ABRUPTIO **** USA 2023 Dir: Evan Marlowe. 109 mins
Refreshing takes on similar tropes that have been done to undeath are quite rare. The horror genre is seeing this in some film work such as Piggy (2022) or dare I suggest Pearl (2022) and Barbarian (2022). Evan Marlowe’s labour of love film Abruptio (2023) comes into this fold with an unsettlingly funny, gory piece of work told entirely with life-like puppets.
These are not the puppets of Charles Band’s Puppet Master series, Small Soldiers (1996) or others. Director Evan Marlowe describes them more like The Dark Crystal (1982) and the short lived television series. For me, the figures look more like people who had the real medical procedure of a face transplant. The beings move about the film, speak, and do dastardly things, and kind things all with the look of The Autons crashing through shop windows in the Dr. Who episode Spearhead from Space (1970).
Abruptio (2023) took eight years to make from start to finish. The basic story is Les Hackel (voiced by James Marsters) is a thirty-year-old non-descript office worker with overbearing parents. Hackel was recently dumped by his girlfriend so he is alone socially in terms of most friends. One night in shades of Zontar, The Thing from Venus (1967) he finds an incision in his neck. His friend Danny who has an incision (voiced by Jordan Peele] says it’s a bomb.
You have moments when the police want Les Hackel to confess to a crime that he doesn’t know he committed so he is tortured. Messages start coming in to his brain forcing a paranoid Les to team up with all sorts of people he meets leading to committing heinous acts. As the violence around him continues to escalate, he meets Chelsea (voiced by Hana Mae Lee) and the two try to figure out what is happening to their world. The paranoia, suspicion, and gore floating around the film is a visual feast. You have warehouses, grinders where naked female corpses are liquified, abandon fairgrounds, flying aliens, naked shower moments, lots of blood, stomach contents and tentacles.
Abruptio (2023) is a blend of quirky color, shadowy lighting and music in a dark fun paranoid film. The action moves swiftly, and the people in this work are all interesting and do add to the story.
Character names in the film are usually not chosen at random. The idea that we are all puppets in this world that respond to messages is simplistic. The title Abruptio is a medical condition in which the placenta can separate partially or completely causing the baby to not get enough oxygen and nutrients in the womb. This could be a comment on the world, the people in the film and their broken paranoid attitudes. The lead character Hackel could have a link with Ernest Haeckel who produced embryo drawings in 1868 causing great controversy and with theories on evolution called Biogenetic law. Clive Barker also wrote the necrophiliac “Haeckel’s Tale” which was dramatized in the Masters of Horror television series. Themes of birth and death all run through Abruptio (2023) with the blood.
Abruptio (2023) features the voice performances of James Marsters, Robert Englund, Jordan Peele, and lastly Sid Haig as bombastic promoter Sal Cheek in what was to be his last performance. This film features a dedication to Mr. Haig during the end credits. However, the puppets themselves, the mixture of live action and those unnerving close-ups with the dead eyes that seem alive are all disturbing to look at giving the movie yet another edge of strangeness to make the audience uncomfortable. Something out of the ordinary in genre and well worth a look for those with a taste for the odd.
Review by Terry Sherwood