Movie Reviews

Review: ‘Spare Parts’ Thrums With a Punk Rock Skull-Smashing Spirit

Published

5 years ago

May 24, 2021

While I’ve previously discussed horror films in which bands must face the music (and their own mortality), Spare Parts is unlike anything on that list.

In the film, an all-girl punk group named Ms. 45 (which is not only a rad band name, but also an excellent genre reference) are shredding their way across America on a “tour”, playing dive bars and getting into brawls with the locals. They prove themselves to be proficient in combat — kicking handsy drunkards off the stage while never missing a beat — and they catch the eye of a local scout, who’s casting for a different kind of headlining act. The girls soon wind up at the mercy of a community of zealots who surgically remove one of each of their arms, replace it with crude weaponry, and throw them into a “Gridiron” ring for gladiatorial combat. Under the watchful eye of the community’s Emperor (Julian Richings, Anything for Jackson), they must spill blood to appease the gods.

Spare Parts thrums with a skull-smashing punk-rock spirit. Practical effects are gruesomely fun, with exaggerated sound effects that are — at times — shudderingly effective. One surgery scene uses minimal soundtrack to highlight the “sssschink” of a surgical scalpel and peeling of flesh. It may not seem like much, but it helps build an atmosphere that makes your skin crawl.

The film revels in its outlandish setting. When Ms. 45 are innocently brought to the junkyard that will soon serve as their prison, they comment on the ridiculously suspicious location. One of them asks their escort “Have you never seen a horror movie?”. It’s a self-aware moment that works well, because seriously, that place screams “you’re going to die here”. To avoid dull one-note visuals, the vehicular graveyard that will now serve as their home is lit with bright gels, enriching the environment with tone and color.

Spare Parts

All the flash and gore aside, I have to wonder if some scenes were left on the cutting room floor, because there are admittedly some points where the gaps in both logic and plot are noticeable. We miss moments that inform other lines of dialogue (one scene starts with the line “you love him, don’t you”), there’s an emotional reveal that’s predictable yet still logically doesn’t make a ton of sense, and there are regular mentions of a “trinity”, the importance of which is heavily referenced but not really explained. The editing of these scenes makes the flow a bit disjointed, and some dramatic bits feel wedged in, but the overall vibe of the film maintains a balance of attitude thanks to the spunky performances of Ms. 45.

The band has good chemistry, with a believable tension between guitarist Emma (Emily Alatalo, Mother!) and singer Amy (Michelle Argyris, General Hospital), who also happen to be sisters. When they get into arguments and roll eyes at each others’ behavior, it’s immediately recognizable to anyone with a sibling. You know what that kind of rivalry looks and feels like, especially when shoved into a cramped van and driven across America. Ms. 45’s drummer Cassy (Kiriana Stanton, The Expanse) and bassist Jill (Chelsea Muirhead, Slo Pitch) balance out the sisters’ bickering and bring emotional resonance to the fate of the band.

Understandably, fight scenes are a heavy component to Spare Parts. Now, as a bit of an action movie nerd I can be rather picky, but I am also a huge fan of practical effects and grindhouse gore, which are both used well here. The battles are an all-out brawl for survival, strung out on anarchy but juuust missing the punch of true riot grrrl attitude. They’re effective, but don’t fully meet their true furious potential. The Gridiron shows they’ve got a scrappy fightin’ spirit, but it’s when the girls are screaming their opening song and ripping riffs on stage that you really believe them as the badasses they are.

When the band is in their element, they’re empowered by their instruments; a six-stringed axe can be just as effective as a sharpened one. I would happily watch another film with Ms. 45 fighting their way through their cross-country tour, scoring their own bar brawls (like a low-budget indie horror version of Spice World).

Of course, as a film about a band being forced into epic and deadly combat, music is integral. Composers Andrew Gordon Macpherson and Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeil (who have also teamed up for Random Acts of Violence and Dark Side of the Ring) push everything forward with grungy guitar riffs that resonate. I have had Ms. 45’s signature song stuck in my head for a few days; it’s catchy, and it’s great music for kicking ass.

Spare Parts rocks a gutteral grindhouse energy, rolled out with enough flash to keep it fresh. It has a fun concept that acts as a great hook — who doesn’t love a bit of surgically enhanced gladiatorial combat — and it’s executed well.

I still left it feeling like I must have missed some things in editing, but it doesn’t affect the overall enjoyment of the film. This is the second directorial credit for Andrew Thomas Hunt (Sweet Karma), but as one of the founding partners of genre film sales/distribution company Raven Banner Entertainment, his extensive work as a producer (For the Sake of Vicious, Psycho Goreman, Lifechanger, Trench 11, and many more) shows that he knows what makes a movie work.

