| Puppet Master Released: 1989 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Supernatural Nuts and Bolts: A small cabal of psychic investigators meets at the Bodega Bay Inn to pay their respects to the memory of one of their own. But there is more happening at Bodega Bay than a mere funeral. Is Bodega Bay haunted or is some unseen hand sending out dolls of destruction to wreak havoc? Only the Puppet Master knows. Summary: The story begins at the Bodega Bay Inn in California of 1939. French toymaker Andre Toulon (William Hickey) realizes that he is coming towards the close of his life. Having perfected the craft of the ancient Egyptian Rites of Afterlife, Toulon has created a cadre of small fully articulated puppets that can act independent of Toulon’s influence or of any other mechanical means of assistance. We have Pinhead, who is an apish looking puppet with long arms that dangle past his knees. Pinhead’s fists are the size of normal human fists and can pack quite a punch. There is also Tunneler, who has a swirling drill bit on the top of his head. Tunneler’s blade can easily carve through human tissue. We also have Ms. Leech, the sole female puppet. Leech can produce fully-grown leeches from her mouth and deposit them wherever she chooses. We also have Jester, whose head consists of three separately spinning pieces. And finally there is Blade, the spooky looking skull-faced puppet with a long black trench coat and retractable switchblade. Two assassins converge on the hotel ready to steal Toulon’s puppets as well as his secrets from him. A nameless puppet warns Andre of this from an upstairs window and the aged toymaker gets to work. Removing a piece of paneling from the wall, Toulon packs away all of his puppets as well as the scrolls detailing the Rites of Afterlife. Before the assassins can break down his door, Toulon puts a gun to his mouth and blows his brains out. Flash forward to December of 1989. Four accredited psychics discover that one of their own colleagues in the field of psychic research has died. Neil Gallagher had apparently ended his life in much the same way Toulon did over fifty years ago. The four friends gather at the Bodega Bay Inn to offer comfort to Gallagher’s widow, Megan. First we have Alex Whitaker. Alex is a professor at Yale and has the gift of clairvoyance through dreams. Then there is the tough talking Dana Hadley. Dana is also known as the White Witch and operates a fortune telling operation on the boardwalk. She carries about a stuffed dog, which she named Leroy. Lastly, we have Frank Forrestor and Carissa Stamford. Frank and Carissa research psychic phenomena by way of sexual interpretation. (Kinky huh?) At dinnertime, Megan reveals that it was Gallagher’s last wish to not be buried until everyone had arrived to pay his or her respects. The group had not seen Gallagher in some time and didn’t realize that he had taken a bride. Megan explains that her family had owned the Bodega Bay Inn for several years. In 1987, she met Neil and the two quickly married. Neil completely renovated the Bodega Bay Inn in that time. Dana has no compunction regarding her feelings for Neil and she lets Megan know straight off that she thought Gallagher was a complete bastard. Later on, everyone retires to his or her rooms. Frank and Carissa enter an old fashioned elevator. Carissa has a post cognitive flashback of Neil Gallagher raping some woman inside of this elevator. Frank pays it little mind and the two go their room across from Alex’s. Meanwhile Dana meets the housekeeper Theresa. She warns Theresa to stay away from the fireplace or else great danger will come to her. Theresa thinks Dana is a crackpot and ignores her. But before long, Theresa gets attacked from a most unlikely direction. Pinhead enters the room, picking up a fire poker. He cracks Theresa across the brainpan while the latter is busy stoking the fire under the mantle. Bitch should have listened to Dana’s words of caution, shouldn’t she? While all this is going on, Neil’s corpse seems to be popping up all over the place. First he appears in the study and later on he appears in Dana’s bedroom. Everyone begins to suspect that Megan Gallagher may be playing some pranks on people. Dana begins erecting wards on everyone’s bedroom. (For all the good it does.) Frank and Carissa decide to have a funky little sexual escapade while the others try to catch some zees. Carissa blindfolds him and ties him up to the bedposts. While she’s riding him faster than Willie Shoemaker at the Kentucky Derby, two of Toulon’s puppets enter the room. Carissa hears a noise and quickly jumps off Frank. She pokes her head under the bed only to find Tunneler sprinting