Horror Channel Frightfest Review: Sequence Break

Oz (Chase Williamson) is going nowhere fast, content to drift through life.  Quiet and geeky, he keeps himself to himself, spends his days working in a store that fixes and refurbishes old video arcade games but with the store on the brink of bankruptcy he may not even be able to do that much longer.

Things seem to be looking up when he meets the vivacious Tess (Fabienne Therese of Starry Eyes), who visits the store looking for a game for her brother and inexplicably takes a fancy to Oz. As their relationship grows however, Oz finds himself becoming increasingly obsessed with a mysterious game he’s trying to fix while being menaced by a deranged, possibly homicidal, homeless man (John Dinan) who stalks him.

As the game begins to change his body and mind, causing him to hallucinate, warping the fabric of his reality, Oz finds himself fighting both for his life and his relationship with Tess.

A twisted little cyber romance with shades of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, writer/director Graham Skipper’s debut feature Sequence Break (we’re not sure if 2016’s Space Clown counted as a full-blown feature) may bite off more than it can chew but it’s an ambitious, trippy throwback to the bodyhorror of the ‘80s, mixing traditional practical effects and CGI into a gooey, stomach-churning cocktail. The more Oz plays the mysterious game the more organic it becomes, more alive, it’s innards viscous and dripping, it’s circuit boards fleshy, hungry, consuming him. It’s not always clear what exactly is going on but it certainly is memorable. 

As hallucinatory and fragmented as the film is visually, Skipper’s greatest asset is his performers, Williamson and Therese convincing as geek love’s young dream, their interplay quirky and adorable, while Dinan is a wonderfully threatening presence, his malevolent, unhinged rough sleeper every urban dweller’s nightmare. 

While it ultimately doesn’t make a lick of sense, Sequence Break’s cyber fairytale is a brooding, atmospheric, trippy little headtrip.

Sequence Break will appear on Shudder in early 2018