Spare Parts is a pushy punk rock rumble. It knows its target, and throws everything it’s got at that bloodied bullseye. It may occasionally miss the mark, but it’s got enough fight to call it a win.

Spare Parts will be available on VOD, Digital, DVD and Blu-ray on June 1, 2021. You can click here to check out the trailer.

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Movie Reviews

The Vord Review: The Mythology Is Free. Everything Else Costs Something.

Published

1 day ago

May 4, 2026

Luna Gray

Here is what drew me to The Vord: the premise is the kind of thing that only works if someone actually takes it seriously. An ancient Nordic entity bound to a corrupt priest, sent to claim a woman’s soul as an offering to something older and worse, while that same entity is also her spiritual guardian. I wanted this film to work.

It does not fully work. But it is trying to do something interesting, and that makes it worth watching.

Writer-director M.T. Maliha’s feature debut arrives on UK digital May 4 via Miracle Media.

What Maliha Is Going For

The setup puts Jillian between two competing forces pulling at her from opposite directions: the Catholic Church, which has colonized her spiritual life and now turns out to harbor a priest who has sold himself to something ancient, and her pagan roots, which the film treats as something alive rather than something historical.

The entity called The Vord sits above both of these, watching, bound to the priest by a deal that requires it to deliver Jillian’s soul to the Old One in exchange for its own redemption. The theological architecture here is actually interesting. Can something that exists outside human moral categories be held accountable to them? Can an entity that has survived centuries of watching humanity be moved by one woman’s particular situation?

Maliha has said the horror she was after was psychological, the confusion of faith and will rather than gore or jump scares. Midsommar works because it treats pagan tradition as something that believes in itself. The Witch works because its supernatural architecture is airtight. The Vord is reaching for that register but never sticks the landing.

Where the Film Breathes

There are moments here that find what they are looking for. The film understands that dread does not need noise to work, and in its quieter stretches, something is present in the frame that earns the atmosphere.

The mythological framework, pagan tradition framed not as superstition but as a parallel system of real spiritual authority that the Church has spent centuries trying to bury, gives the film a tension that does not depend on the effects budget to land. That part works without costing anything extra. Maliha clearly did her research and cares about this material.

The Part That Is Hard to Get Past

The cast is committed. That is what I want to say first, because it is true. The cast is fully committed to this material, and commitment matters. The problem is that the script does not always give them the footing they need to stand on, and when it does not, the gaps are visible.

The scenes that depend most heavily on dialogue to build tension are the ones that struggle the most. The Vord is a film where the horror is supposed to live in what people say to each other, in revelation and betrayal and spiritual crisis, and those scenes require a level of precision in both writing and performance that is not consistent here. Some of the more ambitious emotional confrontations in the second half land somewhere between affecting and slightly stiff. There is nothing cruel to say about that. It is a hard thing to execute, and first films do not always execute the hardest things.

The storytelling also has structural issues that make the mythology harder to follow than it needs to be. The film would benefit from a more disciplined approach to when it reveals information. The narrative shifts do not always land with the weight they are reaching for, and the audience ends up doing more work than they should to stay oriented inside the mythology.

The Budget Is a Real Factor

Psychological horror is one of the most budget-sensitive genres there is. It needs control of every element, the sound, the light, the silence, the space between what is shown and what is not. These things are expensive, and the gap between what The Vord wants to do atmospherically and what the production can fully deliver is visible throughout. This is not a criticism so much as a description. Maliha is attempting a film whose entire emotional register depends on precise atmospheric control, and she does not always have the resources that precision requires.

Working within budget constraints while making folk horror is genuinely one of the harder problems in low-budget filmmaking. Caveat pulled it off on a shoestring because it found the specific visual grammar its story needed and stayed inside it. The Vord has not fully found that grammar yet.

Worth Seeing Anyway

The Vord is not the film it wants to be. But the film it wants to be is more interesting than most of what is on offer in this corner of horror right now, and Maliha is worth watching as she figures out how to make it. The mythology she is drawing from, the premise she has built around it, the question of whether the thing guarding you and the thing hunting you can be the same entity, these are good materials. Good materials in imperfect hands are still good materials.

This is a debut. Give it the weight that deserves.

The Vord is streaming on UK digital from May 4 via Miracle Media.

Movie Reviews

‘ZombieCON Vol. 1’ Gets the Con Right. The Zombies Arrive When They Want To.

Published

7 days ago

April 28, 2026

Luna Gray

ZombieCON Vol. 1 follows Rocket’s Rockets, a cosplay crew who are three-time regional anime convention champions, two of whom also wrote the film alongside their director, and it delivers a genuinely heartfelt love letter to nerd culture.

