Body Parts

This week's movie was supposed to be last week's movie, but the DVD was cracked. Anyway, it's called Body Parts, and stars Jeff Fahey. I saw it when it first came out, but remember very little about the specifics, so we'll have to see if it's as good as I don't remember it.  SPOILER zone up ahead!

The movie begins by showing criminal psychiatrist Bill having a session with a violent inmate named Ray. It seems that Ray attacked another inmate that week, and is in prison for murdering his signifcant other. When Bill asks him why he attacked them, Ray bluntly admits that he simply likes killing people. Gosh, I hope he's the hero...

Bill goes home at the end of the day, to a young, hot Kim Delaney. Hubba. She plays his wife, Karen, and their first scene together involves them having a melodramatic chat about whether or not he's any good as a shrink. Yeesh.

The next morning, Bill is stuck in traffic, talking on a huge phone(Early 1990's gadgets, aren't they a hoot?) about all of the activities on his schedue. While distracted, he nearly gets wiped out by another vehicle, only to have a truck plow into his car, hurtling it around the road like a pinball. Imagine what would've happened if texting had been invented by then!

At the the hospital, Karen  anxiously wait to hear any news about his condition. She meets his surgeon, Dr. Webb, and learns that Bill's arm had to be amputated, all the way up to the shoulder. While Karen reels in shock, Webb also informs her that she can replace his arm with a donor arm, but that the surgery must be done immediately for the best chance of success. Karen hesitates, but eventually signs the conent forms.

Bill is brought into an operating room, and appears to be having the best trip-out since Woodstock. He sees the donor on an operating table across the room, surrounded by armed police officers wearing scrubs, gloves and surgical masks. Dr. Webb comes over to reassure Bill that beverything will work out, then she goes to the other stretcher to begin sawing off the donor's arm. As Bill is given anesthesia and begins to nod off, he sees that Dr. Webb didn't start by taking the arm, but that she decapitated the patient instead. If Bill wakes up with one arm and 2 heads, I'm giving this movie an automatic 10 out of 10 and turning it off right then and there!

Bill wakes up with just his one head, alas. His new arm is being elevated by some kind of sling and pulley. Both Karen and Webb are there when he wakes up, but he doesn't seem to really acknowledge either one of them. Besides, he has a breathing tube taped over his mouth, so he can't exactly respond to them even if he wanted to.

Later, looking more like himself again, Bill gets his first good look at the arm with all of the bandages off. it's pretty cringe-worthy. Then the surgeon asks him if he can move his new arm at all, and he manages to makes it twitch up and down for a few seconds. Webb seems impressed.

At physical therapy, Bill tries to lift a small weight. He manages to bend his arm up twice, then needs a rest. While he's just standing there, the arm suddenly shoots forward with the weight, then down again. The physical therapist looks impressed, but Bill just looks frightened. After that incident, his new arm seems to get much stronger, and soon, Bill is exercising on every machine like a powerhouse.

When the day comes for him to finally check out and go home, he thanks Webb for performing the miraculous surgery. As Bill and his family leave the hospital, a throng of reporters are waiting outside to ask him about the procedure. He humbly suggests that they should focus their microphones and cameras on Dr. Webb, since she was the surgeon who gave him the new arm.

When he gets home, Bill sits the kids down, and fills them in(sort of) on what happened. He then shows them his new arm, in all of its' Frankenstein-y glory. After that awkward moment passes, they all go outside to play in the front yard.

Later that night, Bill watches his hand as it caresses Karen, and they wind up having their Best Sex Ever. It must have been historic, because the next morning finds them making out as he heads out to his car. The kids just laugh like rabid chipmunks on an acid trip.

It's revealed that Bill now teaches instead of meeting dangerous lunatics in prison. Or maybe he does both these days. His class is packed, and the lecture is about what motivates a criminal to perform acts of violence. Twice during his lecture, Bill has brief visions of injuries and violence, and many students notice these lapses.

At home he cuts himself shaving, and swears up a storm in front of his wife and daughter. Then he has another session with Ray, the unapologetic killer. Ray mentions seeing the news about Bill on television, and observes that he looks disturbed and tired.

