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| Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures |
The Hitcher and Near
Dark screenwriter turned Bad Moon writer-director Eric Red first
burst onto the filmmaking scene with his 1988 crime thriller Cohen &
Tate starring Roy Scheider and Adam Baldwin. A year before character actor Jeff Fahey would
immortalize on film the character of Jobe in Brett Leonard’s virtual reality
thriller The Lawnmower Man, he joined forces with Eric Red on the 1991
Canadian body horror thriller Body Parts a film which harkens as far
back as James Whale’s 1931 film of Frankenstein and its notion of limbs or
components derived from deceased criminals carrying some of that latent evil
with them. Think of it as Re-Animator
if it were helmed by David Cronenberg or Pupi Avati replete with a car
crash that rivals even the worst of his onscreen vehicular collisions.
Bill Chrushank (Jeff Fahey) is a married family man working
as a criminal psychologist when one night while driving home he gets into a
horrific car accident, losing an entire arm in the process. With his life hanging by a thread, he undergoes
experimental surgery which grafts another deceased person’s arm onto his
body. While a successful operation after
physical therapy and a return to home he starts having inexplicably violent
visions and begins losing control of his new arm, lashing out at his wife and
kids. Mortified by his shift in
personality and tendency towards aggression, Bill confronts Dr. Webb (Lindsay
Duncan) who oversaw his surgery which leads him towards increasingly dark
secrets pointing towards madness, murder and reanimation of severed limbs.
A tightly budgeted little genre thriller shot in scope
2.35:1 widescreen by Wayne’s World cinematographer Theo van de Sande and
laced with a singing saw oriented score by Loek Dikker, Body Parts is a
great and unexpected number featuring a wealth of notable character actors
including but not limited to Brad Dourif, Kim Delaney and even Zakes Mokae from
The Serpent and the Rainbow. Based
on the horror novel Choice Cuts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
which was re-adapted by Patricia Herskovic and Joyce Taylor, the film is a bit
like a Night Gallery episode and reportedly was kicking around since the
1960s but never made it to the silver screen until now. A 1990s film very much in the vein of a 1950s
science fiction thriller, the film rests solely on the shoulders of Jeff Fahey
who gives debatably a career best performance in this. Brad Dourif is always a pleasure to have
around and Lindsay Duncan as the mercurial Dr. Webb gives off Nurse Ratched vibes.
Giving a limited release in theaters, Paramount Pictures the
studio wound up yanking ads for the film in Milwaukee, Wisconsin following the
discovery of Jeffrey Dahmer’s dismembered bodies in his apartment. Critics were less than kind to it as a mad
doctor body horror flick and the film also underperformed at the box office,
just barely scraping $9.2 million.
Nevertheless, the film was beloved by the horror community and in the
years since it has shaped up to be a solid slice of polished exploitation, a
B-movie with gifted performers and some wicked visual effects sequences and makeup
work. Thanks to the efforts of Kino
Lorber, the film is now on 4K UHD disc with plentiful extras and can be rediscovered
by genre fans who love a good mad science gone awry psycho thriller featuring a
strong lead. Certainly one to make you
think twice about going under the knife.
--Andrew Kotwicki
