Director Evan Marlowe‘s Abruptio arrives after five years in editing and post production and it is a messy, uncanny trip, one that cannot stick the landing but certainly has cut the path for others to follow in a very niche micro-genre of puppet horror.
The main draw for me was that Jordan Peele was starring in this, but his cameo is brief, as should always be expected.
Abruptio operates in the genre of the intentionally grotesque and takes full advantage of the uncanny. It’s hard to imagine a better medium for communicating the weirdness that this movie contains. The world is populated by humans with weirdly rigid, muppet-like, humanoid faces, dead pearl mannequin eyes that periodically blink with the help of CGI.
The movie is at its core some boiler plate trauma plot mixed with trauma amnesia. It has some excellent images, usually hyper violent, which the puppetry allows for. It’s a lot easier for a puppet to chop up a bunch of naked, buxom women corpses than it is to do live-action, I guess? A sentence I never intended to ever write and yet here we all are. The shocking images are not able to sustain even the 90 minutes allotted. A lot of the dialogue is disjointed pseduo-philosophy and feels so rigid that it’s hard to tell if it’s intentionally jerky like the way that the actors move in wide shots, their arms stiffly at their sides even as they run, or if the script is intentionally stylized to read like a series of monologues playing against one another.
The depiction of women is of the poorest quality: an annoying girlfriend, a Japanese schoolgirl replacement girlfriend as a reward for doing awful things for a mysterious cabal of terrorists, a nagging mother, a horny nurse, most of the other women in the movie are corpses, but they’re nice to look at. Women’s naked bodies are played for shock value as well, whether its in burlesque, the shower, or in piles on the grindhouse floor, although the effect is never titillating so much as unnerving.
There’s some kudos to sticking to the bit for so long with the serious and hyper violent puppet version of We Can Get Them For You Wholesale, but ultimately whatever original commentary there might be about the immorality of capitalism or the inhumanity of polarized politics post-pandemic is really lost in the weirdly schmaltzy alcoholism storyline and shoe-horned ending.
