The Limb Salesman

"You wouldn't believe what the fuckin' mutants would do for an arm and a leg."

- Contact explaining the facts of improved life to Dr. Goode

As many countries worldwide struggle to keep a handle on health-care costs and regulate medical research to prevent Dr. Frankensteins from opening "Bodies 'R Us" clinics, Anais Granofsky's The Limb Salesman should find sympathetic audiences in every corner of the planet.

Set in the future, but draped in the past (Diana Abbatangelo's production design revels in antiques, fabric and decades-past baubles) the film achieves much as social commentary even as its fantastic plot moves unevenly forward.

As Dr. Goode, the deeply troubled DNA wizard, Peter Stebbings gives a convincing performance of the nightmare-haunted surgeon who gradually falls in love with his legless patient Clara (Ingrid Veninger) whose full recovery allows her to walk full steam ahead into an O.

Surrounding the tormented lovers in a house that personifies isolation, are the incorrigible family matriarch Lolly (Jackie Burroughs, equally adept as lush, dancer and conniver), her wicked son Abe (Clark Johnson, appropriately nasty, but foiled by a script that lets Clara, the ultimate "wife replacement" toddle off seconds before the revenge-seeking "grunts" circle their wagons) and his son Charles (Charles Officer), onsite overseer of the family's employee-filling water mine—the most precious commodity of the New World.

In order to procure the necessary "parts," Dr. Goode treks to Junction where his contact (Julian Richings, who greedily savours this manic role, resplendent in leather) cooks up a pair of gams in his human tissue lab but not before discovering that the good doctor's heart is not his own. No problem. Contact suggests that "you find a freak generic mutant and help yourself" because "the heart is one organ you can't grow in a Petrie dish" (something about having a soul ...) (Real life mutants are only too common, cross-reference below.) Some of his lines are spoken while, literally, on top of the physician-for-hire, which only serve to muddy the relationship pot.

Writers Granofsky and Veninger do best when shading the contemporary metaphors of cue jumping, two-tier service delivery, exploitation of labour and incest with situations that make this production not "just another fairy tale." They are aided by John Welsman's score, particularly the baroque violin that pulls us back further in time even as the Chopin Ballade signals "dinner is served."

But, finally, that's the flaw: with such a rich buffet of eras, ideas and commentaries, it's difficult to conclude what this film's really about, yet it's a cinematic meal that has much to enjoy.

Not least of which is the unforgettable scene when Dr. Goode awakens, bare, alone with only his own steady pulse for company. Stebbings soars through the moment with chilling authority.