‘Parts Unknown’ Review
Stars: William DeCoff, Alexandra Cipolla, Sarah Michelle, Lizzie Havoc, Alexander Hauck, Ralph Regine, Christina Costello, Stephen Cwiok, Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts, Melantha Blackthorne | Written and Directed by Richard Chandler
You would think that the worlds of horror and professional wrestling would meet and make magical beautiful music together, wouldn’t you? Both are brash, bright, crazy and incredibly fun when they’re good. Sadly… both are bloody awful if done poorly. I’ve seen a few movies that have attempted to blend horror and wrestling (WrestleManiac, Monster Brawl) and I’m yet to see one that has done it particularly well. So… is Parts Unknown, directed and written by Richard Chandler (Witch Hunt), a wrestling horror flick that manages to blend the two mediums into an entertaining film?
It’s a simple premise, as you’d expect, with a violent family of wrestlers (not sports entertainers) who look for another way to satisfy their lust for blood. That’s the plot. That’s it. There’s some sort of supernatural plotline that dips in and out, but mostly Parts Unknown is a stitched together head-wound of random acts of extreme violence and lots (and lots) of gore. The characters have little-to-no build, the performances across the board are pretty terrible, and the film looks like it was shot on a Handycam. Am I being cruel? I don’t think so. I think that if you’re a horror fan, you’ll think this is a very poor horror movie. If you’re a wrestling fan, you’ll think this is a very poor wrestling movie. If you like both things, you will, like me, think this is a disaster and another title to add to the small but growing list of failures in this niche category of film.
If you’re thinking of watching this so you can see some well known wrestling personalities from the past… don’t bother. We get the legendary Jake “The Snake” Roberts’ voice a bit, but otherwise there aren’t any household names to be found in Parts Unknown. Now, I don’t mind that fact. I don’t need to see Road Warrior Animal try to gut Jim Cornette while Billy Gunn and Jim Duggan watch, but I do need to be entertained by a story of some kind. This felt like a muddles and messy compilation of budget gory violence, violence that becomes extremely repetitive quite quickly.
I feel like I’m being overly negative about this, but when the credits rolled at the end I was flummoxed when I tried to come up with a compliment sandwich. There’s very little good to say about this, but if you like gory sequences featuring various body parts being mutilated by wrestlers and aren’t after anything more than that, then perhaps you’ll really enjoy this. Otherwise, give it a miss while we wait to see if anyone will be able to take horror and pro-wrestling and successfully merge them together.
* 1/5
Parts Unknown is out now on DVD and Digital from Wild Eye Releasing.