Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #79 Body Parts (1991)

Eric Red at the helm

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

This entry is special in that I am doing it for the generous and much-appreciated patron behind my exploration of the films of Sam Peckinpah but I am not here to discuss the work of Bloody Sam. 

No, this patron will be donating a kidney very soon and thought it would be amusing to read about Eric Red’s wonderfully ridiculous 1991 horror film Body Parts, a harrowing glimpse from tomorrow about an innocent man who picks up a limb from a serial killer after losing his in an accident and must contend with a serious case of Murder Arm. 

Murder Arm is of course the increasingly prevalent real-life ailment where the recipient of a limb transplant from a hillbilly mass murderer develops an overwhelming desire to murder indiscriminately. 

This poses all manner of practical, moral and philosophical dilemmas. I mean, yeah, it’s cool to have transplanted legs that allow you to walk and Tomahawk dunk on fools at the gym but is it worth the relentless compulsion to kill yourself at the direction of the maniacal evil spirit controlling your body and mind? 

This lovely patron wants me to remind you of the benevolent, life-saving existence of the National Kidney Registry, an eminently worthwhile institution that, unlike Dr. Agatha Webb (Lindsay Duncan), the mad doctor at the heart of Body Parts, is not in the business of knowingly giving people limbs infected with not only Murder Arm but also Murder Other Arm and Murder Legs or trying to resurrect notorious serial killers for the sake of science.

Yes, Body Parts is a silly, silly movie I very much enjoyed in part because it resonates with my current travails as well as those of the patron who requested it. On Monday I went to the dentist for the first time in three and a half years and spent nearly two hours getting a very stubborn infected tooth arduously removed. 

This is how I felt post-tooth extraction

So the horror of surgery and the myriad things that can go wrong with it, up to and including contracting Murder Arm, is an all too fresh and relatable subject for me right now, particularly since I have a looming date for an even more painful, even more involved extraction in the horrifyingly near future. Wanna know why this website hasn’t been updated as religiously as usual as of late? I was finishing two books and also in a whole world of dental pain. Also, watching 30 episodes of The Simpsons for an article onThe Simpsons for Rotten Tomatoes because man cannot live on Patreon alone.

I am a man who enjoys a good Jeff (Easy Rider: The Ride Back) Fahey vehicle and this one is a doozy, and not just because it so closely mirror his iconic turn as the titular simpleton turned evil genius in the next year’s The Lawnmower Man. 

In both The Lawnmower Man and Body Parts Fahey plays someone who experiences a radical experimental surgery that changes them on a fundamental level, that transforms them into an arrogant, murderous monster that thinks only of their own needs and desires. 

In The Lawnmower Man Doctor Pierce Brosnan does a bunch of computer stuff with Fahey’s dim-witted handyman that makes him smarter all right, but has the unfortunate side effect of also transforming him into a vengeful cyber deity.  

Body Parts, meanwhile, finds the enjoyable hammy Fahey playing Bill Chrushank, a smart professor dude who receives the arms of deranged serial killer Charley Fletcher in a radical surgery and suddenly finds himself overwhelmed with nightmarish visions of murder and madness. 

He feels himself steadily losing control over his emotions and his body once the arm begins infecting his bloodstream WITH EVIL, transforming him from a pompous, turtleneck-wearing family man and man of the intellect into a brutal, abusive creep. 

Bill discovers that he’s not alone in his predicament but rather than cursing the Gods for being stuck with a new limb lousy with Murder Arm they’re appreciative for the gifts their bloodthirsty yet impressive new extremities have given them. 

A real bad case of Murder Arm elevates Remo Lacey (the great Brad Dourif) from zero to outlaw hero. He goes from starving artist to hottest painter around when his disturbing paintings of the kinds of gruesome tableaus a deranged mass killer might encounter during his daily rounds start selling like hotcakes saturated in the blood of the innocent as well as maple syrup. 

Dourif won Fangoria’s Chainsaw Awards, which would be more prestigious if they didn’t sound like they were named by a pair of stoner supporting characters in a lesser 1980s teen sex comedy, for his performance here. 

