‘Abruptio’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
Horror movies with puppets: It’s a nutty category with a better track record than you’d think, with “Magic” and “Saw” among its rewarding entries.
But those films look like “Muppets Haunted Mansion” compared to the writer-director Evan Marlowe’s exceptional sociopolitical thriller that’s equal parts body horror exploitation flick, science-fiction survival drama and ultraviolent shoot-’em-up.
Set in a dystopian, kill-or-be-killed America, the film follows a sad sack recovering alcoholic named Les (voiced by James Marsters) who wakes up with a bomb in his neck that’s controlled by a mysterious texter who orders Les on a killing spree. I never thought I’d gag watching rubber-faced, seemingly life-size puppets — the ones from Genesis’s “Land of Confusion” video come to mind — expire in ghastly ways.
And talk about puppet masters: I don’t know what sorcery was called upon by the lead puppeteer, Danny Montooth, and the key puppet fabricator, Jeff Farley. But their uncannily humanoid creations possess extraordinary expressions of despair, anger and, most dynamically, fear and contrition. (Jordan Peele and Robert Englund are among the terrific voice cast.) A magnanimous ending posits the question: What does life mean when the world is stacked against you?
Culture clashes meet gashes and slashes in Sasha Rainbow’s feature debut about a young woman who goes to sickening ends to fit in.
After her father’s death, Wei (Joyena Sun) travels from China to New Zealand to live with family, including her cousin Angela (Jess Hong). The brainy Wei becomes an assistant to her unscrupulous professor, Paul (Jared Turner), in hopes of perfecting a magical skin graft that her father, a scientist, was developing. In a “Face/Off”-style twist, Wei commits a gruesome act that makes her the popular girl she never was. It’s no spoiler to say that Wei’s barbaric attempts at assimilation don’t end with just one corpse.
Rainbow throws a lot at the screen — “Re-Animator”-inspired blood and guts, “Mean Girls” sass, Takashi Miike outlandishness — and most of it sticks like a glossy face peel. The result is a gruesome but compassionate cautionary tale about the burdens of beauty and the universal human need to feel seen, and loved.
I wouldn’t say that Marielle Heller’s magical-realist film, which she directed and adapted from Rachel Yoder’s novel by the same name, is a werewolf story, even though it’s about a human who morphs into a dog. But it does share many werewolf movie conventions, including macabre physical transformations and a troubled protagonist struggling to understand their origin and purpose.
What differs is the thing that makes this darkly comic parable worth watching: Our leading character is a mother — not the usual wolf man — who finds self-determination and a kind of liberation in her canine metamorphoses. In a beautifully focused performance, Amy Adams imbues this character with shifting measures of tenderness, anger and pathos, even when the script makes the subtexts obvious.
The movie has divided audiences over its depiction of motherhood as a vampiric career sucker. I think it takes guts for a director to make a mommy a monster, even more so when the creature is a frolicsome, cutie-pie pooch who proudly answers to Nightbitch.
In French, this film from the Canadian writer-director Annick Blanc is called “Jour de chasse,” or “Hunting Day.” It’s a more precise name than the silly English title that makes this provocative and intensely entertaining thriller sound emptier than it is.
Nina (Nahéma Ricci), a sex worker, gets stranded on a rural road on her way home from entertaining a bunch of bros at their hunting cabin. To her rescue comes Kevin (Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi), one of the nice guys, who takes her back to the men’s cabin, where she’s told she can crash — if she gets hazed. The seen-it-all Nina powers through, but unexpectedly into the picture comes Doudos (Noubi Ndiaye), a Black man who the dudes put through an even more life-threatening hazing. It’s then that Nina grasps that she and Doudos are not exactly welcome in this house of white guy horrors.
While Blanc’s film takes place in a naturalistic setting, the action unfolds in a conceptual sphere that’s both a homoerotic play space and hellscape. Like the neo-Nazi dark comedy “Soft and Quiet,” this film’s message about hate and tribalism is far from subtle. Yet its violent thrills, nasty twists and moral quandaries kept me hooked, and guessing, throughout its brisk 79 minutes.
‘The Calendar Killer’
I checked out this German psychological thriller after being surprised to learn that it recently made Amazon Prime Video’s list of most watched movies. If your idea of a fun winter night is to be under a blanket with a bottle of cheap wine and little need for a story that makes sense, make a date with this psychodrama.
Jules (Sabin Tambrea) works the night shift at a Berlin help line that assists people who are walking alone. One night he receives a call from Klara (Luise Heyer), who says that she and her husband are targets of the Calendar Killer, a psychopath who alerts his victims to the dates they’ll die. That fateful conversation thrusts Jules and Klara into lurid and supernatural worlds of murder, revenge and violent sex.
The director Adolfo J. Kolmerer and the writer Susanne Schneider (adapting Sebastian Fitzek’s novel) seemed to want to address serious issues like mental illness and domestic abuse through a horror lens. What they ended up with is sensationalism and melodrama in a Lifetime vein. To quote Dorian Corey in “Paris Is Burning”: That’s not a read, that’s just a fact.
