The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Disembodied Body Parts refers to human limbs that gain a life of their own and detach from their owner’s body. In the majority of cases, this refers to disembodied hands or arms, although there been some examples involving disembodied eyes, hair and hearts, even foreheads, breasts and penises.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote the classic The Tell-Tale Heart (1841) about a murderer haunted by his victim’s still-beating heart. The original disembodied limb tale on film was The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) about a man haunted by a phantom hand. There are a number of other works in a similar vein, while a disembodied hand even became a regular character in the various incarnations of The Addams Family.
For heads and brains that maintain life in the absence of a body see Disembodied Heads and Brains.
The animated revival of the Addams Family was a mixed affair. All of the same creative personnel and voice talents return here for a sequel, which takes the Addams Family on a road trip
The big screen version of the 1960s tv series and Charles Addams’ cartoons is a highly enjoyable Hollywood Halloween Party, a chance for name actors to put on costume and ape life with a ghoulish, mildly perverse, moderately subversive spin
An animated film revival of The Addams Family. You feel that a PG-rated film sold to family audiences is a bit tame for the Addams’ dark humour, nevertheless this gets much of the kooky silliness.
The big screen Addams Family films ended with the death of Raul Julia. Subsequently the rights were sold to Saban Entertainment who made this cheap, terrible direct-to-video film with a new cast
Sequel to the live-action Addams Family film that reunites the same cast who fine-tune their roles, while the black comedy has an even more barbed bite second time around
Amicus Films venture into the haunted house genre with a newlywed Stephanie Beacham haunted by a disembodied hand but atmosphere is weakened by the constant reaching for crude shock effect
One of the best of the horror anthologies from UK’s Amicus Films. This adapts four stories from Robert Bloch, which are all tales told by the inmates of the titular asylum and settle in with chill effectiveness
The long-awaited return of Frank Henenlotter, the cult director of Basket Case fame, with a film about people with mutant genitalia – a work that proves extraordinary in its mind-bogglingly perverse imagery
Sometimes you shake your head and wonder how a film got greenlit. In this case, we have a comedy where Cam Gigandet’s penis gains a separate life of its own, resulting in a Jekyll/Hyde film of sorts
A fearful Peter Lorre is chased about by the disembodied hand of his late employer. A classic psychological horror film that has borrowed more than a few leaves from Val Lewton
South Korean-made anime that takes a dive into horror grotesquerie in the story of a beauty product that offers to reshape flesh and a girl who becomes obsessed with it
Hammer Films adapt Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars about a revived mummy queen. A troubled production that ended up being one of Hammer’s never-quite-rans
Canadian horror comedy that feels like a warmed-over rehash of Oliver Stone’s The Hand. A film made in wilful bad taste that feels like it came along twenty years too late for the mid-80s heyday of Troma
A pilot for a never sold horror anthology tv series featuring John Carpenter as a pun-cracking narrator. The two Carpenter directed episodes have some tension, while Tobe Hooper’s third episode has a clumsy heavy-handedness
Screenwriter Eric Red directs a film where Jeff Fahey receives an arm transplant only to find it gaining a life of its own as he is hunted by a the donor, a killer wanting to recollect his body parts
Sequel to the cult splatter hit of Re-Animator, directed by the original’s producer Brian Yuzna. Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott and David Gale are back. This has some amazing effects work but lacks the first film’s outrageous black humour
The third of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield films. This is set on a space station thing and has an alternate timeline plot but seems disinterested in little more than creating a bizarre effect every few minutes
The first of Amicus’s horror anthologies. The stories are rehashes of five popular horror tropes, all united by Peter Cushing as the title doctor telling the fortunes of five passengers on a train carriage
Woody Allen film that takes the title of the best-selling sex manual and spins it out as the basis of a series of hilarious sex-themed skits. Contains the famous episode with the giant breast run amok
An earlier effort from Shion Sono that concerns itself with hair extensions that take over and kill their host. More straightforward than many of Sono’s other works but the outlandish of the effects make the film
