Medical student Paula Henning wins a place in a summer course at the University of Heidelberg, where her grandfather had been a noted professor. During one of her classes on anatomy, the body of David, a young man whom Paula encountered on her train to Heidelberg, turns up on her dissection table. Paula's instructor, Professor Grombek, humiliates her by daring her to dissect the heart. Paula finds that David's body presents strange cuts, and decides to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. When she goes to cut a sample for an independent test, she is amazed to find a triple "A" mark near David's ankle. She is then startled by the school's mortuary attendant, who wants to know if Professor Grombek is aware of her acts. Paula finds clues pointing to an ancient secret society, the Anti-Hippocratic Society, which performs gruesome experiments on living people deemed undesirable. Paula also comes across research about the rituals that they perform on transgressors of their rules, or those who inquire too much. One night, Paula sits on her bed and realizes it has been soaked in blood, with candles left under it, as a sign of warning from the Society. She then attacks a figure that enters her room, who turns out to be her friend Hein, who wants someone to talk to over his recent breakup from his girlfriend Gretchen. Casper, Paula's romantic interest, also enters the room and becomes furious that she is not alone. Hein leaves, apparently more at peace. As Gretchen and her new boyfriend prepare to have sex in one of the morgue halls, Hein murders the other man in a jealous rage. He then injects Gretchen with poison, telling her that he will preserve her body. Hein hides it in the morgue and removes the head to prevent identification. He is so absorbed in the labor that he falls asleep without having dispatched the other body. When Paula tries to share her findings about the Society with Hein the next day, he menacingly tells her it's dangerous to know too much. Grombek reveals that her grandfather was a member, and that the drug he became famous for developing was the result of his experiments in Nazi concentration camps. She flees to the hospital to confront her grandfather, but is told that he has died. At the assembly of the Society, Hein expresses no remorse for the murders and defiantly accepts their punishment, slashing himself three times in the face. Grombek takes responsibility for the killings and leaves to call the authorities to arrest Hein. Later, while Paula destroys the diplomas granted to her grandfather, a crazed Hein kills Grombek in his house. Paula gets back to the school but is trapped by Hein and his accomplice, Phil. While they are preparing her for preservation, her bindings are partially cut by Casper. Paula gets loose, poisons Phil, and runs away until Hein strikes a high voltage cable and dies. Casper and Paula then escape together. Halfway through the end credits, a sequence shows two of Paula's classmates praising Hein's abilities in dissection and preservation, discuss Grombek's imminent replacement, and how in their respective practices they will keep a low profile while experimenting for the Anti-Hippocratic Society.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 58% based on, with a weighted average rating of 5.3/10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 33 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "Generally unfavorable reviews". Dennis Schwartz from Ozus' World Movie Reviews gave the film a grade B, calling it "both eerily written and directed". Stephen Holden from The New York Times gave the film a negative review, stating that the film " lacks the raucous, anything-for-a-shock carnival humor of its American prototypes".
