Puppet Master (1989)
Directed by David Schmoeller
Viewed on DVD
Summary: Puppet Master is a mixed bag, but it has a place in the horror canon so every horror fan should see it at least once.
I was so proud when I posted photos preparing for this day. This particularly perfect day on which I plucked the first Puppet Master movie from its packaging. Well, I plucked more than Puppet Master, since the first disc alone has five movies on it, but that’s neither here nor there, for now we have to discuss the classic film, Puppet Master. I didn’t know anything about Puppet Master before I watched this movie, except that there were killer puppets in it, but you can probably intuit that from its title and genre, so I tried to go in as blind as I could and see if this cult film holds up for me. Let’s get started!
Puppet Master starts off in 1939 at the beautiful Bodega Bay Hotel on the coast of California. In this hotel, a certain Andre Toulon puts the finishing touches on a new puppet that he is working on, before being warned by another puppet of his about the arrival of two suspicious men. Toulon quickly stashes his work and prepares for their arrival, determined not to be taken alive. We cut to “the present day” where we meet a hodgepodge of psychics/fortune tellers/paranormal researchers who get called together by a former research partner who has mysteriously died. Gathered at the old Bodega Bay Hotel, the group quickly realizes that things aren’t quite right and that they need to solve the mystery before it’s too late.
Now you may have noticed that, other then Andre Toulon, who does not appear in the full film, that I didn’t mention any of the names or personalities of any of the people from the psychic group. That’s because none of them matter. At all. This may be mildly spoilery, but precisely none of the characters have any serious development and that disappointed me, considering that they are such a unique group with clear character dynamics that sadly never get explored.
To explain a little more, the group of four who gets called in consists of a pair of paranormal researchers, a Nawlins fortune teller, and an Ivy League academic who sometimes dreams about the future. The academic is the least interesting so obviously he is our main character. Nawlins fortune teller is equally bland, but at least attempts to be memorable with her over the top accent and taxidermied dog. Who I was really hoping would get some development though was the pair of researchers who have an interestingly unbalanced dynamic. Of the two researchers, only one of them seems to have psychic abilities, the ability to feel the history of objects/locations, and she’s kind of domineered by her co-researcher who has no psychic abilities but clearly thinks of himself as “in charge.” I was hoping that this dynamic, where the actual psychic is treated more like a scientific instrument than a person, would be explored and developed a bit, but sadly that never happens, leaving us with a cast who just walks through the story.
But I did like the story! I’m always a fan of stories that take odd premises and treat them seriously, and Puppet Master is no exception, taking psychics and ancient Egyptian religious rites and puppets and throwing them in a blender and hitting puree! For my taste, the best genre movies take bizarre premises and just run with them, and Puppet Master does so with wild abandon, establishing a complex backstory and plotline about five minutes into the first movie. Sure, the setup is a bit clumsy and the interesting premise isn’t always followed through with, but I appreciated how strange the writer was willing to make things. Unfortunately, the strange premise is most of what the story has going for it, as the rest of the film focuses on all these supposed psychics stumbling around the hotel and trying to solve the most obvious mystery I’ve seen in a long time. The crux of this story hinges on this group not being able to figure out why Neil, the man who they all quickly concluded had learned Toulon’s secrets of mastering life after death, would kill himself. To add to that, during dinner on the night they arrive, Neil’s body somehow disappeared from his casket and appeared in an armchair in the parlor. None of these psychics are able to draw any sort of connection between Neil’s body being moved post-mortem and Neil’s probable discovery of Toulon’s research into power over the afterlife. It feels very odd that everyone is so baffled.
Really though, the reason why everyone is so confused is pretty simple, and that is because things here can’t happen too quickly because this movie is padded to hell and back. It takes a long time for the dialogue-heavy scenes to be done with so that the reason everyone was there, wholesome puppet murder, could commence, and even when they get here, they aren’t quite what I hoped for. Don’t get me wrong, the puppets themselves have a certain charm to them, mostly because all the killer ones have this adorable derp factor that comes from either their ludicrous design, like a puppet who is just a tiny head and legs on the torso of a beefy guy, or the knife puppet, who has a mask and uses a knife. Getting back to the padding though, the puppets are adorable and the kills are fine, but what kills everything is how badly edited the sequences are. Without criticising the effects too much, the kills are exciting for this level of film, what ruins them though, is that the sequences are paced so sluggishly, it seems like they take much longer than they should be.
That’s kind of confusing so I’ll try to explain. The beefy-armed puppet attacked someone, which consisted of him running up to her and punching her several times in the face. That’s fine. Immediately, the victim grabbed the puppet and flung him away, crawling away from this attack, which is also fine. The puppet then kept chasing her down, punching her and getting thrown away at least THREE times, all while this woman is still crawling down a hallway. Each of these moments were fine, but the death would have been a lot more visceral and exciting and scary if the sequence was trimmed a bit to make it quicker, and almost every death sequence has that same problem. I can’t quite figure out why this problem exists though, because at 88 minutes it’s not like they couldn’t shave a few minutes off and still hit feature length. Maybe someone on the team thought that all the puppet footage was so good that they wanted to keep it all? But sometimes less is more.
Going through it again and again in my head I really have no idea whether or not Puppet Master was a good movie. I focused on the things that stuck out to me the most, like the non-existent characters and very strange editing, but there were also many less obvious things that worked. I enjoyed the bizarre premise and the setting of an aged bay hotel was pretty neat, along with a fun and appropriate score. For general audiences, Puppet Master would be way too slow and weird, but every horror fan should probably see it at least once just to get a glimpse into the specific subgenre of puppet slasher films.
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