Fleisch Reviews

Made for German television but shot in New York and New Mexico, this oddly stilted thriller concerns a honeymooning couple who run afoul of an underground organ smuggling ring in the American Southwest. German exchange student Monica (Jutta Speidel) and her American boyfriend, Mike Shepherd (Herbert Hermann), get married and embark on a cross-country road trip. They stop for a break in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and take a room at the rundown but inexpensive Honeymoon Inn motel. As the young couple takes an early morning walk, an ambulance manned by armed "paramedics" appears out of nowhere. The medics kidnap Mike, but Monica manages to escape, clad only in a T-shirt and shorts. Monica hitches a ride with a gruff trucker, Bill (Wolf Roth), who's understandably skeptical about her story. But he runs into the ambulance and its truculent drivers at a truck stop, and their behavior strikes him as odd. He agrees to help Monica find Mike, and enlists the aid of his trucker buddies. Bill and Monica, now disguised in a dark wig and sunglasses, check into the Honeymoon Inn and, sure enough, are abducted by the mysterious ambulance drivers. Bill's buddies form a road relay to track the ambulance until the coast is clear. Then two big rigs box it in; one driver comes out firing and is shot in return, while the truckers force the other to tell them what's going on. To their horror, they learn of a network of isolated motels and fake ambulances kidnapping healthy but incautious travelers and delivering them to a hospital at Roswell Air Force base, where they're plundered for their organs. Monica and Bill set off for Roswell in the ambulance in hopes of saving Mike before he's reduced to nothing more than spare parts for some wealthy patient. Directed by Rainer Erler from his own novel, Fleish ("flesh"), this slow-moving medical chiller/road movie was made shortly after COMA (1978) but apparently not released in the US until the mid-'80s, when it turned up on cable television and video under the title SPARE PARTS. The obvious and inappropriately lyrical theme song, "How Much is Anyone Worth," is horribly overplayed, and overall the film is an oddity of interest mainly to genre completists.