PUPPET MASTER (1989)
I don’t know about you, but I always assumed that movies released straight-to-video weren’t worth bothering with because they were . . . well, just plain bad. Despite my bias, I’m sure I watched and enjoyed plenty of them, but the judgement stood. Especially when it came to horror. It’s not really my own fault: I had the unfortunate experience of sitting through a few bad low budget films that weren’t the “so bad they’re good” kind, they were just bad.
It wasn’t until well into my twenties that I was introduced to the PUPPET MASTER movie series and the company behind it—Full Moon Productions. They specialize in low budget, straight-to-video horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. PUPPET MASTER (1989) isn’t just the first film in the series, it was the inaugural film of the newly formed production company. Since its inception in 1989, the company (under various name changes and sublabels) has continued releasing new installments of PUPPET MASTER and a variety of similarly ridiculous movies. The PUPPET MASTER franchise now consists of fifteen movies, including reboots, prequels, and spinoffs. There’s even a crossover movie with another Full Moon series, DEMONIC TOYS.
On my most recent rewatch of PUPPET MASTER, my first thought was how it really feels like it was made with the intention of being a series of films from the start. What’s surprising is that it does a lot of establishing of the premise and yet moves through the story very quicky. It feels much shorter than its 90-minute run time. The beginning of the movie can be a bit disorienting, especially when watching it for the first time. It feels like it starts mid-scene and you don’t really know what's going on. The first couple minutes bounce back and forth between shots of an old man in a room full of dolls that appear to be alive, two men dressed as stereotypical villains (all black, complete with trenchcoats) making their way to the old man's room and a shot moving through the hotel from a low point of view. Before the two men get to his room, the puppet maker Andre Toulon, packs the puppets and a scroll into a trunk, hides it in the wall then commits suicide.
While it doesn’t seem like it, the opening does a lot of work toward setting up the basic premise of the movie. We quickly, without an in-depth explanation, know that this man somehow brings his puppets to life and that’s it’s a secret worth dying for. It also does a really great job of pulling the viewer into the story.
From there it jumps to the present day, where four different people with psychic abilities are contacted and led by their acquaintance Neil Gallagher to the hotel where Toulon killed himself, the Bodega Bay Inn. When they arrive, they’re surprised to find that not only did Neil marry the latest owner of the hotel, but he also recently committed suicide. We eventually learn that that Toulon was an alchemist who knew of an ancient Egyptian method for giving life to inanimate figurines. They’d all previously worked together to find the method that had been thought lost with Toulon’s death.
The wife inherited the hotel after her parents’ deaths and, with Neil’s help, had begun renovations. She’d been expecting the group and thought they came to show respect to her dead husband. The movie proceeds pretty much the way you’d expect with the characters getting killed off one by one. Or two, depending on how you count, in the case of the obligatory couple getting during a sex scene. The murders are, of course, being perpetrated by the puppets after Neil must have found and released them from their hiding spot in the wall.
One of the things I love about the movie is that it follows the old rule of “less is more.” While the characters' deaths are gruesome and violent, overall, it’s not actually gory. In most cases, we don’t even see the fatal blows, instead cutting away to a different angle or a completely new scene. So many movies these days just run with ripping victims apart from start to finish. And while I love a good decapitation or evisceration as much as the next girl, it eventually starts to fall flat. This way we get something to build up to and when we finally get all the blood and guts splashing across the screen, it has a real impact and feels more satisfying. I’m going to go ahead and assume that this was likely a combination of conventions of the era and a financially savvy tactic. Fake blood and guts and prosthetics really add up and after all this was a low budget film. Whatever the reason, it takes skill to pull off successfully and should be appreciated.
Before venturing into the PUPPET MASTER franchise, I was skeptical that it would interest me at all. Frankly, I still don’t think I’d call myself a fan exactly. I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch them, but they are entertaining. Specifically, this first installment did a really great job of pulling me in and got me interested in checking out more.
But more importantly, it led to me being a bit open-minded. I’ve learned to be a bit less judgmental, immediately writing off movies that I assume are just too weird or silly. They probably are (they usually are), but that doesn't mean they’re bad movies. And even if they are, bad movies can be entertaining too.
