Abruptio
Lester Hackel is a man who has new problems to go along with his existing issues, a grown man with thinning hair who attends Alcoholics Anonymous and lives at home with his parents, his badgering mother and his indifferent father who never looks up, watching horror movies in his bedroom and recently dumped by his girlfriend who told him his obsession with videogames was creepy and now waking to find a scar on the back of his neck.
A small bomb planted inside him which will decapitate him if he fails to follow instructions relayed to him via text messages, he is directed to a series of rendezvous with similarly coerced accomplices or the chosen victims they are to eliminate directly by shooting them or indirectly by leaving deadly booby traps, but despite initial hesitation once the first body falls Les begins to find the later killings become easier.
Produced over a period of eight years from the first voice recordings of the cast to eventual release, Abruptio is written and directed by Evan Marlowe, an oddity more interesting for its presentation than the increasingly loose script which abandons any notion of logical progression for an approach closer to freeform association as it leaps about randomly from mustard gas and mass murder to puréed people and alien impregnation towards a disappointing conclusion.
The voices including Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s James Marsters as Les, A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Robert Englund, the late Sid Haig of House of 1,000 Corpses and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Christopher McDonald as the police chief who tortures Les to obtain a confession to crimes unspecified even though there is knowledge of the murders he has committed, is he a puppet and if so who or what is controlling him?
The physical realisations of the characters mannequin-like prosthetics with occasional animated news reports such as the assassination of the president and the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, neither subsequently mentioned again, Abruptio is a plunge into the cold waters which run through the uncanny valley, undeniable in the squishy latex reality of their flesh but disturbing with their polyester hair, blinking eyelids, imperfect skin and bad teeth, but as impressive as the renderings they are little more than a gimmick which is insufficient to support a feature film.
Les constantly in the dark, reacting rather than comprehending, the premise and format are established quickly but never develop and despite the mounting bodycount Abruptio is neither as bold and inventive as Mad God nor as outrageous and subversive as Team America, never questioning whether everyone held hostage to meaningless employment and circumstances is a puppet and instead closer to The Machinist with a conclusion which actually diminishes the undertaking with a cop-out revelation which renders the commitment a frustrating waste of time.
Abruptio was screened at Grimmfest in Manchester
