Few horror movie settings have been more underused or made poor use of as medical school/ dissections/ autopsies. The best one is perhaps Anatomie (Anatomy) from Germany. So Unrest is a welcome entry. A lot has been made about the possible use of real cadavers for this film and after seeing it, I'm not sure that is the case. Now the original ad posters make no mention of that, if you go the films web site. It's only with Horrofest that you see posters that make that claim. I sure hope they didn't use any. Cadavers shouldn't be used=abused for entertainment. The filmmakers even have the anatomy professor talk about this. It's their burden to create with special effects the most realistic looking bodies. With movies like this it's always interesting to see how real-looking things are. Things don't start good in that regard. The first scene of the main corpse arriving makes the typical error of showing a corpse, most likely some poor crew dude in a body bag, that bends when being picked up. Later they correct things by having a body that is indeed rigid when being moved. While I haven't attended medical school in the US, some things are questionable even for US medical schools, like attending anatomy lab before the lecture class has even begun. The students start dissecting the body with the thorax first. This is important for the movie but doesn't happen in reality- anatomy starts with the limbs first. There's a scene where the first incision is made in the skin where they show what must be 3/4 of an inch of skin. At the midline of the thorax and over the sternum, the skin isn't that thick. The bodies are kept under a sheet, which would be very unhygienic. Perhaps the most bizarre thing is that in the lab there's some almost ceiling-high tank with, what I imagine is supposed to be formaldehyde, where bodies are kept for some reason and that are removed with some hook. Yes, our main character jump several times into the tank! Good as a "Oh-disgusting" factor but too absurd. The story itself is OK, but it could be better. The whole thing is about a corpse from Brazil shipped to a hospital to be used for an anatomy class. An atheist female student played by some Britney Sperms look-alike turns out to be able to feel and know things beyond the senses and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about the body she's working on. Unfortunately, even though this is a lower budged movie not done by a main studio, the filmmakers felt the need to conform to current standards of movie making instead of being free to do what they want. As a result we have the typical strong teenage female lead, who is just 5'4 by the way, yet acts like Rambo and single-handedly drags bodies living and dead out of the aforementioned tank; and the weak males who are just there to support her. Also typical for Americans, the filmmakers did a lousy job researching some of the themes used in the movie. For some reason to explain the whole ghost aspect, they introduced an Aztec fertility goddess to sort of connect the thing with the corpse from Brazil. However, the Aztecs where never in Brazil but in Mexico. And yes, Brazil isn't Mexico, it's nowhere near Mexico, it has nothing to do with Mexico. Of course for Americans, the world has only two kinds of people: Americans and Not-Americans, who can be Asian or Latin. Unfortunately this sort of ignorance is offensive to all non-Americans and Mexicans and Brazilians will have a good laugh at the expense of the dumb and lazy writers. Had they done their work they'd discovered that voodoo is popular in Brazil and that would probably have worked better than the Aztec goddess thing. The movie does a good job though at portraying relationships between the characters, there's some cute and tender moments between the lead and her weak male accessory. Even though these are medical students they seem to have an awful lot of time to play cops instead of studying. The movie has a good look to it that matches the whole dead bodies theme.
