A Surreal, Synthetic Nightmare! “Abruptio” Available on Blu-ray!
35-year-old Les Hackel is stuck in a rut. He has a numbing, pushing paper office job, he lives with his overburden mother and an absently present father, his gossiping girlfriend dumps him, and life, looking forward, looks bleak and unexciting. When he learns there is an explosive device implanted in the back of his neck, Les is pushed into a plot that uses people do life or death dirty work without a choice. The odd, ugly texted assignments have him interact with a medley of colorful, unsavory characters also under the thumb of the unseen puppeteers and force blood onto his hands. Happening simultaneously around him, society begins to crumble after the U.S. President is assassinated and anarchy roams the streets. He meets Chelsea, a young college student looking for refuge from chaos, and the two slowly form a bond of support and affection that’s slowly being threatened by what Les learns might not be of this world.
Unlike anything seen before regurgitating and depicting an undercurrent common theme of extreme guilt, “Abruptio” is the all-puppet, doomsday horror thriller that needs to be seen. Evan Marlowe writes-and-directs only his second feature-length, horror film in over a decade behind 2012’s “Blood Rush” and “Horror House” with a series of shorts in between. The 2023 “Abruptio,” a term used to define pause or separation, is a decade-later elevated experience that conveys an alternate universe impact through the petrifyingly personified use of dolls in the middle of a collapsing world. Marlowe’s HellBent Pictures LLC and Los Angeles based Sweet Home Films embark on the 8-year journey to completion from 2016 to the film’s release in 2023 with Marlowe footing time, energy, and money as executive producer alongside Barry, Kerry, and Susan Finlayson, Ryan Hicks, Martin Lee White, Kerry Marlow, and Anchor Bay Entertainment’s Thomas Zabeck, and Brian Katz with the presenting and physical media distribution rights.
Since pre- to post- took 8 years to completion, “Abruptio” speaks to use from the grave as the late Sid Haig, the bald and bearded stern-looking and wide grin “The Devil’s Rejects,” “Foxy Brown,” and a slew of other genre early genre B-pictures actor and who died in 2019, has a principal supporting role voicing one of the older modeled puppets with a gruff voice and wise-crackin’ dad jokes in what would be one of the revered horror and exploitation actor’s last roles. James Marsters, who is more of a frequent voice actor (“Curses!”, “”Dragon Ball Super”) but has made his mark in live-action television and film (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Shadow Puppets”), voices the protagonist role, an antiheroic, recovering alcoholic Les Hackel with skeletons in his closet that are not initially apparent but made known to be there from his lethargic loafing through life and not saying much of anything until his AA meeting where he notes the bottle being his confident peacemaker. Marsters projects a nice average mid-30-year-old man’s non-distinctive voice juxtaposed against the likes of Haig and others who do standout vocally, such as with Christopher MacDonald (“Happy Gilmore”) as a sadistic police chief and Jorden Peele (“Get Out”) as Les’s loose-mouthed only friend, Danny. The interesting characters, all game to all sort of disturbing behaviors and violence, are interweaved into Hackel’s do-or-die assignment; some are unsavory like a brutish Englishman mobster like Clive (Darren Darnborough, “20 Feet Below: The Darkness Descending”) or the germaphobe arsonists of school age children in Mr. Salk (Robert Englund, “A Nightmare on Elm Street”) but there are also grounded personalities that support and need supporting. Hana Mae Lee (“The Babysitter: Killer Queen”) plays her puppet double who’s under the oppression of a societal breakdown and she finds solace in the teetering guilt of Les Hackel and the two find a common quietude that helps them cope until subversion rears its ugly head, yet again. Rich Fulcher, Sohm Kapila, Patrick Cavanaugh, Kerry Finlayson, Carole Ruggier, and John Wuchte, rounds out the cast of voices.
