Chocolat left me with something of a blah taste in my mouth, so I decided to find the cinematic equivalent of its opposite, something else I could finally take off my HBO watchlist.
I am not sure I could find anything more the opposite of a whimsical romantic drama than a cult movie about killer puppets, so here we are with 1989’s Puppet Master.
After a short prologue in which the title character hangs out in a California hotel in 1939 before he kills himself just as Nazi agents show up, we have a vague idea that there’s a man with living puppets acting as his helpers. The puppet master is played by character actor William Hickey, and he has one of those faces I know I’ve seen before even if I didn’t know his name, so aside from a one-scene cameo from 80s scream queen Barbara Crampton, that about does it for recognizable actors in this movie. Sure, lead actor Paul LeMat was in America Graffiti, but I don’t remember him from that movie as much as I do Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, and Harrison Ford.
This isn’t the sort of movie you watch for recognizable actors.
Anyway, flashing forward to “the present,” a group of psychics with different abilities learn of the death of a former colleague, someone who wasn’t very pleasant and none of them miss. The four gather in the same hotel, meet the dead man’s young widow, and then look into the man’s mysterious death. But see, those living puppets are running around the hotel. What the puppet master knew, what the Nazis wanted, and what the dead man may have found, was a means to bring inanimate objects, including corpses, to life. The puppets are out to kill as many of the hotel’s guests as they can, and therein is where the fun begins.
Bottom line: this is a cult movie. It’s weird, probably had a pretty low budget, and what it didn’t have in money or star power, it makes up for with creativity. The puppets are rather impressive beings, like the physically strong Pinhead who has a tiny head on a large body, or the Leach Woman who vomits, well, leaches. Sure, you’d think that avoiding these guys shouldn’t be too hard, but that’s not the point. This is not the sort of movie to take seriously as puppets with drills for heads or switchblade knives for hands run around attacking people. The puppets don’t talk, but some of them do have rather distinctive personalities of their own in their rather limited ways, and the special effects that brought them to life actually are rather good.
Now, this isn’t a great movie, but for anyone in the right frame of mind looking for something that somehow spawned a number of direct-to-video sequels and not some great work of horror cinema. The premise itself is silly and flatly ridiculous. But if that’s your thing, this is a fun movie if nothing else.
Grade: B-
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