Spare Parts

What’s more punk rock than getting your arm hacked off and replaced with a rivet-shooting axe by a cult of junkyard freaks? On paper, Spare Parts should play like a scratched-up VHS discovered at a squat party — a bloody, DIY manifesto against good taste. In practice, it’s more like a band with all the right influences but no distinct sound. Ambitiously grimy, knowingly trashy, but leaving its best riffs on the cutting-room floor. Short-Ass Summary Directed by Andrew Thomas Hunt, this 2020 Canadian flick follows Ms. 45, an all-girl punk band touring through hell — or at least the worst parts of America. After a setup ripped from a seventies revenge thriller, they’re captured by a cult led by a wannabe Caesar (the great Julian Richings) and forced into gladiatorial games. The ticket price? Their **** limbs, swapped for crude weapons. What Works & What Bleeds This is grindhouse — low-budget, loud, messy. The junkyard-turned-neon-arena looks fantastic, dripping with sleazy charm. But the fights? Repetitive, underwhelming, rarely hitting the gonzo heights the premise promises. The bandmates are clichés, the dialogue cartoonish. But in this genre, that’s almost a feature. Where it stumbles is when it suddenly wants to be serious. Grindhouse can’t fake gravitas — it just exposes the seams. Body horror fans: temper expectations. The opening limb-removal sets a gnarly tone, but the film never keeps that energy. For a movie about weaponized arms, it oddly pulls its punches. The Politics (or Lack Thereof) This premise should be dirtbag-left gold: women literally commodified and dismembered by a patriarchal death cult. That’s a metaphor begging to be exploited. Instead, the movie half-flirts with critique before falling back into the same **** of women’s suffering it could’ve skewered. The revenge arc isn’t a revolution — it’s just a reshuffle inside the same broken system. That’s the real missed opportunity, but as a grindhouse , trying to be too serious might have hurt it even more. The Comic Book Save The tie-in comic? Way better. A cheap little pulp artifact that delivers the raw, pulpy blast the film reaches for but rarely lands. Honestly, it’s what got me to watch the movie, and I wish it had been a full series. Verdict Spare Parts is exactly what it is: a 90-minute B-movie that respects your time, delivers on the hook, but never escapes predictability. It’s dumb fun with flashes of brilliance, well executed but wont quite hit cult-classic status. My 2.5/5 stands — it’s halfway to greatness, but settles for “just fine.”