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Clinic is a 1993 Russian animated short by Alexander Bubnov. It concerns a series of horrifying nightmares had by an old man during an overnight stay in a hospital, where he's menaced by a variety of demented doctors, nasty nurses, and sinister surgeons.


Tropes:

  • Asshole Victim: A strange one where we learn how unpleasant a person is after we see them suffer. It turns out the old man is a callous jerk who cuts another patients life support after having his nightmares.
  • Black Comedy: There's a few gags to be found, though very grim ones (like the hapless other patients briefly seen in the first nightmare, including one that's a bloodied upper torso of a man crawling across the floor).
  • Catapult Nightmare: The old man wakes up screaming several times throughout the short.
  • The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: The last nightmare features a psychiatric doctor who's clearly off his rocker himself, wearing an untied straitjacket and wielding a cut-throat razor.
  • Couldn't Find a Pen: In the last nightmare, the old man is forced to draw a protective circle in his own blood to save himself from a pack of demonic doctors.
  • Creepy Physical: The exam in the old man's second nightmare includes having his mouth forced open with a tongue depressor, his pants pulled down, getting an enema, getting stabbed in the ass with a needle, and being strangled by a sphygmomanometer.
  • Deranged Animation: Oh yes
  • Dripping Disturbance: The old man's time in the waking world is punctuated by an odd dripping sound. At the end, the drip turns out to be coming from his room-mate's IV bag. Even though his room mate is on life support, the old man callously turns off the IV so he can get some sleep.
  • Eye Scream:
    • The old man's second nightmare ends with his eyes falling out. In the third nightmare, the hospital's eye doctor keeps a jar of eyes, and pins them to the old man's face.
    • One of the doctors in the last nightmare is an oculist who has an enormous eye sticking up from where his neck would be. He proceeds to get glass in it, and it turns purple like it's bleeding internally.
  • Faceless Eye: The third nightmare has an enormous monster that's just a disembodied eye floating above the hospital. It's implied the eyes the doctor keeps in his office are the monster's offspring.
  • Hope Spot: In the final nightmare, the patient is seemingly safe behind his protective circle. Then one of the nurses calls in the radiologist, a terrifying robot whose X-ray gaze breaks through the spell and allows the other demon doctors to attack.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: The opening nightmare has a group of surgeons acting like they're sitting down to a dinner, implying they're planning to eat the unfortunate old man who is their patient.
  • Medical Horror: The short consists of a long string of hospital-themed nightmares being had by an elderly patient.
  • Mood Whiplash: The final nightmare begins with the apparently-dead old man in a casket, covered in lit candles, with hospital staff solemnly gathered around him. Then they burst out cheerfully singing "Happy Birthday to You!" to the head doctor, who blows out the candles. Then the old man wakes up with a fright to find himself alone in a cathedral-like space.
  • No Ending: The movie ends with the old man waking up from his final nightmare and killing his roommate by cutting off his loud life support before falling back asleep likely to have more nightmares.
  • Nuns Are Spooky: One of the demon nurses in the last nightmare is wearing what looks like a nun's habit.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: The last nightmare features a sinister, fanged nurse who's drinking from some of the samples from the blood lab.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Too Many Mouths: The Dentist monster in the final nightmare not only has a gruesome Lamprey Mouth, but little mouths where its eyes and ears should be.

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