Phonearl
Good start, but then it gets ruined
Ceticultsot
Beautiful, moving film.
Blake Rivera
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
Scarecrow-88
Hands of Orlac once again gets a treatment, this time by writer/director Eric Red, starring Jeff Fahey (back when he still had his matinée idol looks) as a professor of psychology and often visits criminals in prison to study what makes them commit evil. When he suffers a horrible traffic accident thanks to a car losing its tire, it takes his right arm. A breakthrough arm surgery through a "grafting procedure" sees that Fahey will not be without the missing limb...it comes with a price. The arm, he soon discovers, was taken from a serial killer eventually executed. Two other men also received body parts from the killer in surgeries by Dr. Agatha Webb (Lindsay Duncan), a painter named Remo Lacey (Brad Dourif) and a young man named Mark Draper (Peter Murnik) who had both legs applied after spending time in a wheelchair without them. Eventually, though, someone is "coming to collect".I found some of the plot rather fascinating, as Fahey's Bill Crushank truly dedicates himself to understanding where evil comes from, and how the arm attached to him is ruining his life. The arm is violent, smacking his son and nearly choking his wife while he was sleeping in bed. He can see the murders in his dreams committed by the killer, and Bill increasingly has that gnawing feeling the murder's influence is taking hold of him. Reaching out to the others (Mark's legs cause him to nearly wreck into ongoing traffic), he finds that both men are suitably pleased with their new body parts (Remo's painting reflects what the killer sees; he claims the images just "come from the air" and that he's making far more money since he got his new arm than before when he was creating work for the walls of hotel rooms).The film left me a bit unsatisfied because I think Red has something here that eventually goes off the rails at the end when someone returns to take back the grafted body parts "given away". It is really quite bloody and graphically violent (legs gone, a victim going out a window, losing his grip once one of his arms is pulled right from the torso it belongs), but the reasoning is rather loony. A head actually being transplanted and kept from dying, body parts hooked to "life support", being pumped with a blood supply and machines, and limbs being "confiscated" from "their rightful owner", with Webb's eventual approval (taking a turn towards mad science) leaves Body Parts deteriorating into camp. It left me rather awestruck after following Bill through the travails of this arm causing him much grief that the film decides to turn loose a serial killer towards the end seemingly for shock value. Kim Delaney is the wife of Fahey, just unable to tolerate her husband's danger to her and the children. I had forgotten just how beautiful Kim was or that she was in this movie. The car crash that caused Fahey to need the arm is horrific, the crime scene with the missing legs is gruesome, and Dourif's character is totally enthusiastic about what the arm has done for his life (for the better), not discouraged by Fahey's misery and forewarning about what the body parts might have wrong with them. Dourif's performance is lively and energetic, I'll give him that. I have seen him better, though. I guess his performance fits the character he's provided: a lease on life anew, Bill's concerns pale in comparison to the profit afforded to him. Webb's attitude towards Bill regarding his desire to have the arm removed, not concealing her staggering apathy and disregard for his well being and hope to get rid of it so he can get his life back provides the film quite a cold and remoresless sociopath. Webb's devotion to her work, even if it is harmful to the recipients of the parts she grafts to patients presents her as quite the villain, deserved of her eventual fate.
rbrb
The film is enjoyable and is good fun.The main character loses his arm in an accident, and gets a replacement from a dubious source leading to all sorts of macabre events, and the play includes having a mad scientist/doctor.What I like about this picture is that even though the story spirals into absurdity and is preposterous, all the lead actors take themselves and the story very seriously making the movie even more hilarious. Everyone gives full throttle performances which keeps the viewer nicely entertained!I wonder if we have or will get a body Parts II?! Worthy of a solid:7/10
Matt Kracht
I don't quite understand why everyone hates this movie so much. I thought it was a little silly, but not nearly poor enough to receive a rating of three or four.Body Parts had potential, especially as a thriller/splatter film, but perhaps it needed a better director. I know this is going to sound stupid, but I think maybe James Cameron (director of Terminator and Aliens) would have been a good choice.Jeff Fahey's career sure went nowhere, didn't it? I recommend this film to all other bad movie lovers, Jeff Fahey fans, and horror fan completists. Otherwise, I suppose you're best off avoiding it. I'm one of the few people who didn't walk away from this movie making retching noises.
Arca1943
One of the worse movies I have ever seen. Even more so because it was adapted from a Boileau-Narcejac novel. For years and years, every time a new Boileau-Narcejac suspense novel was released, among the list of already-published books, the title « ...Et mon tout est un homme » was always accompanied by two mentions : « Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir - 1965 », and below, in smaller characters : « En cours d'adaptation cinématographique » (which means : in the process of being adapted for the screen). So year after year, I was expecting the movie to finally emerge from the book. When it finally did, in 1991, I watched it. Poor me.In a way, «Body Parts» is a tour de force. Sure, Boileau-Narcejac wrote plenty of suspense dramas, very anxiogene ones at that, some of which also became masterpieces of suspense on the big screen : such as Henri-Georges Clouzot's « Diabolique » and Alfred Hitchcock's « Vertigo ». Except that « ...Et mon tout est un homme » is NOT a suspense drama : it is a FARCE ! A macabre farce ! Which is why it was awarded le Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir ! (Grand Prize for Dark Humour) The movie «Body Parts» is a tour de force in its own kind because, from a crazy plot whose eccentric twists are justified only by the fact that it is satire, they came out with a dead-serious, B-Series horror flick that is really a festival of involuntary humor !
