Studio:   Anchor Bay Entertainment
Director: Evan Marlowe
Writer:   Evan Marlowe
Producer: Kerry Marlowe
Stars:    James Marsters, Christopher McDonald, Hana Mae Lee, Jordan Peele, Sid Haig, Darren Darnborough, Robert Englund

Review Score:

Summary:

An ordinary man becomes an unwitting pawn in a strange conspiracy when he’s forced to commit unspeakable acts under the threat of a bomb in his head exploding.

Synopsis:

Recovering alcoholic Les Hackel, a nebbish who was just dumped by his girlfriend Allison and who still lives at home with his overbearing mother Doreen and inattentive father Abe, finds a freshly stitched scar on the back of his neck. Les’s friend Danny, who has the same scar, warns that bombs were planted in their heads by unknown parties who want to blackmail them into committing horrible acts to further an anarchic conspiracy.

Les and Danny see the president assassinated on live television. Revealing he has orders to kill Les, Danny pulls out a gun, but he is unable to shoot his friend. Danny’s head explodes.

Les receives a mysterious suitcase with instructions to open it as his office, which he does. The suitcase releases a toxic gas that kills Les’s coworkers along with his boss Lloyd.

A text message directs Les to a nightclub where he meets standup comedian Sal, who has also become a pawn in the apocalyptic plot. Told to team up, the two men travel to a home where Les is forced to execute a rich mom and dad along with their nine-year-old daughter Janine. Les then receives an order to kill Sal, which he does by decapitating him with a shovel.

Dennis, a police officer, arrives to escort Les to a police station where he meets Chief Richter. Richter demands that Les confess, but Les is confused about what he is supposed to admit to. Assigned an ineffectual lawyer named Mr. Dummkopf, Les is then strapped into a torture device that electrocutes him into unconsciousness.

When he wakes on the side of a remote road, Les receives directions to a warehouse where is instructed to partner with unscrupulous criminal Clive. Together, Les and Clive rob a convenience store where they also kill several men. After Les empties a safe, Clive knocks Les unconscious.

Les wakes up back at the warehouse. Clive leaves Les tied to a chair, but also leaves him with half of the stolen money.

As the Statue of Liberty is destroyed on live TV, a woman named Chelsea Klass enters the warehouse pleading for protection from the dangerous chaos sweeping across the world. Les agrees to help Chelsea and takes her back to the house where he murdered Sal and the family, which the conspirators strangely gave to him along with a car and the cash. Les and Chelsea gradually bond.

Les receives instructions to meet Mr. Salk, who firebombed a schoolhouse to prevent his bomb from exploding, on the roof of a parking garage. Les and Mr. Salk are then directed to a storage unit where they are told to process mutilated human bodies in industrial fans that liquefy them for packaging in barrels.

Les finds his ex-girlfriend Allison among the mangled bodies. Allison begs for Les’s help, but he puts her in the fans anyway. Unable to complete the gruesome body disposals, Mr. Salk stops helping Les, which causes Mr. Salk’s head to explode.

Les returns home to Chelsea. Les tells her how the barrels had the name “Herason” and the symbol of the knot of Hercules on them. Les notes that the name Herason sounds familiar.

From TV news footage, Les and Chelsea realize whoever is behind the ongoing attacks is creating an army of slaves. Inside Sal’s stomach, the two of them find a USB flash drive containing a code in Egyptian hieroglyphics. They also continue hearing a distinctive melody in their heads. When Les plays the melody on a piano, the music opens a door to another dimension where a massive monster emerges from the ground.

Recognizing he is losing his mind, Chelsea takes Les to see Dr. Travers. After hearing Les relay his belief that pureed humans are being fed to a boogeyman, Dr. Travers confines Les to a psychiatric hold.

The doctor’s oversexed nurse, Victoria, hands Les a card for the La La JoyLand amusement park. When he tries to leave his padded cell, Les opens a dimensional doorway to a strange world Victoria calls “The Colony,” where captive women birth bulbous eggs to create a new race. Les tricks Victoria into destroying the eggs. As mutant babies begin emerging, Les rushes back through the door to his world to tell Chelsea that aliens want to annihilate the human race and take over the planet.

Remembering La La JoyLand from his childhood, Les takes Chelsea to the amusement park, which is now abandoned. There, they run into Clive, who knocks Chelsea unconscious with a baseball bat. Les flees. Clive pursues him, but Les lures Clive into a trap where he strangles Clive to death with a rope.

Les returns to the parking lot to find Chelsea missing. Floating aliens with tentacles chase Les back to his car. From the backseat, Chelsea surprises Les by strangling him from behind. Chelsea apologizes by explaining the aliens got to her, and she must now obey their orders like Les does. Les ends their struggle by tearing open Chelsea’s neck.

Les runs to another dimensional doorway that transports him to his mother Doreen’s house. Les discovers Doreen is using the garage as a maternity ward for newborn alien babies she calls “the brood.” Doreen tells Les she wants his help feeding them, but Les moves to cut off their heads with hedge trimmers. Doreen warns Les his bomb will go off, but nothing happens when he decapitates the first alien baby. Doreen then tries wrestling the shears away from Les, but she ends up stabbed in her stomach. Les sets fire to the garage and exits.

