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| All Images Courtesy: Anchor Bay Entertainment |
Anchor Bay Entertainment, one of the original cult-film boutique labels from the very beginning of the DVD era, which folded in the mid-2010s (after a slow death, having been bought by Starz and later Lionsgate), has just relaunched as a modern blu-ray label. Clearly aiming to return to its original roots as a distributor of cult and independent genre films, Anchor Bay’s initial roster of releases consists mostly of new, oddball indies boasting impressive casts of cult/horror icons. The most exciting of these is almost certainly Abruptio, a bloody, ultra-darkly-comic horror film with an impressive cast including James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Hana Mae Lee (the Pitch Perfect and The Babysitter films), Christopher McDonald (Happy Gilmore, Requiem for a Dream), Rich Fulcher (The Mighty Boosh), Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), actor/filmmaker Jordan Peele (Key & Peele, Get Out), and the last-to-be-released performance by the late Sid Haig (The Devil’s Rejects). And the most fascinating hook of the film? It’s all puppets. Grotesque, fleshy puppets, acting out the film’s depravities. It’s a fascinating watch – a grim, violent, often uncomfortable watch, but one which reveals layers and some very interesting, unexpectedly thoughtful themes as it goes on. Definitely not for everyone, but a very unique film which is highly deserving of the distinction as the new Anchor Bay’s first big special edition.
Les Hackel (James Marsters, playing very much against-type in a role that could not be any less like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Spike) is a depressed, apathetic sadsack of a guy whose life is going nowhere. He’s stuck in a dead-end job that he hates, still lives at home with his overbearing parents who treat him like a child even though he’s 35, his girlfriend just left him because she couldn’t deal with how depressing he is, and he’s attempting to get sober after realizing he’s become an alcoholic to keep himself numb. Then one day he wakes up and feels a strange incision on the back of his neck, and his equally loser-ish best friend (Jordan Peele) says he has one too. They soon learn that mysterious forces have implanted bombs at the base of their skulls, and whoever is responsible starts giving them orders: commit horrible atrocities like assigned murders and robberies, or the bombs go off. As he navigates the violent nightmare of his new existence and encounters other reluctant assassins likewise implanted with bombs (among them Sid Haig and Robert Englund), Les realizes that a massive global conspiracy is at work: some kind of shadowy group, possibly alien, is using humanity as puppets, and making everyone kill each other. The film becomes increasingly strange and surreal as Les attempts to figure out the mystery without losing his head.
Abruptio carries us through this surreal nightmare with a very bizarre mixture of tones. Often times it is grim and horrifying, with the premise of average people forced to commit brutal murders under threat of explosion feeling a lot like a Black Mirror episode. At other times the film engages in ultra-dark, gleefully bad-taste gross-out humor that has shades of Kuso and The Greasy Strangler to it (although not quite as extreme as either). This is especially true as the film goes on, and the nature of the conspiracy and what is happening to Les becomes more and more surreal and absurd. But while the film absolutely gets a kick out of wallowing in bad taste, it is not just nihilistic empty provocation, or gross/disturbing for the sake of it – it definitely has something to say. Abruptio uses its gross absurdity in service of a surprisingly powerful musing on alcoholism, depression, and dysfunction, with emotional weight to match the film’s visceral impact.
To create its potent cocktail of psychological unease and visceral discomfort, Abruptio embraces the uncanny valley in a way that I have seen few films attempt. The puppets are very carefully crafted to look realistic and believable enough to portray human emotion and bring the story to life, but weird and wrong enough that they are inherently uncomfortable and uncanny to look at. Their odd fleshiness, covered with realistic hairs and wrinkles and blemishes, is extremely creepy and weird by design. It makes for a very confrontational piece of art, and one that is very effective in achieving exactly the level of discomfort that it wants to. The puppets, brought to life by a small and extremely skilled team of creature effects artists and puppeteers, are fantastic. Their mobile and expressive faces are able to convey all the emotion that the story requires, and they are a pretty amazing technical feat on an indie budget.
