Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991)

Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Fahey, and Kim Delaney in Body Parts

Cast: Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Duncan, Kim Delaney, Zakes Mokae, Brad Dourif, John Walsh, Paul Ben-Victor, Peter Murnik. Screenplay: Patricia Herskovic, Joyce Taylor, Eric Red, Norman Snider, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Theo van de Sande. Production design: Bill Brodie. Editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Loek Dikker. 

How can a movie with a car chase, a fight in a barroom, and an abundance of gore turn out so dull? Body Parts is based on an old trope, that of severed members taking on a life of their own. Adaptations of W.W. Jacobs's 1902 story "The Monkey's Paw" are so numerous they have a Wikipedia page of their own and Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les Mains d'Orlac, about a concert pianist who receives the transplanted hands of a murderer, has been filmed several times, including Robert Wiene's 1924 silent The Hands of Orlac and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The many adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also play on the notion of reanimated body parts. But it's not that the idea behind Eric Red's movie has been done to death, so to speak, it's that Eric Red and the various screenwriters who worked on the movie find so little new and interesting to do with it. It's adapted from a 1965 novel, Choice Cuts, by the writing team known as Boileau-Narcejac, who provided the source material for some much better movies: Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). The acting isn't bad. As Bill Chrushank, a psychiatrist who receives the arm of a murderer after losing his own in an auto accident, Jeff Fahey does a solid job of suggesting the ways the transplant brings out the worst in what may have been his own latent tendencies to violence. Lindsay Duncan plays the surgeon who does the transplant as a cold-blooded scientist with just a touch of hauteur that turns malevolent when her breakthrough technique is threatened. Brad Dourif overacts a little as the artist who receives the other arm and finds that it actually feeds his imagination and produces darkly disturbing paintings that sell. And Kim Delaney does what she can with the role of Chrushank's wife, who bears the brunt of his emotional transformation. But Red's direction never builds suspense, giving us time to anticipate the shocks we expect the material to provide. There's also a completely unearned "happy ending" that saps any lingering tension from what has gone before.