couple of years ago I found Shadowbuilder (with Michael Rooker ya know) on DVD in the bargain bin at my local supermarket. It was one of those ultra-cheap discs with several movies on, and one of them was The Coroner. So today I actually decided to watch it and it more or less lived up to the legend of being bad: it's very bad. But still kinda enjoyable in a freaky way. But it's hard to write about movie that's so incompetent, so empty and so stupid. What could I do? Well, I did what every normal person would do: grabbed my copy of The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey and consulted The Nine Satanic Sins, and here's what I came up with:

The Nine Satanic Sins

1. Stupidity
- Oh, stupidity is the biggest sin in The Coroner. I love how the police department refuses to investigate a suspect just because he's THE coroner in town, even if there's tons and tons of physical evidence against him. This is just a small stupidity compared to the whole movie, but I need to choose something.

2. Pretentiousness
- The Coroner is guilty of pretentious flashback-moments, and use of even more pretentious flashforwards.

3. Solipsism
- The whole movie is based on solipsism, that the only thing that counts it's the main characters own experiences, reasons and opinions. She hits a person in court just because she think he's wrong, she also - someone tells us - once called a dog to the witness stand because the dog is a better witness than a human. She's bitch, to use a more frank word.

4. Self-deceit
- The Coroner, because of it's pretentiousness actually think it's an important piece of thriller. A good thriller, a good drama with some intelligent satire. Eh, it's not. And I guess self-deceit also includes not noticing how the concrete wall bounces around like a cheap whore when someone is banging a head in it.

5. Herd Conformity
- Yes, following the mainstream is a good thing sometimes. But not when you complete lack talent to do your own Silence of the Lambs and Seven.

6. Lack of Perspective
- Obviously a film team that forgotten than they can't make movies. They just don't have "it". Very painful, indeed.

7. Forgetfulness of Past Orthodoxies
- They made bad movies 100 years ago. Why make a bad movie again?

8. Counterproductive Pride
- Pride made the makers of this movie continue, and it destroyed them in the end. Sure, it's nice that the movie was made - not many people make a movie - but why didn't they realize no one involved had any kind of talent?

9. Lack of Aesthetics
- The Coroner is so ugly. SO UGLY. And no one involved seem to understand it. SOOOOO UGLY!

The Coroner was actually distributed by Roger Corman's New Horizons, but I doubt he ever saw the movie itself. The director, Juan A. Mas, was a long-time collaborator with Corman, mostly as second-unit. Maybe he should have stuck with filming inserts of feet getting out of cars, close-up of hands and those exciting scenes of airplanes landing and taking off that someone always need to shoot for ever darn movie.

Many words about a crappy movie. But I'm unemployed and kinda borded, so I'll blame it on that.