cult film freak: MIMSY FARMER WITH BARRY PRIMUS INVESTIGATING 'AUTOPSY'

Mimsy Farmer in AUTOPSY Year: 1975 Rating: ***

Unlucky First Girl (to die)( Gaby Wagner asks Mimsy Farmer if she's American, to which Mimsy's character... a pathology doctor working in a hospital's morgue... answers that she's "half American"...

Which sums up the blonde starlet's career, starting out as guests on mainstream stateside television (from MY THREE SONS to THE FBI) to co-starring in low-budget counter-culture speeding-car flicks (THE WILD RACERS to HOT RODS TO HELL to RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP)...

Mimsy Farmer in AUTOPSY

Before becoming a quintessential European-Giallo central-character scream queen, to which AUTOPSY exists as a kind of slow-burn, parenthetical break to superior exploitation flicks like THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK and THE ROAD TO SALINA...

Basically doing 90-minutes of wide-eyed reaction shots to perpetual hallucinations of dead people rising: from the hospital basement morgue to venturing into the sparse Italian city-space beyond the usual Giallo interiors full of creative paintings and brightly-colored drapes...

Barry Primus and Mimsy Farmer in AUTOPSY

And partnered with intensely melancholy priest Barry Primus (the initial victim's brother resembling her DEVIL'S ANGELS co-star John Cassavetes), AUTOPSY is a kind of noirish mystery-thriller that attempts to piece together the genre's usual shock-for-the-sake-of-shock blood & guts...

Sometimes feeling like a deliberate homage of THE EXORCIST: if Ellen Burstyn and Jason Miller were solving a murder... involving the red-headed Wagner's violent death during (and mistaken for) a spell of enigmatic hot-summer suicides...

Mimsy Farmer in AUTOPSY

With some MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD thrown in: both involving a sexy blonde medical professional with deep dark secrets... caught within the surreal Italian-horror atmosphere of DON'T LOOK NOW...

But AUTOPSY doesn't have intriguing enough side-characters (from Mimsy's womanizing father to her wealthy playboy boyfriend) for the investigation's inevitable "this is how and why it all happened" finale to really matter... beyond providing the beautiful American-imported Euro-starlet another darkly morbid role to sink her "half-American" cinematic teeth into.