Review: Puppetmaster

In 1939, at the Bodega Bay Inn in California, puppeteer Andre Toulon is putting away his creations whilst a couple of Nazis are about to break the door down. He subsequently commits suicide. 50 years later, a collection of psychics (including Paul Le Mat and fortune teller Irene Miracle) arrive at the same Bodega Bay Inn having been telepathically invited there by a man who was obsessed with animating the inanimate. The psychics learn when they arrive that their host has recently committed suicide (shouldn’t they have seen that coming, though?). Instead they are menaced by Toulon’s puppets, out of their hiding spot all these years later.

 

I used to watch a lot of Full Moon movies in my teens, which inevitably meant watching the first five or six “Puppetmaster” films. It was really the franchise that the company was built on, as I believe this was Full Moon’s very first release after the collapse of Charles Band’s previous company Empire. After the fifth or sixth one my cinematic interests tended toward classic cinema from the golden years as well as whatever was popular at the time. From 2024 onwards I’ve been revisiting some of those films as well as many of the Band productions I didn’t see back then, especially having also read Band’s irresistible autobiography (titled Confessions of a Puppetmaster). Inevitably that meant revisiting the “Puppetmaster” franchise (watching a few for the first time) after many, many years and remembering those days of going to the video store and getting 10 videos for $10 for a whole week. Those were the good ‘ol days, folks. This 1989 film from writer-director David Schmoeller (the eerie “Tourist Trap”) is no better or worse than I remembered, which is to say it’s not bad but it’s not quite as enjoyable as the next two films in the rather unwieldy franchise.

 

One thing I didn’t remember is that this franchise predates “Saw” in killing off its main character early whilst managing to find ways to continue the franchise with said dead character popping up throughout for quite a few entries. The other thing I didn’t remember how weird and sexual the film is. My memory had this being a pretty mild, innocuous franchise. Like “Ghoulies” (from Band’s other company Empire), this one has its inspiration taken from “Gremlins” and my memory had this being a half-step more mature. It’s actually a pretty kinky film with a fair bit of nudity. The plot is pretty bonkers, mixing killer puppets with psychics and Nazis. It’s quite interesting, even if not terribly well executed (there’s plenty of dead space with lots of skulking about).

 

The big attractions here are quite clearly the iconic puppets from the late David Allen (“The Primevals”). They’re awesome, especially Blade, Pinhead, and Leech Woman. Blade is a truly malevolent puppet that seems to somehow take joy in killing, whilst Leech Woman’s first appearance is hilarious and disgusting. The human cast is far, far less impressive and sadly they’re in a lot more of the film than the puppets. Idiosyncratic character actor William Hickey isn’t as memorably tied to the role of Andre Toulon as Guy Rolfe would subsequently be, but the latter had the benefit of several appearances in the role. Hickey is nonetheless fun in the part of the kindly old puppeteer (at least as he’s written to be in this entry). On the other end of the scale, Paul Le Mat is the antithesis of fun, and you can easily see why he was one of the members of the “American Graffiti” cast to not go on to much afterwards. That film and “Melvin and Howard” worked in spite of him, not because of him. Irene Miracle is even worse, the star of Dario Argento’s excellent and underrated “Inferno” is truly abysmal here. She also delivers the worst southern accent you’ve ever heard from someone born somewhere around that part of America. I also have to say that these are some extremely unpleasant, unsympathetic – and frankly uninteresting – characters. So it’s a shame they’re afforded the bulk of the screen time, save for a useless ‘guest star’ cameo by genre fave Barbara Crampton.

 

This isn’t a particularly good film – or the best film in the franchise – but it’s the one that started it all, and has some fun moments from time to time. It’s a pretty easy watch, and I got a little bit of that nostalgic feeling rewatching it this time. Schmoeller’s screenplay is based on a story by Charles Band and Kenneth J. Hall (the latter of whom co-wrote Fred Olen Ray’s terrible “The Tomb”).  

 

Rating: C+