The beloved star of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Wise Blood and Child’s Play probably isn’t onscreen for more than ten minutes but that’s all it takes for him to steal the movie with his off-kilter charisma and uniquely impish combination of boyish innocence and malice. 

Love this dude. Always great. #B-Rad4Life

Body Parts is a markedly better movie when Dourif is onscreen unsuccessfully trying to convince our hero that, actually, Murder Arm is a good thing, and he should focus on the positive instead of his urge to kill the people closest to him. 

Remo is living his best life, riding this whole “murderous super-arm” thing for all its worth after decades of struggling. His time here is all too brief but Dourif at least he gets a death befitting his status as a horror icon, getting tossed out of a window and having his second-hand evil arm torn clear off in one fell swoop. 

The serial killer’s legs, meanwhile, were bequeathed to a young jock overjoyed that with more than a little help from a mad scientist and a dude who killed twenty people, most of them probably reasonably innocent, he now has what the young people call “mad hops.” 

That’s right: this double amputee can now straight up dunk on fools. I’m sorry, but if movies like Like Mike, Slam Dunk Ernest and Uncle Drew have taught me anything, it’s that if someone acquires spectacular, seemingly preternatural basketball skills it’s because they’re wearing magical shoes. 

Being able to slam dunk because of an evil leg transplant? Because of Murder Legs? C’mon, that’s just silly and if there’s one thing that distinguishes this movie about a man with a terrible case of Murder Arm and a serial killer whose head is sawed off and then placed on a functioning body but who remains alive long enough to scheme to get his limbs and torso back it’s realism and verisimilitude. 

Is Body Parts’ premise science fiction or science fact? As Fahey’s portentous, turtleneck-loving egghead professor windily inquires, where is evil ultimately held? Is it in the soul? How about the spirit? Does evil lurk within our hearts in a metaphorical way OR as Body Parts hilariously proposes, is it more in the nature of a skin condition, like a bad rash or a sunburn, only it makes you want to kill everyone around you? 

Body Parts has a surprisingly impressive pedigree for a movie about Murder Arm and dudes who get their heads cut off yet keep on keeping on. It’s loosely adapted from a novel by the literary team of Boileau-Narcejac, the source of the slightly better received cinematic adaptations Les Diaboliques and Vertigo and co-written and directed by Eric Red, whose screenwriting credits include the cult classics Near Dark and The Hitcher. 

Near Dark was rather audaciously a shit-kicking country and western vampire movie that took itself very seriously. Body Parts similarly treats a comically ridiculous premise—smart guy gets Murder Arm, then must find a way to kill the still-living dude he got it from before he kills him and everyone else who is borrowing his extremities—with incongruous seriousness. 

Body Parts doesn’t wink at the audience to let us know that it realizes just utterly absurd it is. There’s no distancing irony, zero acknowledgment that what we’re watching is, to use my new favorite phrase, next level bonkers, a movie that makes no sense whatsoever on the surface, and even less sense the more you think about it. 

Red’s deranged exercise in body horror (co-written by a screenwriter on Dead Ringers) maintains a fever dream intensity from start to finish. Too much self-consciousness would ruin Body Parts’ vulgar, pulpy B-movie charm but Body Parts instead plays its exquisitely bizarre premise bizarrely straight. 

Body Parts is everything I wanted it to be, and everything I fuzzily half-remember it being when I saw it in the theater as a fifteen year old Jeff Fahey super-fan. It’s deliriously entertaining trash and a reminder that donating organs is a wonderful, kind, generous thing everyone should do, and in real life has NEVER resulted in even  a single case of Murder Arm, or Murder Other Arm, or even Murder Legs. 

So what are you waiting for? Follow in the footsteps of this great humanitarian and give an organ to someone in need and cash money to a pop culture scribe in perpetual economic peril (that’d be me) as well. 

I would very much appreciate both acts of generosity and even life-saving kindness, albeit one more directly and personally than the other.  

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