Spare Parts (2020)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) The spirit of grindhouse exploitation is alive and well in Spare Parts, a Canadian horror movie that feels like a fever dream of extreme gore horror components bolted together. Our protagonists are a punk grrl band stuck in the middle of nowhere after a bad show and a flat tire—their troubles get increasingly worse as they are kidnapped by a cult, mutilated so that their limbs are replaced by weapons, and forced to fight in an arena built inside a junkyard. One of their boyfriends eventually shows up to investigate, but don’t put too much hope on him: this is the kind of film where the final girl gets to win on her own, with an extra nihilistic twist that can be seen well in advance. Surprisingly not played for laughs, Spare Parts never misses an opportunity to spray blood and expose the innards of a human body. (And that’s not even getting into the even more disturbing sequences—this film doesn’t play nice.) While I usually don’t like that kind of extreme horror, Spare Parts at least has a consistent and appropriate tone throughout: this is a nightmare, and it doesn’t try to soften the blow through juvenile humour or a happy ending. Director Andrew Thomas Hunt uses his low budget effectively, and there’s an earnestness to the production that shows how clearly the film is made by gore fans for gore fans. As a result, I don’t exactly like Spare Parts, but I don’t hate it either—which is not bad for that kind of film. The target audience will get a lot more out of it than I did.