The Limb Salesman

This is an ironic love story set in a future world that has been badly damaged in some strange way making uncontaminated water rare. Society is now built around the efforts to find safe water. The story drags more than a little.

THE LIMB SALESMAN is a snail-paced love story set in the mid-to-late 21st century. Little is explained but somehow drinkable water has become a rare and extremely valuable commodity that must be mined for, though wine and energy are still plentiful. Bad water is still plentiful but drinking it leads to terrible mutation.

Just what has happened to the water that covers so much of this planet that it cannot be distilled to make something drinkable is unclear. Also with such tiny amounts of water being of great value, how the world subswists is left to the viewer to work out.

This is the backdrop for a slow-paced story of Dr. Gabrial Goode (Peter Stebbings) who has come to an isolated area where Abe Fiedler (Clark Johnson) runs a water mining operation. Fiedler desperately wants his mutant daughter to have the legs she was born without. Science can grow her new legs with genetic engineering.

The one organ they cannot grow is the heart. Again it is unexplained why but any organ can be grown but a heart. Fiedler has other problems at the same time. His miners are clearly not happy with the way Fiedler runs his operation and trouble is brewing.

Anais Granofsky directs the script written by himself and Ingrid Veninger. The budget would not allow for a futuristic look. Instead it is set in a brooding 1880s house. Seeing the 1990s car in a world in which companies boast they been around since 2032 seems inconsistent. There is no sign of where the miners live.

The storyline is ironic but is insufficient to support a film of this length. THE LIMB SALESMAN is a decent start for beginning filmmakers, but there is only enough story to fill less than an hour. Most of its audience will find it dry, cold, and dull.

Mark R Leeper

(c) Mark R Leeper 2004

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