Lethal Medicine

There's a house that I pass everyday on my way to picking up my kid from school that sports a grotesque 15-foot billboard on its front lawn festooned with enormous color photographs of purportedly slaughtered, late-term human fetuses. Now, it's a curious thing: even if I were a passionate anti-abortion advocate, I think these in-your-face, shock tactics would tick me off. There's something enormously offensive about such assaults (regardless of who's doing the assaulting) in their fanatic appeals to pre-rational response. Lethal Medicine falls squarely into this camp of gut-wrenching propaganda. Produced by an anti-vivisectionist group calling itself the Nature of Wellness (check out their web site at www.animalresearch.org), the video attempts to make the case that animal experimentation, in addition to being unspeakably cruel, is almost totally ineffective as science. The contention is that animal physiology and genetics are so fundamentally different from that of humans, that biomedical or toxicological experimentation is basically worthless when it comes to extrapolating results from one species to the next. The darker accusation which underlies these arguments is that pharmaceutical and health care industries and other big business entities continue these useless practices to cover their legal behinds, and serve as a smoke screen for continued despoliation of the body and the environment. Using a deceptively bland-voiced narrator, Lethal Medicine attempts to make its points using a scattering of unimpressively-credentialed anti-vivisectionist "authorities," and, more grimly, horrific footage of experiments themselves. I found much of this stuff completely unwatchable. Oddly, although these scenes of laboratory carnage seem to go on forever, the narrative is generally rushed, as if slowing the pace would give us too much time to ponder the unsubstantiated nature of the arguments being made. In videos, as in other media, there's a significant difference between a passionately expressed viewpoint and an unremittingly strident harangue. This is clearly the latter. Not recommended. Aud: C, P. (G. Handman)