MEAT PUPPETS

In theaters this weekend:

Stopmotion--The peculiar low-tech magic of stop-motion animation has always been one of the special delights of cinema for me; it's one of the reasons I became a movie lover as a child. Because of the work of masters like Willis O'Brien, Jim Danforth, Karel Zeman and the great Ray Harryhasuen, the labor-intensive, expensive technique is often associated with whimsical fantasy or science fiction. But it can be used for nightmarish horror as well, and this nasty, self-referential British chiller, directed by Robert Morgan from a script he wrote with Robin King, takes us to that dark side.

Ella (Aisling Franciosi) is the daughter of famous stop-motion animator Suzanne (Stella Gonet), and an animator herself.  Because she no longer has the use of her hands, Suzanne directs Ella in painstakingly manipulating her puppets; she refers to Ella herself by the affectionate--or maybe not so affectionate--nickname of "puppet," and she's quietly, passive-aggressively tyrannical toward her, constantly unsatisfied with her work, constantly demanding retakes. Ella would like to contribute her own ideas to her mother's work, yet when asked what these ideas are she's stymied, daunted by Suzanne's greatness. 

But when Suzanne falls into a coma, Ella meets a nervy little girl (Caoilinn Springall) in her building who talks her into abandoning Suzanne's project--a traditional tale involving a cyclops--and starting a new stop-motion film based on a storyline she suggests. It involves a terrified girl fleeing through the forest and taking refuge in a cabin, stalked by a hideous figure called the Ashman. She also insists Ella start using actual dead animal parts, and worse, over her armatures. Before long Ella is haunted by visions, some of them pretty hair-raising, of the gruesome characters in her film.

The live action side of Stopmotion has a strong streak of Cronenberg-esque "body horror," while the stop-motion sequences show the influence of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. It's a potent one-two punch of creepiness. This is one of those movies where the line between dreams and reality isn't always certain, but Morgan keeps enough of a coherent narrative that this doesn't become tiresome, and there are freaky erotic touches, as when Ella is having sex, and fingers her lover's back as she would a stop-motion puppet.

Like many films of this sort, when Stopmotion shifts to overtly murderous, gory grapples in its last half-hour or so, it loses some of its macabre potency. But Franciosi, who played the stowaway in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is a compelling presence, and on the whole, this is one of the more memorable horror pictures in a while. The only real complaint is the same one that applies to most films that showcase stop-motion: there isn't enough stop-motion.