You may not have heard of Stopmotion, but I caught the trailer a little while ago and it’s now streaming on Shudder. It looked good, so I thought I would give it a try. The movie stars Aisling Franciosi, Stella Gonet, Tom York, Therica Wilson-Read, and Caoilinn Springall as the main players. Written and directed by Robert Morgan.
The Story
The story isn’t all that original, but it was interesting.
A stop-motion animator struggles to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother.
It’s a small-budget British horror. What caught my eye was the creepy stop-motion animation. I like a decent horror and I have a thing about weird and twisted visuals.
Ella (Franciosi) works as an animator for her mother, Suzanne (Gonet). Due to Suzanne’s age, she cannot move her hands as much anymore. Suzanne comes up with the story, Ella does the stop-motion. Ella feels trapped, as she can’t create anything new from her own imagination.
When Suzanne ends up in hospital with a suspected stroke. Ella is left to her own devices and starts to make a film for herself, not just her mother’s idea. As the film she is making takes shape, it starts to leak into real life for Ella.
She meets a little girl who gives her ideas for her new film, but it seems the little girl is more in control than she is letting on. The little girl keeps talking about the Ash Man, someone no one wants to meet. The Ash Man starts to become a reality.
Stopmotion
What was fantastic in this movie was the stop-motion animation. As you can see from the trailer, it’s excellent. Really well done, and the dolls are very creepy. I liked this. Whoever did the animation, they did a hell of a job.
The cast is very good. Franciosi carries the movie very well and watching Ella slip into insanity is well done. I couldn’t place Gonet, but then it clicked, that she was the ugly one from House of Elliot. That was a BBC drama from a few years ago.
Morgan’s direction is good, not great, but good. What was well done was the sound effects and music. They both added a level of creepiness to Stopmotion and it worked well.
Overall
There is a lot of horror out there, and most of it is churned-out garbage. This was a low budget movie, the budget is credited at about £800k. Stopmotion shows that you don’t have to have a huge budget to make a good movie.
I felt it tailed off a little towards the end. There is a deeper meaning to the ending, which I didn’t quite “get”. Saying that though, I was also tired. Maybe on another viewing I might understand it more. I am willing to give it another try.
Stopmotion is a rather good horror movie without all the tropes of modern Hollywood. If you get the chance, and you like your horror, give it a chance.
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