SEQUENCE BREAK (2017)

Studio:       Shudder
Director:    Graham Skipper
Writer:       Graham Skipper
Producer:  Graham Skipper, Lyle Kanouse, Audrey Wasilewski
Stars:     Chase Williamson, Fabianne Therese, Lyle Kanouse, Audrey Wasilewski, Johnny Dinan

Review Score:

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Summary:

A mysterious video game warps reality for an arcade repair technician, threatening his new relationship in the process.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Jerry, the owner of an arcade machine repair shop, attempts to introduce attractive customer Tess to his introverted technician Oz. However, Oz is too engrossed in his work to notice.

Jerry later informs Oz that due to declining business, the shop will close permanently in a month. Jerry also mentions that he will be leaving the shop in Oz’s hands while he visits family.

Oz goes drinking at Audrey’s bar and meets Tess, who recognizes Oz from the arcade game shop. The two of them strike up a conversation, which leads to agreeing to meet the next day.

Meanwhile, a mysterious man with a scar on his forehead leaves a circuit board in a padded envelope on the floor of Jerry’s shop. Jerry investigates the commotion. The man says, “you weren’t supposed to be here” before strangling Jerry to death.

Oz returns to the shop and finds the circuit board. Oz plugs it into a cabinet and begins playing the unusual vector-based game. Oz has strange visions while playing and later dreams of his hand shattering like glass.

Tess meets Oz at the shop before they go out to lunch. Tess kisses Oz during their date, causing Oz to experience a haunting hallucination of Tess.

The mysterious man returns to the shop. He asks if Oz plugged in the game and rants about the “white eye.” The man imparts more cryptic messages about the machine before finally leaving.

Oz plays the game once again. The console joystick and buttons melt in Oz’s hands as the board inside the cabinet mutates. After the game ends and his trance is broken, Oz vomits.

Tess and Oz continue dating. Tess becomes oddly fixated with the strange cabinet, but Oz does not allow her to play it. Tess asks Oz about his abandoned dream to create a video game of his own. The two of them spend a night together inside the shop, during which Oz has another disturbing dream.

The man enters the shop to look at the machine while Tess and Oz are away. When they return, Tess attempts to play the game. The man suddenly appears and screams that Tess shouldn’t touch it. The man insists that Oz has a path to follow and the game is meant for him. Tess calls the cops and the man leaves.

After Tess goes to sleep, Oz plugs in the game’s chip to his computer to research its code. Oz is led to the term “sequence break,” which is video game lingo for actions performed out of their intended order.

Oz plays the game again. This time, he sinks completely into the machine. On the other side, he confronts a mirror image of himself who screams before he wakes back in reality. Oz vomits electronic game cables.

Tess calls Oz to ask about his worsening health. Oz angrily dismisses her suggestion that he should see a doctor. Oz stops responding to Tess’ messages.

Oz’s obsession with the game continues. The man comes into the shop while Oz is unconscious, but he is unable to start the machine. The man sits on the floor to meditate.

Despite advice from bartender Audrey to forget about Oz, Tess decides to stop at the shop on her way home from the bar. Drawn to the arcade cabinet, Tess plays the machine as the man watches her from behind. The circuit board continues mutating. Tess experiences hallucinatory visions and when her game ends, she collapses to the floor.

In the morning, Oz finds Tess lying dead. The man confronts Oz while he grieves and cryptically explains that Oz has to break the unbeatable game. Oz asks if the man created the game. The man responds, “we did.” The man goes on to say that the game is a doorway to the infinite where all things are possible. However, he discourages Oz’s theory that he can resurrect Tess if what the man says is true. The man makes a claim that Oz has a responsibility to break the game before suddenly slitting his own throat and dropping dead.

Oz plays the game. Oz experiences a vision of Tess trying to communicate with him as a hand comes out of the screen. The entire cabinet mutates. Cables attach themselves to Oz and melt his body. When the game ends, Oz separates into two realities.

In a red-tinted reality, Oz plays the shop’s arcade games before discovering a strange computer chip. Oz forces the chip into his forehead and morphs into the mysterious man. He then vanishes.

In a green-tinted reality, Oz rescues Tess when she rises from ooze inside the machine. They fight their way out of the cabinet and back into reality, but hands pull Tess back in. Before she disappears, Tess implores Oz to look between the ones and the zeroes.

