I should confess upfront that I am no fan of wrestling. I have nothing against it, for those of you feverishly typing hate comments; like any other sport I’ve just never been interested.
Fitting, it would seem then, that I am charged with reviewing a horror film, Parts Unknown, set in and around the wrestling ring, with little to no knowledge of the sport’s wide appeal. Though, to be fair, despite the story, I don’t know that this movie cares much about wrestling, unless wrestling is literally people screaming while they put their opponents in choke holds and other various positions. Wait. Shit.
The official plot for Parts Unknown deals with a group of disgraced wrestlers who go about murdering people after making some sort of deal with either the devil or a demon. I’m not exactly sure. At certain points, characters seem to have been killed but then arise from the dead unscathed.
I should say now that this movie is deplorable and barely worth writing about. I cannot think of a clever comparison for its awfulness, so instead I’ll use a scene from the film itself to illustrate my pain: Two female wrestlers enter the ring. When one of them appears to win, the other viciously attacks her, lifts her bra and cuts off one of her nipples with what looks like a branch cutter of some sort.
Yes, watching this movie was like having one of my nipples cut off… slowly. I said it. I meant it. I’m here to represent it.
The plot makes no sense and every character just growls and shouts at the others in any given scene, before either murdering them or entering the ring themselves. The fight scenes are poorly choreographed, and the audio is either unfinished or sloppily produced. During the opening scene I thought that maybe the movie was dubbed and that it was why I was seeing characters speak but the lines seemed completely different. Turns out it was just one of many terrible elements of a movie that is so bad, I question my love of all movies now.
I realize the adage is that no one sets out to make a bad movie. Okay. Fine. But what was the motivation behind this one? Like why did the filmmakers need to make this movie? What passion for film, or wrestling, or both, drove them to this result? I would speculate that it was a lot of drugs and many poor decisions.
Parts Unknown is why we cannot have nice things. If you want a better wrestling movie, please seek out Ready to Rumble. It’s a lot of fun and worth more of your time than this nipple cut-off of a movie. If you want a better viewing experience with the title Parts Unknown, I would also suggest Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, a show created by someone worth more than most, who also understood the importance of cinema and producing something truly spectacular.
--Matt Giles