towards her. Tunneler drills into Carissa’s face and that’s all she wrote for this beauty. While Carissa is getting drilled in a most non-sexual manner, Ms. Leech hops on top of Frank. Apparently Frank seems to think that this seven inch plastic doll is his girlfriend! Go figure. Anyway, Ms. Leech belches up four or five leeches and they all suck the blood out of Frank’s body while he is tied screaming to the bed. Bye Frank. Loser. Next on the list is Dana. Pinhead attacks her in her room, breaking her leg. She pushes him away and crawls into the hallway. She keeps going until she reaches the elevator. Pinhead follows her and begins to punch the snot out of Dana. Mustering her reserve, she picks the little fucker up and chucks him beyond the area of the elevator and down the stairwell. But she didn’t count on Blade providing back up. Blade enters the elevator car and slices Dana’s throat wide open. While all this is going on, Alex has one of his prophetic dreams. He dreams of Neil Gallagher rising from the dead to kill his young wife Megan. Alex awakens with a start when Megan begins rapping on his door. Megan wants to show him something important and she leads him to one of the upper attic rooms. They find the diary of Andre Toulon. Megan explains that Toulon’s work involved imbuing life into inanimate objects. At this point we come to realize that Neil Gallagher is alive and well. As Megan had suspected, Gallagher had indeed found Toulon’s work while he was doing his renovations. Obsessed with immortality. Gallagher had performed the rite over his own body shortly before shooting himself in the head. Now instead of existing in a living body that will eventually age, Neil can no live as an immortal in a dead body that will not age at all (supposedly). Neil knew that his four psychic friends would eventually learn the truth and try to pry Toulon’s secrets from him. In order to keep the secret to himself, Neil had the four psychics attend his funeral so that he could get rid of them. He has even used the Rite on the deceased bodies of Dana, Frank and Carissa. Now, Alex and Megan are the only ones that know the truth concerning the resurrected Neil Gallagher. Alex and Neil begin to fight. During the melee, Neil violently discards one of Toulon’s underfoot puppets (Jester). The other puppets take great umbrage with this abuse and turn on Gallagher. They trap him in the elevator shaft. Neil tries climbing out through the top of the elevator, but Blade arrives and cuts his fingers off forcing him to drop. At that point, Miss Leech assaults Gallagher on one side while Tunneler drills into his head from the other. Eventually, Gallagher dies. The following day, Alex says his goodbyes to Megan Gallagher. Megan walks away and we find that she now has possession of Dana’s dog Leroy. The dog is no longer a stuffed corpse however, but a living breathing animal. Perhaps it is now Megan who is using Toulon’s magic. The fates of Andre Toulon’s puppets remain unknown. Acting/Dialogue: Everything is pretty well rounded as far as this is concerned. No academy winners here, but nothing to complain about either. Jimmie Skaggs does an impressive job as Neil Gallagher, especially towards the end when we get to see a bit of Neil’s dark side. The dialogue didn’t offer a great deal, but I think everyone fell into his or her characters really well. There was a nice dynamic between everybody. I thought that casting William Hickey as the aged Andre Toulon was a nice touch. Hickey was a master at portraying characters who were actually a great deal older than he was. Hickey was only sixty-one when he played Toulon, but the character looks as if he could have easily been in his mid nineties. And last but not least, we have a quick cameo by Barbara Crampton of Re-Animator fame as a customer at Dana’s fortune telling stand. Gore: There is a bit of gore in this, but nothing extremely overt. We have a gunshot to the mouth, a girl’s face gets ruined and Gallagher’s fingers getting chopped off. That’s about the height of the gruesomeness. Guilty Pleasures: Kathryn O’Reilly (Carissa) shows one of her breasts and we also get to see her flit around in a see through negligee. There’s also a black and white flashback wherein we see another woman’s boob come flopping out of her shirt. But this takes place during a rape sequence so that makes it kind of tasteless. On the non-sexual side of guilty pleasures, I really got a kick out of seeing Blade use his knife to flick the remains of Neil’s fingers off of the top of the elevator car. Ahhh…life’s little perversities. The Good: Hot on the heels of the popularity of Child’s Play, director David Schmoeller offers us a