Puphedz: The Tattle Tale Heart... it's a comic retelling of an Edgar Allan Poe story, with wooden puppets. You think that's weird? Well, it's even weirder than you think.

The overall premise has some potential. A creaky cart being pulled through a desert is revealed to be a traveling entertainer's cart. The actors are wooden puppets, each with its own name (Woodrow Larchbottom III, Douglas "Chip" Fir, etc.), and they take on different roles depending on the day's show. Today's feature is a rendition of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," so Larchbottom plays the narrator, the other puppets take on the other roles, and off we go. But where are we going, and do we want to go there?

I might have been tipped off by the project's name: Puphedz, obviously a play on "puppets." It smacks of "cool dudez" who seem to think that spelling thingz with "z" iz, like, so 21st century, dude. But hey, even cool dudez deserve a fair shake when they make films (not filmz, sorry), and anyway, I really like Edgar Allan Poe, so I thought, hey, let's see what oddball perspective these guys take to the material. It could be quite neat.

Well, as it turns out, this is just a weird piece. Now, weird can be good, and certainly I've enjoyed various animated/claymation films, including the definitely oddball Star Warp'd. But there's a category of "weird" that includes things like... oh, like soy sauce on chocolate-covered pickles. (If any readers out there actually like soy sauce on chocolate-covered pickles, I don't want to know about it.) Things that just don't go together. Like "comedy" and "Edgar Allan Poe story." There are a few interesting moments in the film, in which a certain absurd humor actually works... for a moment. Most of the film, however, is neither funny, nor creepy, nor dramatic. It's just constant over-the-top weirdness that doesn't seem to have much of a point.

It's amazing just how long 34 minutes can be, in subjective time. After what seemed like an endless time of watching The Tattle Tale Heart, I glanced over at the DVD player's elapsed time display. Only eleven minutes? How could that be? Over twenty minutes more to suffer through? Well, suffice it to say that I endured it so that you, dear viewer, won't have to.

The DVD

Video

It's hard to judge the image quality of this DVD, given that the filmmakers have chosen a grainy, low-quality "look" overall (possibly in this way making the best of what they had to work with). In some of the scenes, print flaws are deliberately exaggerated, giving the image a worn look as if of archival footage.

Given the apparent stylistic choices here, I'd rate The Tattle Tale Heart as slightly above average. Color and contrast are both satisfactory, and given the nature of the sets and characters, we get about as much detail as is likely possible. The 1.33:1 aspect ratio transfer preserves the film's original aspect ratio.

Audio

The Tattle Tale Heart's Dolby 2.0 soundtrack isn't really up to snuff... or, possibly more accurately, it compounds the problems of the original source. The voice actor for the main character in The Tattle Tale Heart is difficult to understand, with a mumbled and overly fast presentation of the dialogue that ends up decidedly unclear.

Extras

The main special feature is a fifteen-minute featurette featuring the various filmmakers talking about the Puphedz project. It's a very interesting piece, and the various people involved speak quite articulately about their inspiration for the project, the overall premise, and so on. In fact, it made me feel rather guilty for not liking the final product... but alas, the featurette makes it sound much more interesting than it ended up being, at least for me.

There are also "cast biographies" for the puppets (giving them fictional and rather punning histories), trailers for the film, and a photo gallery.

Viewers have the choice of watching either a 34-minute version of the film (the "director's cut," in a way) or a 27-minute shorter version, with a few scenes cut for pacing purposes.

Final thoughts

In nature, a creature born with one or two mutations may be stronger, better, faster than his fellows, and thus prosper; but one born with too many mutations is likely to just wither and die. So, too, with film: weirdness can be fascinating and productive, pushing the envelope in new and exciting directions... or it can be just plain too weird. Into the latter category falls Puphedz: The Tattle Tale Heart. I suggest skipping it.