The film is also very well-shot, to place them convincingly in the world so that they always feel like full characters, and never like props. We feel the uncanny-valley-ness of them, but we never see them as fake or unconvincing, and rarely see behind the curtain. The illusion is broken just a few times when a character is required to be moving across a space in full-body wide-shot, and the filmmakers were forced to use a human stand-in moving across a physical set wearing a mask of one of the puppet characters, but this thankfully doesn’t happen too often, and I had no trouble overlooking these occasional distracting moments. Probably 90% of the shots in the film were pulled off using actual, practical puppets, and the dedication to the artistic choice in a DIY indie is incredibly impressive. On the filmmaker commentary, they say that this movie was made very very slowly over a full decade, with most of that long production period being the result of having to hand-make everything with very limited resources. All the work and time definitely paid off.
The puppets are likewise brought to life by the movie’s unbelievably good cast. The voice talent in Abruptio is excellent, and likewise absolutely benefitted from the film’s ten-year production period. The dialogue was recorded early in the production, so the puppeteering could be done to match the actors’ already-edited scenes, meaning these lines were mostly recorded the better part of a decade ago. Director Evan Marlowe remarks on the commentary that this was probably the only reason why they were able to get Jordan Peele for his supporting role: his lines were recorded pre-Get Out, so he was still beloved Key & Peele comedian Jordan Peele, but not yet Oscar-winning screenwriter and one of the most iconic genre filmmakers of his generation Jordan Peele, who probably would have been harder to get into the recording studio. And then there’s Sid Haig, who passed away in 2019 and who was very frail and ill in 3 From Hell. His performance here was recorded long before that, so the Sid Haig we hear here, in his last performance to be released, is him at full health, sounding vital and very lively, giving a scenery-chewing performance that may be the film’s most over-the-top. It’s a very fitting farewell to the late horror icon.
Add in a few more iconic character actors like Robert Englund and Christopher McDonald, and you have an insanely stacked cast for such a DIY indie – and all of them have genuinely significant roles, not blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos. As a Mighty Boosh fan, I was also very excited to hear the always-wonderfully-bizarre Rich Fulcher (Bob Fossil himself) pop up. All involved give very strong performances: they all totally understand the weird tonal balance that the film is trying to achieve, giving performances that straddle its peculiar line between grim and comical.
As our tragic, numbed-from-depression lead, James Marsters is excellent. He really gets to show his range here, going against-type hard; if I didn’t know, I would have never recognized that it was him, since he plays so totally the opposite of the type of role we expect from him. Buffy fans are used to hearing his voice full of cocky swagger and charisma (not to mention a very convincing working-class British accent), playing a character who is always certain that he is the coolest guy in the room, and his other roles tend to cast him in a similar type. Here, he plays an even more numb and detached counterpart to the main character from Office Space, crippled by depression and alcoholism and indecision and self-loathing. He’s a meek, apathetic guy, who could easily be totally unlikable if Marsters didn’t give the role just the right amount of sadness, longing, and humanity. The movie is, for all intents and purposes, from his POV, and he is the only character who is in every single scene, so this is really Marsters’ movie to carry, and he absolutely carries it.
While I was very impressed by both the cast and the puppetry, Abruptio is not as uniformly strong in its other aspects. I found the script to be a bit of a mixed bag, with some of its strange turns working more than others. Some of the themes also definitely work better than others: the central themes about depression, dysfunction, and alcoholism definitely worked for me, but the themes about Les’s psychosexual issues with women I found to be pretty half-baked and sketchy, and off-putting in ways that the film doesn’t necessarily seem to intend. It’s possible that over its very long gestation period, Evan Marlowe kept adding more layers of themes into the film, but not all of them work, and they maybe weren’t all needed. The film at least mostly works though, and even when it falters the puppetry and the cast keep it worthwhile.
Of course, mileage definitely will vary with this one. Some people will be totally on-board with its weird, uncanny, deliberately off-putting puppet-nightmare vision, but others will find it pretty repulsive and just not be interested at all. Considering how much the uncanny-valley and the desire to evoke discomfort are baked into its DNA, it is the epitome of a film that is not for everyone. But after reading this, you should have a pretty clear idea of whether it might be for you or not, and if you’re intrigued, you should definitely check it out. It's a very bizarre journey, and often an unpleasant one, but it is an impressive, very unique experience that I think is ultimately worth it, and I’m glad that Marlowe and company had the audacity to pull it off.
- Christopher S. Jordan