Thoughts on Body Parts

    On Criterion, as part of their 90s Horror collection, I watched the 1991 film Body Parts, starring Jeff Fahey as a criminal psychologist who interviews killers, who loses his arm in a grisly car accident and he gets a grafted arm in an experimental operation, which turns out to be from a serial killer. He has weird visions of murdering people from the killer’s POV, and his right arm acts on its own, attacking his family and nearly killing guys in a bar fight. He meets other men who also had received limbs from the same body, with their own weird side effects.

    I’ve seen various films and TV that have this premise, where someone receives a donated organ that comes from a killer, so then they have strange visions or murderous impulses (Body Bags, Hideaway), or they get donated organs from the victim of the killer and use their visions to find the serial killer (Blind, a Beyond Belief episode). So it’s not a totally unique premise, but decent to watch.

    I can’t really get into Jeff Fahey as an actor. He has startling blue eyes that stick out against his dark hair, but beyond that, he’s not that charismatic or interesting, he’s just there. He fits in direct to video movies, that definitely felt like his market, but his acting pales in comparison when he’s against Brad Dourif in a scene, who is just obviously way more talented and interesting, and his supporting character as a struggling mediocre artist who turns successful post-surgery with his disturbing art from the killer’s POV made him way more compelling to watch, like just dropping into his story in the middle of it and wanting to follow him instead of Fahey and his family.

    The third act felt ludicrous and dumb, and didn’t make much sense to me, it just seemed like a stupid explanation. I bought that Lindsay Duncan as the doctor would have some corrupt ulterior motives for performing the experimental operation, but the further explanation and reveal just took me out of the movie, like not suspending my disbelief anymore.

    So it was fine to watch as an average psychological thriller (which had its TV trailers pulled after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught because of images of dismembered body parts in the movie), but could have had a better leading man, and especially not wasting Brad Dourif in a small supporting role.