Unlike anything you’ve ever seen before in a first of its kind medium of puppetry that’s unsettling and unique. Humanoid faces molded into individual personalities have a pseudo-skin texture appearance stitched with superlative detail in a five o’clock shadows, fine hair fibers, properly placed facial spacing, and a skin tone that’s not different from mine or yours. Yet, what makes Full Moon’s special effects artist Jeffrey S. Farley’s puppet so damn effect is the devil in the details they lack: ageless pores and wrinkles, no eye movements beyond blinking, lips that flap up and down but again don’t move past a vertical motion, and a loose, rubbery skin like an oversized mask that doesn’t quite fit right. Puppetry rods helmed by Danny Mantooth and Jonathan C.K. Williams have seamless Sesame Street gesticulation but when shooting is from afar and not shooting from chest up, a warm body animates the lower half without the use of a puppetry rods, and this intermingle weaving method messes with the mind that puts into question the surrealism being witnessed. With that suspicious surrealistic element circulating, “Abruptio” pushes the antiheroic Les Hackel to recall and confess a crime he cares not remember and in trying to set that haunting guilt aside, Les is thrusted into a quicky corroding world that sets him centrally ablaze with murderous missions conducted in a crumbling global society by ubiquitous, subverting plotters orchestrating under clandestine means. Guilt dispatches phantasmagoria in droves in “Abruptio’s” especial brand of horror and science-fiction.
Who would have thought the complexities that that string together the human soul could be conveyed so poignantly, so precisely, through puppetry? Evan Marlowe did and his film, “Abruptio,” is a masterful marionette of mixed melancholy and optimism when everything seems hopeless. A part of the first batch of releases from the revived Anchor Bay label, “Abruptio” comes to Blu-ray on an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD25 capacity. The compression on the 25gig disc does not dilute the picture quality and digital reproduction presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. As mentioned previously, puppet skin textures have an uncomfortable likeness to real human skin, dotted with stubble, wrinkled by time, and patched with faux fur to give simulate head hair and facial hair. Yet, high-def captures miniscule details in the rubber-like fabric that develops folds or hummocks across the surface. Certain aspects of the face are exaggerated to nightmarish levels, such as the wide-open eyes or large appendages like in Sal’s Gonzo nose. Age distinctions are wonderfully apt to create the type of person and persona and the human movements from a distance compared to the closeups have a seamless complement to where you don’t know where the actual puppet move ends and where the person movement begins. Blacks are a softer dense and the purposefully hardscape of urban and suburban environment, sprinkled with animation television bits, does fan a diffusion of natural and synthetically coated objects to match current mise-en-scene. The English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo invites lossy audio into an eclectic range of gunfire, electrical currents, and flying unidentifiable objects whizzing just overhead. Spatial distance is affected the most by not clearly marking the effect in relation to our perspective, which is mostly through Less Hacek’s eyes or in an omnipresence around Hackel and creates an anemic audio layer that doesn’t punch like it should. Dialogue renders over good enough to thwart a tough concept when understanding conversations with a mouth flexion with no expressive movements of the lips or corners of the mouth needs a little support when gesturing can’t cut it. English subtitles are available. Bonus features contain two audio commentaries – one with writer and director Evan Marlowe and producer Kerry Martowe and the second has puppeteer Danny Montooth – and a featurette A New Kind of Horror has interviews from voices actors, such as Robert England, Jordan Peele, and James Marsters, and the crew, such as director Evan Marlowe. Unlike Anchor Bay’s other initial batch release, “Abruptio” comes with a cardboard O-slip with stretched, blood sprayed-skin of the puppet faces overtop the Blu-ray Amaray that houses an illustration of a marionette hand and puppet silhouettes. The disc is pressed with the same image and there is nothing else inside. The region free release has a runtime of 95 minutes and is not rated.
Last Rites: Twisted and grotesque, yet still remarkably human, the separation ambiguity between puppet and man is “Abruptio’s” gift to fans of peculiar films.
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