Bill tells Ray to trust him, and extends his new arm out to the convict. Ray sees a tattoo on the donor arm, freaks out, and tells the shrink that the specific tattoo he has is only worn by prisoners on death row. Then he just yells and screams for help until the guards come back to escort him to his cell.

Bill leaves the prison to pay a visit to the police department, where he heads to the Criminal Records division. He has a friend there run a fingerprint scan on his donor arm, only to discover that it once belonged to Charles Fletcher, a criminal who committed multiple murders, larceny, you name it. The day he was executed matches up with the day a "donor arm"became available.

Bill lies awake in bed that night, having more and more visions of violence. His wife finds him the next morning sitting up in bed, smoking and nervous. She tries to get him to talk about it, and they decide that he needs to see Dr. Webb again.

Dr. Webb tells Bill that it's silly to think that the arm is controlled by anyone else but him, and she suggests that he should talk to a fellow shrink. He discreetly tails her to the Physical Therapy area, and finds a file listing all of the patients who were given implants from the executed criminal.

He visits the apartment of Remo, an artist who was given the killer's other arm. Remo sees the visions too, and paints them on his canvases for a tidy profit. He tells Bill that the violent pictures have made his career flourish, and that his paintings are selling almost faster than he can paint them. When Bill insists that the killer's influence on his work is dangerous, Remo kicks him out.

Bill returns home, and starts writing down everything in his study. Karen walks in to remind him that they're going to a party for one of his colleagues, and scares the ever-lovin' crap out of her husband. As he yells at her, she retorts that he's benn Hell to live with lately, and she walks away.  They should've called this Body Parts: Waiting for Something to Happen.

Bill visits the cop who arrested Fletcher, and learns that Dr. Webb's transplants were very experimental and hush-hush. She even bribed people to get the prisoner into the OR faster than normal. Also, it turns out that the cop was one of the armed men Bill saw surrounding the other stretcher before his procedure.

A very weary and frightened Bill heads home, where his son surprises him by leaping on him from out of nowhere. They wrestle on the floor for awhile, until the son climbs onto the couch and body-slams his dad right in the new arm. Bill violently flings thge boy across the room, and Karen sees the whole thing. As Bill continues to writhe around on the floor, his wife tells him never to lay a hand on the children again.

Bill does more investigating in the morning, and finds another body part recipient, a young jock named Mark. Mark was given a new leg,and suddenly, his basketball skills are amazing.  maybe it's just me, but everyone else besides Bill seems to be enjoying success with the new transplants. Maybe his arm got all the crazy in it?

Bill follows Mark from his car, and sees the young man suddenly begin to drive in an erratic manner in a crowded intersection, So, it appears that the leg also has a will of its own. Nice of the movie to tell me that right after I speculated that the posession angle was a dud.

Anyway, Mark pulls his car over to calm himself down, and Bill approaches him. They discuss the transplants, and Mark admits that he doesn't always seem to be in contol of his new legs. Bill hands Mark his business card, then drives home for the night.

As they sleep in bed together, Bill's hand starts to touch Karen while Bill sleeps. When the fingers squeeze around her neck, Karen wakes up and screams. Bill is forced to move out, and he tells the kids that he'll return when he's no longer a danger to them. He checks himself into a seedy motel, and begins to hang out with the other transplant patients at a local bar.

As the 3 drunk men talk about whether or not the limbs could contain evil DNA, another patron tries to eavesdrop on them. He demands that Bill show him the hand, and a bar fight breaks out. It's pure chaos. And still, no body count.

After the fight ends, Mark Draper buys a bag of groceries and goes straight to his apartment. His new legs seem unusually week, and he barely makes it inside. He places a call to Bill, but is attacked early into the chat. Bill arrives too late to save the young athlete, and finds the body violently torn up, with the lower half torn off in pieces. Meaty, chunky pieces.

Bill calls the cops, and the lead detective is the same one who apprehended Fletcher. He finds it extremely odd that Bill would be at th scene of such a gory crime, and tells him that he'll need to come in for questioning. I imagine that Bill says yes, because the scene abruptly ends there.

We next see red smears flying onto a plastic sheet. Oh, it's just Remo, getting his Jackson Pollock vibe going on strong. As he admires his latest gory masterpiece, Remo senses that someone may be in the apartment with him. He does a search, but finds no one.

