One sits down to watch Anatomie 2 with similar anticipation and the hope that it is, like its predecessor, going to really push the gore and clinical obsessions into something creepily uncomfortable. The sequel certainly has a wonderful attention-grabbing opening scene where a respectable doctor is hosting a function at a conference only for his mentally ill brother to stumble in and start slicing himself apart with a scalpel in the middle of the reception floor. The main plot starts out in fairly similar directions to the first film, with Barnaby Metschurat playing a variant on Potente’s intern and uncovering the activities of the AAA. There’s a rather outrageous scene where Heike Makatsch, in a wonderfully predatory performance, throws him down on an inspection table in a scene that manages to combine both seduction and medical examination.

But despite the promise of these scenes, Anatomie 2 pans out as a heavy disappointment. The biggest letdown of the entire film is that after the abovementioned opening scene, the entire film drops into routine thriller mode. There’s nothing throughout the rest of the film that has any of the creepy gore or way-out dissection scenes that the original did. There’s the odd surgery scene and one amusing scene where the Filipino nurses operate to remove Metschurat’s implants and a steel spring jumps out into their faces, but these scenes have had the edge taken off any shock value they might have held by the fact that surgery is now shown in gut-squirming detail with almost routine regard on primetime reality tv makeover shows. Certainly there is nothing at all in the film that has any of the original Anatomie’s taboo-defying impact.

Nor does the thriller plot hold anything of the original’s wild twists and paranoid intensity. Instead of the original’s illegal autopsies, this time Ruzowitsky comes up with a plot involving illicit bodily enhancement. While this does give the film a certain topicality, and some of the issues packed around the side of the film like the problems of uninsured immigrants and the insurance industry’s increasing domination over the medical profession give the film an interesting political edge, the body enhancement plot takes the original from a creepy gore film into the arena of schlocky ‘sci-fi’. The nastiness of the scenes in the original with victims waking up on an autopsy table to find themselves partly dissected, or the killer taunting a victim who has been injected with a blood-coagulating drug as she tries to escape, have been replaced with rather absurd scenes with people using laptops to control others muscular implants and zombie-walk them towards the edge of a rooftop. Even a scene where one unstable experimenter is attacked by the thugs tamely fades out just as the victim is pinned against the wall. It is a case of a genuinely edgy taboo-defying film having been watered down to the level of an average and not even very suspenseful thriller.