The October Ordeal Day 20: Body Parts

October 20th: Body Parts (1991)

(This is the final cop-out, I swear. Here's an old review. It isn't very well written. I'm running out of reserves, so this should be the last time I'll have to mine old SD material. There was simply too much going on today for me to watch a flick)

Body Parts is directed by Eric Red (writer of The Hitcher and Near Dark, and also potential murderer- Google it), and stars Jeff Fahey as Bill Chrushank, a psychology professor who loses his arm in a freak accident. As part of a new experimental program supervised by Dr. Agatha Webb (Lindsay Duncan), he receives a new arm, cut from a recently deceased serial killer (naturally). It takes Bill a while to get used to his newly grafted-on arm, especially since it seems to have retained some homicidal tendencies!

After alienating his family and freaking out his students, Bill decides to do a little P.I. work and figure out what’s up. He manages to find the names and addresses of the other participants, including unstable artist Remo Lacey (played by Brad Dourif!), who received the other arm and is now famous for his gruesome paintings, which are actually the killer’s murderous visions. He also locates the legs, which went to basketball player Mark Draper (Peter Murnik), an all-around nice guy who now runs incredibly fast, and hilariously drop-kicks people left and right. When Bill finds him, he’s just narrowly avoided crashing his car, when his foot slams unexpectedly on the gas at an intersection.

The three go to a bar to hash things out, but are so messed up from the killer parts they instigate a massive bar-brawl, fighting the patrons and each other. But things get even worse, when the killer returns- his head on a new body- and starts killing our protagonists to get his limbs back.

From then on the twists and turns never stop, with questionable science, schizoid performances, flying dropkicks, amazing basketball skills, evil doctors, suspicious cops, and Fahey shooting a gun at living body parts, suspended in a holding tank.

The film’s most inventive scene comes towards the end, when the resurrected killer (whom we learn is Dr. Webb’s son) pulls up alongside a police cruiser which Bill is sitting shotgun in, handcuffs Bill’s hand to his own, and speeds off, while the Jamaican cop in the driver's seat has no choice but to follow! Body Parts is one of the most inventive and enjoyable horror flicks I’ve seen in a while, thanks to real-life madman Eric Red.