new take on the idea of toys gone bad. Whereas Child’s Play’s main antagonist Chucky was an evil man trapped inside the body of a doll, Schmoeller’s puppets are actually innocent creations with their own personalities. He actually has us feeling sorry for the way Gallagher manipulates the little wooden fuckers since it is obvious that they were crafted from the hands of a loving master. Full Moon Productions are known for cranking out low budget straight-to-video spook fests, but one thing that Full Moon has always managed to pull off is style. Puppet Master is by far not the most original concept to ever come down the pike, but Schmoeller breathes unique life into this tale and it carries a mood and texture, which practically becomes the signature of all of the Full Moon movies that follow. The most commendable trait to this project is the music score supplied by Richard Band. Band’s music wafts along like a lullaby but it carries with it a sinister undertone. I don’t think they could have selected a piece of music that captured the mood of Puppet Master better than this one. The puppets themselves are pretty interesting as well. The special effects used are hardly state of the art, but they come off rather well and don’t look overly cheesy. Even though Blade is designed to be the fan-favorite, all of the puppets seem to share equal screen time and each one gets to cause some serious havoc in their own right. (Except for Jester, who didn’t seem to accomplish fuck all except for getting his mouth slapped halfway across his head.) Although it’s predictable as hell, I liked the idea of the puppets turning against Gallagher. I couldn’t really see why they would follow his lead in the first place. But since he is a re-animate, just like they are, I guess they regarded him as some kind of big brother. Either way, the dolls eventually throw off the yolk of oppression and do a serious number on Mister Gallagher. I always get a kick out of seeing the villain done in by his own cronies. The Bad: There’s only one thing about Puppet Master (and similar stories) that rankles me. Okay…listen up movie directors…THEY ARE ONLY FUCKING DOLLS! HOW FUCKING DANGEROUS CAN THEY BE? They apparently also posses the ninja-like ability to blend in to shadows and move about unseen. In the 1939 segment of the movie, Blade scoots around from the parking lot of the Inn and all the way throughout the lobby and up the elevator without being seen by anyone. Hell, the little fucker even announces his presence by running across a set of piano keys in the lobby. How is it that nobody sees him? Later on, Blade even scopes out Alex’s room. Alex emerges from his room into the hall to see what all the noise is about. Blade circles around him and Alex-the-all-powerful-psychic doesn’t notice shit! Even the scene with Dana is kind of corny. Now while I understand that Pinhead is the strongest of the puppets, he succeeds in breaking Dana’s legs with little effort. Which brings up an interesting nit pick I have concerning Dana. Throughout the course of this flick, this dizzy bitch is bopping around waving her feathers and incense, erecting all of these wards and shit, right? Maybe somebody should have told her, that magic wards and circles aren’t quite so effective if the caster is six sheets to the wind. Obviously cheap wine must have a hampering effect on mystical sigils. The hack. No wonder she’s dead. The motivation behind the villain kind of threw me off. Now dreams of immortality not withstanding, but what was the point in having the four psychics come over just to kill them off. Chances are, Neil could have resurrected himself quietly and no one would have been none the wiser. He had his reasons I guess, but personally I found them to be kind of cheesy. I’m still trying to figure out how Neil could have performed the Rite on himself. Since the magic only affects non-living tissue, then he couldn’t have performed it prior to his own suicide. And obviously he couldn’t have performed the Rite after he was already dead. So what gives? Schmoeller should have worked on this more. The only thing left to bitch about is Gallagher’s fate. We clearly see him die, and yet he shouldn’t be able to die; not by conventional means anyway. So is Gallagher still alive? (Maybe he was the one who resurrected Leroy the pooch). Or is he truly gone for good? Ah well. I guess that’s what sequels are for. Great Lines: “But you’re dead!” “Ahh yes. Dead. I put a gun to my head and blew away my vast knowledge.” --Megan and Neil concerning Neil’s apparent demise. Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. |
 |
|
|
|
|
| Back to Movie List Back to Contents Back to Home Page |
 |
|
|
 |