Abruptio is a horror movie that took about a decade to complete thanks to mainly using puppetry with an extensive post-production process. It’s an interesting, but also odd-looking movie that you can’t quite look away from due to the detailed, bug-eyed characters and excessive violence (which I’m not complaining about). Despite using puppets, it’s definitely not a kid’s movie — there’s a lot of blood (albeit CG blood mixed in with some practical), gore, violence and even a little puppet nudity for good measure.

The story focuses on Les (voiced by James Marsters of Buffy the Vampire-fame), who works a boring white-collar office job and still lives with his parents. One day Les receives a mysterious text saying he has a bomb in his neck and after witnessing someone close to him lose their head to said-device he realizes he has no choice but to do whatever the text says. Les soon finds himself committing a series of heinous acts, most of which involve murder, and the occasional disposing of bodies. Luckily for Les, he does get rewarded for doing these dirty deeds, so it’s not all bad, I guess?

Meanwhile, civilization as we know it seems to be collapsing around him, but that's neither here nor there, as Les has much more important things to do, like getting the dang bomb out’ve his neck. Along the way Les meets some strange and eclectic people (also with neck-bombs) who are also tasked to do things, so they’re often told to team up. As if the film’s story wasn’t bizarre enough as it is, it somehow gets more absurd as it goes on, eventually leading to a pretty silly climax, and unfortunately, copout finale.

Clocking in at over 90 minutes, I couldn’t help but feel like the film overstayed its welcome. This is especially felt around the mid-mark, where not a whole lot happens. The whole concept of using puppets for characters also felt a bit gimmicky to me, especially since they clearly use actual people when showing movement with the whole body, like when someone is running away from the camera.

Admittedly, the use of puppets does kind of draw the viewer in, because it’s so odd-looking and essentially underused in mature storytelling, but outside of that, I didn’t really see much of a point to it. I was also under the false impression that the filmmaker’s focus was to stick to practical effects (namely since they’re using practical puppetry), but there’s a lot of CG sprinkled throughout the movie, specifically when there needs to be more blood in a particular scene and it is very noticeable and distracting, almost more-so than the puppets themselves. In fact, the CG is just plain terrible by the end of the movie.

The film would’ve benefited from sticking to practical effects all the way, especially with the blood and gore, but I’m sure they had their reasons (probably time or budget restraints). Either way, the movie was an interesting effort in storytelling that just didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

Abruptio is currently in limited theaters and will be landing on physical media in December.