'Body Trade' Gets Under Your Skin, Not For Squeamish

The neat thing about slasher shows is that they tend to get scarier as they get cheaper.

This is certainly true of Body Trade, one of Road Rage Films‘ more recent projects from creator Mike West. If you’ve never heard of Road Rage Films, well, they describes themselves as an “independent production company focusing on making top quality movies with little to no budget”; an apt description, considering Body Trade – a show about a black-market human parts provider in Niagara Falls – feels kind of like a Troma Entertainment

production for the Internet age of filmmaking.

So far, Body Trade is two episodes in, each at about 5-6 minutes long, but the first two episodes came out two months ago so we’re not quite sure when the rest are coming other than a vague “Summer 2009”. That might be one of the downsides to RRF’s exposure-based business model.

What we do have in those two episodes is pretty good, however; Kevin and Chris are two no-name hustlers who bring their boss’s comatose body to the Second Life Clinic after some sort of bowling-related accident. As you probably could have guessed, the Second Life Clinic (see promo spot below) is essentially a front for a black market business in human body parts, and Kevin and Chris discover that their compromised position puts them right where a mysterious doctor wants them – that is, in charge of, ah, “product acquisition”.

To be sure, this is indie filmmaking through and through; you won’t find the polish of a professional studio production that you might be used to. With a slasher/exploitation show like Body Trade, though the low-budget look is ultimately part of its appeal – it just makes the strip club look more sleazy, the operating room more illegal, and the winter that much colder.