The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler

Yesterday's sci-fi meets today's 'heart-snatchers' headlines in this pre-Coma medical thriller. As dogged reporter Nielsen searches for the senator he's seen whisked away from hospital after a near-fatal car crash, the politician himself (Dillman) wakes in a New Mexico clinic with a whole new set of internal organs, plundered from clone-like captive 'somas', bred specifically as transplant donors. This low-budget curio (itself seamlessly transferred from video to film) treads an engaging path through the genre clichés and asks most of the right questions about the selective application of medical high-tech, without ever quite sparking. But if it ends with an evasive whimper, at least it's a politically outrageous one.