Stopmotion is really messed up. That’s an easy descriptor for weird cinema but when it’s applicable, it’s applicable. This is one seriously messed up movie that starts pretty sane and goes bugnuts by the end.

It’s about a woman trying to finish her mother’s last stop motion film… before being distracted by a little girl who probably binge watched Phil Tippet’s Mad God every day for a month. She starts work on a new, far more goopy stop motion film.

First of all, for a movie called Stopmotion, there’s a surprising lack of actual stop motion in it. The majority of the film takes place in real life meat space. She’s working on a stop motion film and we see excerpts from it, but I was fully expecting an army of stop motion creatures to chase her around with knives. It’s not that movie… that movie’s been done before.

Instead, the first hour is a surprising slow burn movie about making a movie. It has some creepy, icky, dream-like moments, but it didn’t do anything that blew my socks off. It can be unsettling and surreal with its visuals and sound design… but I kept thinking the pacing was off.

But then the final act takes place. I don’t usually get queasy in horror movies. I’ve watched the drippiest, grossest, ooey-gooiest and shrugged it off. This movie got me. It got me bad. I was cringing in my chair at a body horror scene that, in other hands, would just be Tuesday. But it unnerved me… purely from good practical effects, sound design, and editing.

And oh that sound design… it’s bad enough when its the sound of a metal armature where it doesn’t belong, but add in the meat sounds? Ugh.

Those with a low tolerance for ick, especially around one’s own body, should stay away… or go rush to see it (depending on your tolerance for, and desire to be, grossed out). Me? Anything that makes me this physically uncomfortable is something that deserves some (arms-length) love.

Score: 91