Review: Puppet Master II

Paranormal psychologists (including Charlie Spradling) converge at a hotel in Bodega Bay after hearing about the events of the first film. Unsurprisingly, Andre Toulon’s living puppets don’t take kindly to visitors and start bumping them off. Nita Talbot plays a psychic, and Steven Welles eventually turns up as a heavily-bandaged man who claims to have inherited the hotel. He allows them to stay through their investigations, but won’t allow them into his quarters. George ‘Buck’ Flower and Sage Allen play a couple of elderly farmers.

 

Full Moon’s resident FX guy David Allen (“The Primevals”) takes the helm for this 1990 sequel to the film that helped build Charles Band’s other company after the end of Empire Pictures. Although most reviews state that Allen wasn’t up for the task of directing, I actually think this one’s ever-so slightly better than the first film. Basically “Prince of Darkness” with puppets, it’s essentially the same film done marginally more effectively, with the puppetry obviously receiving an upgrade, and a terrific, iconic music score by Richard Band (“Ghost Warrior”, “From Beyond”, “Zone Troopers”).

 

Scripted by David Pabian (Full Moon’s solid “Subspecies”) the focus yet again is on the humans more than the puppets, though Steven Welles mostly works as Toulon. He’s terrible in a flashback scene, but actually really good the rest of the time getting to sort-of homage Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man”. The late reveal of his real face is absolutely disgusting in the best way, good makeup job there. Cult character actor George ‘Buck Flower’ has a too small role, but basically playing ‘Crazy Ralph’ you can’t say it’s not apt casting. Even better is Sage Allen as his gun-toting wife, and Nita Talbot is solid enough too. The actors playing the parapsychologists are less impressive, however.

 

There’s enough fun stuff here to recommend to anyone who liked the first film, and I’m not just talking about Charlie Spradling gracing us a brief viewing of her lovely goodies. Thanks, Charlie. In the aforementioned flashback we see a Mephistopheles puppet (called Mephisto) with a very famliar evil white face – awesome stuff there. I also liked the opener where the puppets somehow dig up Toulon’s grave and revive him. A mixture of stop-motion, puppetry, and animatronics, Allen and his team do excellent work on the puppets here. I particularly liked the Hun-like Torch, a nasty as hell puppet with a flame thrower. The deaths in this are really nasty in just the way you want for this kind of thing, the squishy sound FX for Tunneler’s kill are nasty fun.

 

A little better than the first film, but this franchise would reach its peak with the next entry. A little slow, a little slight, but with enough still to recommend for a very select audience.

 

Rating: B-

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