Larry Buchanan must count as one of the all-time bad movie directors and in this ultra-cheap alien invader film, in itself a remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), he is true to form
One of the strangest of Japanese monster movies in which the heart of the Frankenstein monster is caught in the Hiroshima atomic blast and grows into a giant boy
In his second film as director, Oliver Stone ventures into the disembodied hand theme. An amazingly OTT Michael Caine plays a cartoonist who believes the hand he lost in an accident is exacting vengeance against his enemies
Fourth film version of The Hands of Orlac about a pianist who receives hand transplants from a murderer and believes they are possessing him. Compared to the first two versions, this is dull and prosaic
Classic German silent film about a pianist who receives hand transplants and believes they are possessed. Superbly stylised direction from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari director Robert Wiene and with Conrad Veidt putting his all into the contorted mime work
A variant on the much more charming Mad Monster Party?, an animated film featuring cute cuddly versions of the Famous Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, wolfman etc) with Adam Sandler voicing Dracula
I had little enthusiasm for this, I tend to like my classic monsters serious rather than defanged – these Hotel Transylvania films are so watered down, Dracula doesn’t even get to drink blood
Surely the first slacker horror film in which teenager Devon Sawa’s hand becomes possessed. A comedy that feels as though it should have been a lot funnier than it ends up being on screen
One of the spate of teen monster movies of the 1950s, this is a B movie that at least has the benefit of not taking itself too seriously and the creation of some memorable alien creatures
Having been promised for a long time, this is the third of Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers films. Filled with some unworldly jumps, this is also the slightest of the Jeepers Creepers trilogy
A David DeCoteau film about a giant alien eyeball that causes people to become erotically aroused. The chessiness of the premise is hijacked by DeCoteau’s typical homo-erotic predilections
A giddy madcap, frequently over-the-top and entirely ridiculous Spanish film in which Melinda Clarke’s tongue is possessed by an alien whereupon the tongue starts killing people
The Hollywood remake of The Hands of Orlac, a classic with Colin Clive as a pianist who believes he is possessed after receiving hands transplanted from a killer. With a fascinatingly demented performance from Peter Lorre
One of the better films from Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions set amid voodoo rites in the American South and creating an atmosphere of exotic/erotic mystery
Live-action adaptation of a manga about the war between body-snatching parasites that are capable of rearranging their host’s bodies. This plays out as a madcap version of The Thing relocated to a Japanese high school
Parasyte Part 1 was a manga adaptation filled with wild effects sequences. This sequel is an even better film that expands the characters and ideas in quite fascinating directions
The perpetually awful Mick Garris inflicts adaptations of Stephen King and Clive Barker stories on us in what looks like an unsold pilot for a horror anthology tv series
The sort of film that might make Troma radioactive green with envy they didn’t make it concerning a giant rampaging ass. Mind-boggling and willing to be stupid and in frequent bad taste
Based on the popular series of children’s horror tales, this Guillermo Del Toro written/produced effort borrows the idea from the Goosebumps film of having the stories come to life and the idea from Stranger Things and It with a group children fighting against them. On screen, the finished result never quite seems as much as it promises to be
Film with a mad scientist creating an army of disembodied arms, this could have been a demented classic but just emerges as cheap
James Gunn takes over the Suicide Squad franchise and welcomely rescues it from the dud first screen outing, giving it his characteristically irreverent sense of humour
This is supposedly an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart but it throws out all semblance to the story and instead tells a possessed transplant limb tale
From Larry Blamire, a deliberately ridiculous spoof of the 1950s alien invasion film. Blamire’s dialogue and the deadpan with which everybody plays is frequently hilarious
Low-budget independently made film that manages to effectively use a singe warehouse location to suggest a gateway to Hell
Not to be confused with the Oliver Stone film, this is a surrealist satire on the George W. Bush presidency
Sequel to Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork, which ups the number of horror homages but suffers a low budget