Abruptio (Movie Review)

Les Hackle is your quintessential dead end shlub. He has a crappy office drone job he hates, his girlfriend just dumped him, and he still lives at home, playing video games in his mom’s basement. Everything changes one evening when he notices a fresh incision on the back of his neck. He soon learns that his friend Danny has the same incision and he’s convinced it’s a bomb that will explode if he doesn’t follow the instructions he’s receiving in a mysterious text message. When the bomb goes off and Danny is violently decapitated in front of him, it seems pretty clear that Les had better follow the orders he’s being texted lest the same thing happens to him.

Most of the second act of Abruptio follows Les being puppeted from afar by some unseen person with unknown goals. The unique gimmick of the movie is that Les isn’t just being puppeted, he, and all of the other characters, actually are portrayed grotesquely realistic puppets that live smack in the middle of the uncanny valley. There are small CG assists with blinks and mouth movements and the more mobile scenes are actors wearing latex masks and gloves, but every scene in this film is played by a disturbingly lifelike puppet. It’s pretty amazing stuff for a presumably low budget movie and must have taken an unfathomable amount of work to bring to life.

The film took an incredible eight years of production from the initial voice recording sessions in 2015 until its release at the Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier this year. As far as voices go, director/writer/cinematographer/editor Evan Marlowe landed some horror luminaries like Jordan Peele, Robert Englund, Sid Haig (in his final role), along with James Marsters (best known as Spike from the Buffy shows) and veteran character actor Christopher MacDonald.

So aside from the nightmarishly lifelike puppets and an all-star cast what else can you expect from this movie? Most of the movie unfolds as a series of vignettes where Les meets up with another character who also has a bomb implant and the two of them will be forced to commit some awful act. The other person will inevitably end up dead, Les will get some new orders and meet someone else and a new vignette will play out. As it starts to get a bit rote (and all the celebrity cameos wind down) in the third act it morphs into a full-on surreal cosmic freakout. The earlier sections of the movie is a gory but fairly grounded crime spree that feels a lot like the Purge movies, but the final act almost feels like an extended homage to the Phantasm movies.

Ultimately, Abruptio feel destined to become a cult object. A lot of people are probably going to have a hard time getting invested with the puppets. They are truly disturbing looking (those teeth!), even during the mundane scenes, and as beautifully-crafted as they are, they aren’t exactly very expressive. People who will get excited at the thought of a gory puppet-based horror movie (you know who you are) will probably get exactly what they’re hoping for, though. There’s a lot to marvel at in this movie and the amount of labor and time that must have gone into it make it clear that Abruptio is as pure a labor of love as any film can be.