Crew
Director – Rainer Erler, Photography – Wolfgang Grasshoff, Music – Eugen Thomass, Production Design – Paul Kinslow. Production Company – Pentagramma/ZDF.
Cast
Jutta Speidel (Monica Shepard), Wolf Roth (Bill Michalsky), Herbert Herrmann (Mike), Charlotte Kerr (Dr Jackson), Tedi Altice (Landlady), Ben Zeller (Paramedic), Christoph Lindert (Assistant)
Plot
Monica, a German exchange student in the US, marries the musician Mike. They head off across country on their honeymoon. Conscious of saving money, Mike signs into the rundown Honeymoon Inn on the edges of Los Cruces, New Mexico. Not long after, an ambulance appears and the two attendants grab Mike. Monica flees into the desert. When she returns to the motel and tells what happened, the landlady calls the authorities only for the ambulance and its attendants to return. Monica flees, pursued by the ambulance and begs a ride with the truck driver Bill. Believing her story, Bill decides to help Monica return and rescue Mike by tracking down the source of the illegal organ harvesting operation that has abducted him.
Spare Parts starts out as an abduction story. Couple go on a holiday, the husband goes missing, people around insist nothing is wrong. It’s been a staple of the thriller genre since at least Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). Certainly, the basics of the plot where someone searches for another person who has been abducted by an illicit medical operation has surprising similarities to Larry Cohen’s later The Ambulance (1990), right down to the operation being represented by a sinister ambulance. The scenes where Jutta Speidel is aided by truck driver Wolf Roth, who becomes drawn into solving the mystery of the disappearance, also reminds of the subsequent Australian psycho-thriller Roadgames (1981).
The set-up is okay. My issue would be that Rainer Erler is not much of a suspense director – compare Spare Parts to the abovementioned Roadgames and the scenes with Jutta Speidel on the run from the pursuing ambulance are never pushed for as much as you feel that they could be. Certainly, the one thing Spare Parts does is in give a well photographed outsider’s view of the American landscape – the setting is a crucial element of the film.
Spare Parts becomes quite a bit more interesting in its second half when Wolf Roth calls upon the help of his fellow truckers and they create a scheme where Wolf and Jutta Speidel pose as newlyweds to be abducted whereupon the truckers waylay the ambulance in the middle of the road and basically torture the attendant – by placing him inside the freezer unit of one of the trucks – to find out what is going on. In the subsequent scenes, Wolf and Jutte pose as ambulance drivers to infiltrate the military base where the operations take place – located at Roswell, no less! These scenes have a fascination as Jutte tries to find her missing husband, only to discover that the operation’s director, the mysterious Dr Jackson (Charlotte Kerr), has worked out who she is, but then oddly enough turns around and starts trying to help her. These scenes develop considerably more interest and Rainer Erler’s direction during these sections is fine.
Rainer Erler (1933-2023) was a director who worked in German television. His other genre works are the Edgar Wallace adaptation The Witch (1971), the nuclear thriller Plutonium (1978) and the space expedition returns to Earth film Operation Ganymede (1979).
Trailer here
Full film available here