As Remo returns to painting, a figure leaps out at him, and pushes him out of the nearest window. Remo clings to the window, but the killer tears his new arm right out its' socket, sending Remo falling to the street below. In slo-mo, of course. Damn, I was hoping that Brad Dourif would have more to do.

A squad car pulls up to the building as Remo is plummeting to his death, and his body crashes through the windsahield. On the bright saide, that pretty much clears Bill of the murder, as he was with the cops at the other crime scene. That probably doesn't help Remo, though.

The detective tells Bill that he plans to be his personal bodyguard until the killer is caught. Bill doesn't seem to be very confident, but goes along with the idea anyway. Oh, and they're being tailed by Dr. Webb and one of her colleagues. I need a scorecard or some kind of chart just to untangle  this  mess of a plot...

Bill and his "bodyguard" pull up to a stoplight, and neither one sees a car approaching theirs. It pulls up next to them, and the driver is FLETCHER??? Well, I guess that somebody got a head transplant after all, as stupid as that sounds. Fletcher slap a handcuff onto Bill's wrist, and they're forced to speed along with the killer so that Bill's new arm isn't wrenched out of its' socket.

They drive like maniacs, struggling to avoid concrete barriers, orange construction barriers, other vehicles...Hell, at one point Bill even climbs through the car window to fight with the psychopath. In the end, Bill just grabs the detective's gun, and shoots the chain that links the handcuffs together.

They watch the killer speed off, and Bill decides to steal the police car and chase the killer down, leaving the detective looking befuddled by the side of the road. The killer pulls his car over when he hears the police siren in the distance, and begins gathering up the various limbs he's collected so far. At this point, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be scared or laughing, but I'm going with laughter. This movie's so ridiculous, I can't help myself.

As soon as the killer escapes with the limbs, the car he crashed explodes. Somehow Dr. Webb finds him, and she seems to want to reattach all of the limbs to one body again. I'm willing to bet that this movie is epic when you're high. I'm still laughing, though.

Bill takes a time-out to write a farewell letter to Karen. In it, he tries to apologize for his recent erratic behaviour, and lets her know that he still loves her and the kids. Then he mails it, and walks the rest of the way to the hospital.

In the operating room, Bill sees all of the various body parts in a tank, and some are moving and twitching. Dr. Webb arrives, and asks him to give the arm back. When Bill refuses, she makes a silly speech about how easy it is to do transplants now, even human heads. Bill still says no, so Fletcher sneaks up behind him, and knocks Bill out. Why the heck would Dr. Webb side with the killer?

When he wakes up, he's on the operating table, and Webb is just about ready to sever the arm again. Bill sits up and screams, right before delivering a knockout punch to the surgeon. Fletcher enters the room as Bill struggles with the anesthesiologist, and the killer accidentally fires his shotgun at the wrong person, blowing the medical professional's head off his shoulders.

Then Bill and Fletcher fight over the shotgun, and Bill nearly gets shot in the face during the struggle. He finally gets the, uh, upper hand, and manages to snap Fletcher's neck. The killer crumples to a heap on the floor, and Bill uses the hospital phone to call the police. He tells his detective friend that he killed Fletcher, only to have Fletcher raise the gun one last time, to shoot Dr. Webb. Bill kills him yet again.

Bill writes in his journal that, after Fletcher died, the arm never had any weird impulswes again, and the visions stopped. He and his wife sit under a tree in a park while the credits roll. THE END

What a mixed bag! Great gore, good actors...but the silliest plot and dialogue I've seen in a long time. Ande why so few victims? No wonder I couldn't remember the details from seeing it before--it was a goofball movie! Oh, and let me know if anyone ever watches it while high...I have a strong feeling that it gets much better if you do. Middle of the road this week: 3 killer trees out of 5.

And what did I learn after watching Body Parts?

-Transplants are a piece of cake! Even head transplants.

-When playing with your kids, throwing them into walls across the room is a no-no.

-The best way to tell if something is wrong with your new arm transplant? It makes love to your wife better than you do.

Later this week, I'll be torturing my eyeballs with I'll Always Know What You Did 
Last Summer. I hope the movie is shorter than the title! See ya then...