Just think Knights of Badassdom, a horror film that needs you to understand why these people care about what they care about before it can ask you to care about them. Although, I think the whole “Cosplay is lame”! Thing died out a long time ago.

The Comedy

The practical makeup effects look like the work of actual cosplayers competing, not Hollywood’s approximation of cosplayers competing, and the distinction is the difference between a film that is looking at this world from the outside and one that has been living in it.

The characters carry the specific mixture of expertise and softness that comes from living inside a somewhat shunned culture. However, ZombieCON Vol. 1 leans into that culture in a loving, non judgemental way.

The Scott Pilgrim energy in the fight staging earns its references rather than just pointing at them. The anime visual grammar is sincere, not ironic, which is the only register in which this kind of thing is actually funny. The film borrows inspiration from just about everyone but somehow manages to do it respectfully.

The Cast

Punkie Johnson came to this from Saturday Night Live, and the gap between her and the rest of the ensemble is perceptible in every scene they share. She finds the timing on lines that are still looking for their timing, lands the joke at the exact moment before the scene needs to move on, and the effect is that everything around her becomes more controlled in her presence.

Erin Áine as Claire carries the film’s stranger turns without explaining them. The character is asked to move from one kind of story into another, several times, in ways the film does not prepare you for, and Áine moves with it without telegraphing the transition or breaking register. Manny Luke’s Rocket is calibrated to produce friction from the opening scene, and Luke commits to it without softening it or winking at the audience about it.

What It Is

ZombieCON Vol. 1 has a first act that takes thirty-one minutes to produce its first zombie, a budget that shapes what the horror can do once the horror arrives, and a cast that makes both of those things survivable.

The audience for this kind of film has been burned before by entries that treat cosplay culture as the setup for a punchline. This one does not do that. It lives inside the culture rather than observing it, and the result is a horror comedy that earns the affection it is asking for even when the seams are showing.

ZombieCON Vol. 1 is free on Tubi.

Movie Reviews

‘Don’t Die’ Is a Good Friday Night Horror Film And That Is Enough.

Published

1 week ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Don’t Die hits UK digital April 27 via Miracle Media. Benjamin Stark wrote and directed it. It played Panic Fest 2024 and spent the better part of two years making the quiet festival rounds, waiting for the right audience to find it. That audience is you.

What Happens

Jenks, played by Theodus Crane, needs medication he cannot afford. He breaks into a small-town pharmacy after hours. This was supposed to be clean. Nobody was supposed to be there. The pharmacist, Julia, played by Virginia Newcomb, was working late. She gets shot. Not knowing what else to do, Jenks takes her exactly where she tells him to take her.

This turns out to be a remote cabin run by a small collective quietly distributing medication to people who cannot access it through legal channels. The Robin Hood framing is warm, and the film offers it genuinely before slowly removing the warmth.

The Turn

The group running the cabin is not irrational. They believe what they are doing matters. They believe the math is simple. People need blood and organs, medication costs money, two strangers showed up and nobody outside knows where they are. Jenks figures out what that math adds up to about two minutes before the film shows it explicitly, and Crane plays the moment of comprehension exactly right. Quiet. Still. The kind of fear that does not move.

Stark earns the horror here because the people doing terrible things are not doing them out of cruelty. They have a system. They have a purpose. No villain monologue. No sadistic speech. They are calm and businesslike about it. That calm is what makes the third act work. Horror is rarely as effective as when the threat makes a kind of sense.

The Cast

Crane carries it. He plays Jenks as a man who keeps choosing decency as the available options narrow, and that consistency is what makes the back half hit as hard as it does. The performance never reaches for sympathy. It does not need to.

Newcomb as Julia is the other weight-bearing wall. She has the harder job. Her character moves from victim to something more complicated without the script telegraphing the shift. She handles it without calling attention to the handling.

Joshua Burge rounds out the central trio as Randy, the friend who shows up when needed and clocks the situation faster than any reasonable person should. If you don’t have a Randy in your life, make sure to get one.

What It Is and Is Not

Don’t Die was marketed as horror. It earns the label by the end, but it arrives there through crime thriller territory, and the patience of the first two acts is deliberate and correct. The tension builds quietly. When the horror finally arrives it lands harder because of the time spent getting there.

The budget limitations are present and real. Small locations, a tight cast, minimal spectacle. Stark works within them rather than against them, and for the most part it does not show. The pacing stumbles in the back half, running about five minutes longer than it should in the wrong places. There are moments where the momentum stalls. Neither is fatal.

It does not have much to say about healthcare beyond using it as a mechanism for the plot. That is fine. Not every film needs a thesis. This one tells a good story, maintains tension across most of its runtime, delivers a few genuine scares, and knows exactly what it is. Most low-budget horror manages one of those things.

Don’t Die is on UK digital now. Good Friday night film.