Police officer Dennis picks up Les and returns him to Chief Richter. Strapped into the torture device once again, Les insists he still doesn’t know what to confess to. Coerced into thinking harder with another painful shock, Les finally recalls a memory of driving drunk and killing a cyclist on Herason Lane.

With her neck healed, Chelsea enters the police station to ask Les if the constant voices in his head make sense now. Chief Richter allows Les to leave after asking him to think of the dead man’s family. Les kisses Chelsea.

Les wakes up back in reality to realize everything he experienced was a nightmare. To clear his guilty conscience, Les calls the police to confess to vehicular manslaughter.

Review:

At best, Les Hackel can be considered an average Everyman. At worst, Les could be called a sad sack. A balding 35-year-old, Les still lives at home with his parents while working a nondescript office job during the day and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at night. Up until today, he had a girlfriend, but she just broke up with him after deeming Les “kinda creepy,” what with all his “video games and things.”

Knowing the film’s lead character is describable as an ordinary dud, does “Abruptio” sound enticing so far? What if I told you Les’s lame life gets a lift when he discovers his head holds a bomb, which unknown conspirators use to blackmail him into committing horrible acts as part of a plot to create chaos across the world? Oh, did I mention “Abruptio” also plays out with lifelike puppets instead of human actors?

I didn’t do more than cursory research into “Abruptio,” but it sounds like the complete behind-the-scenes story of its creation would be interesting to hear, at least to ears interested in the nuts and bolts of indie filmmaking. Reportedly, voice recording began in 2015 and concluded in 2017 with a stacked cast of notable names. I wouldn’t know what connections writer/director Evan Marlowe has, but he somehow assembled an entire row of tables from any midsized pop culture convention, including “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” James Marsters, Christopher McDonald, Robert Englund, Jordan Peele, and the late Sid Haig.

Initially slated for release in 2020, “Abruptio” got bit by COVID-19 the same as everyone and everything else. Even so, Marlowe admitted in an interview that same year that his film wasn’t even halfway finished, despite six years having passed since the start of production. It would take two more years to complete the movie, another year before “Abruptio” played its first festival, and one more year on top of that to finally premiere to the public.

So what does Evan Marlowe pull out of this potpourri featuring a posthumous performance, an Academy Award-winning talent, a horror icon, and nearly ten years of toiling to bring his bizarre labor of puppeteered love to the screen? Despite how much I’ve wracked my brain, I’m unable to come up with the accurate adjective to put in front of “weird” that can appropriately acknowledge “Abruptio’s” unique aesthetic without giving the wrong impression that it has the irreverent attitude of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, or Seth MacFarlane’s style of adult animation.

Feeling like it takes place in a sideways reality where dream logic lightly pokes at the periphery, the closest comparisons I can come up with to describe “Abruptio’s” vibe are “Dave Made a Maze” (review here) and “Rent-A-Pal” (review here). Oddly grounded, yet simultaneously otherworldly, “Abruptio” deals in outlandish slices of sci-fi like alien invasions, mutant babies, and interdimensional portals, but also in controversial shocks such as a firebombed schoolhouse, institutionalized torture, and a nine-year-old girl having her head blown off along with her parents.

In an ordinary movie, the film’s backdrop of America undergoing an anarchic terrorist attack would be appalling. But because puppets are committing these crimes and experiencing their aftermath, “Abruptio” filters uncomfortable imagery through inherent childhood nostalgia, challenging reactions to find the right direction with a compass that’s been rendered inoperable.

“Abruptio” has humor, though I’m hesitant to over-highlight the movie as a comedy. Sid Haig voices a hacky standup comic whose gleefully groan-inducing jokes attract straightforward laughs. Lines occasionally accent comical interactions, like Les comforting a woman with a drink she sips before quizzically asking, “Cough medicine? Why would you give me cough medicine?” Confused for a different reason, Les responds, “It’s brandy. Top shelf brandy.” A better example of the film’s askew sense of humor can be heard when a frustrated Les, who wants to change his clothes after killing a couple of people, says, “I need to put on something that isn’t covered in skull.” The simple switch of saying “skull” instead of “blood” clicks “Abruptio” half a notch into being just that much more out of the ordinary without lighting a neon sign above its peculiar personality.

The concept combined with puppetry could have easily turned “Abruptio” into a silly movie. Instead, it’s darkly disturbing while being entertaining in a wild way that almost makes you feel conflicted for being amused. Subverting expectations again with an unexpectedly emotional conclusion, “Abruptio” ends as a surprising morality tale that’s never preachy because you don’t even realize you’re watching one until the final few minutes. For those who say they’re sick of sequels and superheroes, “Abruptio” offers a one-of-a-kind viewing experience unlike anything that falls off a Hollywood assembly line.

Review Score: 80