Oz opens the machine and sees the circuit board pulsing with slime. Oz pulls out the board and destroys it. Reality rewinds and resets to the story’s beginning. Oz finds a business card for a graphics artist and tells Jerry he is going to work on his own game after the store closes. Jerry tells Oz that a young woman is coming by the shop to look at one of the machines. Tess enters and meets Oz for the first time.

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Review:

As an actor, Graham Skipper is familiar to genre fans for roles in Joe Begos’ “Almost Human” (review here) and “The Mind’s Eye” (review here) as well as Jackson Stewart’s “Beyond the Gates” (review here).  There is only one degree of separation between casts and crews on all of those projects as many of the principals run in the same indie scene circles.  It’s little wonder then that “Sequence Break,” Skipper’s directorial debut, taps into the same throwback themes of Cronenbergian-type terror and synth-soaked 1980s-ness as his likeminded filmmaking friends.

Chase Williamson, in red alert danger of being terminally typecast as a scruff who always looks like he just rolled out of bed, plays an analog man in a digital world.  Oz is the introverted repair technician at an arcade game shop unsurprisingly about to go out of business.  While drowning his sorrows in a drink at a local bar, he meets Tess.  Oz was too busy under the hood of an arcade cabinet to notice when Tess came into the shop earlier.  But she noticed him then and she notices him now.  The two of them strike up a convo based on their mutual interest in Miyamoto and eventually strike up a romance too.

Back at the shop, a mysterious man who resembles the raving panhandler outside of Silver Lake’s Whole Foods leaves an even more mysterious circuit board on the floor.  Oz finds it and is of course compelled by curiosity to get the unknown game going so he can give it a whirl.

Oz embarks on a psychedelic trip to his namesake when sessions with the weird game result in hallucinations, haunting visions, violent vomiting, and an irresistible urge to do it all over again.  The mystery man returns with cryptic warnings about Oz fulfilling his destiny by finding a way to beat the unusually entrancing game.

Meanwhile, the machine’s inner workings begin mutating.  Oz also undergoes a transformation.  Psychologically, he can’t be certain what is real anymore.  Physically, the game seemingly wants to assimilate him.  None of this is good for his new relationship with Tess.  But it is even worse for the unraveling sanity there may be no hope of saving.

“Sequence Break” is a small film whose big ideas are efficiently encapsulated by just five actors working within a handful of cramped locations.  Fabianne Therese as Tess cutely complements Williamson’s Oz to give the couple enough chemistry to keep their romance running.  A giallo Christmas lighting scheme coupled with viscous practical effects charges scenery with the style of retro-edged dread and gross goo that filled 20th century video store shelves to the brim.

“Sequence Break” makes for a solid directorial debut, though its undersized scope won’t give “Tron,” or “Bishop of Battle” for that matter, any sleepless nights regarding who is at the top of the heap for sentient video game thrillers.  The scrappy film fights hard with more heart and more polish than many microbudget movies.  Yet it also shows the seams of its limited resources by asking audience imaginations to meet the onscreen effort halfway.

It’s a trivial quibble, but an illusion-breaker nonetheless, when you can see arcade monitor title screens clearly reading “Donkey Kong” and “RoadBlasters” while the cabinet marquee bears a made-up name like “Space Fighter” or “Lunarium.”  Maybe my arcade 80s upbringing makes me a snobby crank, but I can’t buy into a character waxing nostalgic about a game that never existed, particularly when I can see Mario running along a red construction beam.

When Oz is transported inside the game, the other world is staged as an empty black background with one or two lights illuminating Oz in the fore.  One shot of Oz climbing back out has the monitor catching the light queerly, revealing itself as a plain piece of black board.  Knowing that the right thing to do out of respect for the production is to look the other way doesn’t make such sights any easier to unsee.

Graham Skipper is caught between a rock and a hard place with his movie’s lo-fi sci-fi.  In this sort of situation, you never want a first-time filmmaker with minimal money to bite off more than is being chewed here.  Skipper’s story is the right mix of intimate drama, cerebral tension, and biomechanical body horror achievable with a small crew on a slim budget.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to be a regular connoisseur of this kind of content and be completely bowled over by the fiction or its realization.  Earnest elbow grease is evident.  “Sequence Break” is just a touch too slender in scope to pack a knockout punch as slickly sinister sci-fi.

Review Score:  60

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