Body Parts(1991)

Submitted by Julio M

Short pooper:
Bill’s (Jeff Fahey) transplanted arm, as well as the other arm and two legs given, respectively, to fellow patients Remo (Brad Dourif) and Mark (Peter Murnik), originally belonged to convicted criminal Charley Fletcher (John Walsh). Dr. Webb (Lindsay Duncan) knew about it all along and performed the procedures as part of an ongoing reanimation experiment, where she basically split Charley to pieces with the intention of putting him back together, à la Frankenstein. Charley himself, his head inserted onto another body, was in cahoots with her, recouping his limbs off the other men. Charley accidentally kills Dr. Webb. Bill eventually gets the upper hand and kills Charley, and, in the end, is at peace with his family and his life, with Charley’s arm still a part of himself.

Longer version:
Both Remo -a struggling artist who has now had a newfound streak of creativity, thanks to Charley’s other arm- and Mark -who had Charley’s legs inserted to him and can walk again- are eventually targeted and killed for the recouped limbs. Bill pleads with Det. Swchuck (Zakes Mokae) to help with the case, but they both fail to prevent the murders. It is revealed that Charley himself, whose head has been successfully inserted onto another body and reanimated, committed the murders to recover his limbs and is now targeting Bill for the same reason.

Charley catches up with Bill under a traffic light and handcuffs himself to Bill -on the transplanted arm-, after which he takes off, while Bill desperately tries to keep up, to avoid having the arm ripped off. Before hitting a road divider that would maim Bill, he manages to use Shawchuck’s gun to shoot the cuff and tear it apart. Charley escapes and Bill chases after him, both winding up at the same hospital where all the transplantation surgeries have happened.

Wielding the gun, Bill arrives at an operating room, where he witnesses Charley’s body -the torso, both legs and one of the arms-, set up in a glass display and connected to machinery as being kept alive. He is knocked unconscious and, when he wakes up, Dr. Webb appears upon him. It is then revealed that the whole endeavour of Bill, Remo and Mark receiving the transplanted limbs was part of a massive reanimation experiment personally conducted by Dr. Webb, so that she could assess if the limbs would work well on another person and, since they do, she is now ready to return them to their rightful owner; the pinnacle of her experiment was having inserted Charley’s head, “with a special feeding to his brain”, into another headless body, so that he could function the way he has, this whole time.

As she approaches a restrained Bill with a circular saw to remove the transplanted arm, he reacts and knocks the woman out. Then, Charley wrestles him to take the gun off him, but Bill manages to snap Charley’s neck and proceeds to shoot at the glass display, destroying Charley’s body parts. Charley, now barely functional, tries to kill Bill, but ends up killing Dr. Webb instead, while Bill shoots Charley’s head, finally killing him.

The movie ends with Bill enjoying a moment in a park with his wife Karen (Kim Delaney), while reflecting, in his journal, that there were no further issues with Charley’s arm and, despite the events that transpired, he is still thankful for receiving it.