Last night’s Netflix streaming selection was a short (~30 minutes) film called Aftermath.  I deliberately selected a short movie because I wanted to try and get to sleep earlier (which did not happen, of course, thanks to Tai-Pan by James Clavell — this is probably my third or fourth reading of this book, and it still draws me in).

The Netflix streaming synopsis:

This disturbing short feature from gore specialist Nacho Cerdà is set in a morgue, where the day-to-day business of performing autopsies gives way to something far more sinister when one of the employees lingers after closing time.

Based on that writeup, I’m not sure what I was expecting — something involving living dead, probably.  How wrong I was.  Before I say more, I should say that this movie reminded me of something that happened to me in 9th grade.  I had just learned about the existence of narcolepsy.  (Really, browser?  Narcolepsy is not a word?  What medical school did you attend?!?)  I understand that it is a serious problem for many people, but at the time I found the idea of spontaneously falling asleep to be very amusing.  I got in the habit of announcing to all of my teachers that I was narcoleptic, and probably I pretended to fall asleep during class.  Anyway, after this had been going on for a week or so, my English teacher took me aside after class and said I might be interested in reading a particular short story, since it prominently featured narcolepsy.  I was intrigued, so I read the story.  I wish I could remember the name of the story or the author now — I just did some quick googling, but no dice.  Anyway, as I recall it, the story was about a married couple, and it turns out that one of them (the wife, I believe) cohabitated with their spouse for a long time after they had died.  I remember it being a decent story.  Needless to say I was amused, though.  First, of all my teachers I would expect my English teacher to know the difference between narcolepsy and necrophilia.  Second, she handled things remarkably calmly given that she believed I had been loudly declaring myself a necrophiliac for over a week.  It seems like the sort of thing that should at least raise eyebrows, even in high school, but she apparently took it in stride and (perhaps in an effort to bond?) lent me a story on the subject!  You would think based on this story that she was a good teacher, but she was actually pretty terrible.  At the time the only thing I liked about her was that she was young and had large breasts — hey, I was fifteen years old!  Apparently she was having an affair with my History teacher, and while I didn’t know that at the time, I do remember we used to joke about how often those two would hang out together after classes.  But she was one of those teachers who seemed a bit intimidated and resentful of intelligent students.  It’s amazing to me how many people like that end up teaching.

BUT I DIGRESS!

You probably have guessed by now that Aftermath involved necrophilia.  But not the usual sort of necrophilia.  Well, not what I imagine to be the usual sort of necrophilia, anyway.  I always assumed that people who engaged in such behavior would want to fuck pretty fresh corpses which were intact and that one could reasonably imagine being alive, maybe just sleeping or knocked out by roofies or what have you.  Maybe that is an incorrect assumption, because in this movie, well, I guess the corpse in question was fresh, but it didn’t otherwise qualify.  I’m not sure I see the appeal of having sex with a corpse that is halfway through an autopsy, but hey, perhaps I’m just a prude!

The movie seemed to be going for two things.  One, shock value.  Two, very graphic and realistic representations of corpses in various states of autopsy.  I gave it two stars, mainly because it didn’t really hold my attention.  It could have accomplished everything it did in more like 15 minutes, in my opinion.  There is only so long that you can only watch a guy fondle a corpse’s guts with one hand while his other hand is busy in his pants.  And you can quote me on that.