hulking figure emerges from the desert, pulling a cart that bears a stage set meant for puppets. The curtains open, revealing a troupe of wooden actors performing an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" that remains accurate in plot particulars despite a goofy, parodistic tone.
The deranged puppet narrator sits straitjacketed in the corner of a padded cell, vehemently denying that he's mad. As he tells his story, he is tormented by an unseen audience, which laughs uproariously at all of his anguished straight lines, and by an unseen unkeeper, who enjoys practical jokes such as sending an angry bee into the cell. None of this long distracts the narrator from telling the story of how and why he murdered the old man with whom he shared a house ... or from carefully specifying, again and again, that he and the old man were "just" roommates, sharing living quarters only to save money on rent.
After murdering the old man out of sheer revulsion for his distinctly odd left eye, our narrator buries what's left of the corpse beneath the floorboards ... and then entertains two local police officers, while being tormented by the intrusive sound of a vengeful, telltale heart.
Brilliant in design, less so in performance
Winner of the 2002 Screamfest Horror Film Festival's Best Animation Award, "The Tattle-Tale Heart" is in effect almost as schizophrenic as its protagonist. Visually, it's enchanting. The puppets are terrifically expressionistic creatures, simultaneously disturbing and amusing, with textured faces designed to bring the wood grain into sharp relief. The set design is also brilliant, with eerily distorted rooms and deliberately exaggerated artifice that, if anything, enhances the central conceit of a tale told by a madman. Among the best effects is the old man's notorious Eye—in Poe's original tale, enough to drive the loopy protagonist to murder, and in this adaptation, utterly understandable as the source of such an impulse. It's not the kind of thing you want to see across the breakfast table every morning.
Alas, the film's high level of visual achievement is just about its only positive attribute. The character voices are supposed to be comic, but they're so over the top they're merely grating; the protagonist's high-pitched squeal wears out its welcome real fast. As for the script, which tries to enhance Poe's original with a spoofy slapstick layer, it's downright painful. The jokes are belabored, the setups are obvious, and when the two bickering cops enter, playing out the old shtick of the white guy who tries to impress his black partner with ghetto slang, the conclusion can't possibly come fast enough.
The DVD comes with a feature documentary, a photo gallery, a jokey set of cast bios (profiling the puppets themselves) and the theatrical trailers. The main feature is provided in two versions, one five minutes longer than the other. Since even the shorter version doesn't work as intended, the addition of scenes that merely slow down the story is less than welcome.
