Charles Band’s production company, Full Moon Pictures, kept the horror genre alive and kicking during it’s heyday in the 1980’s and 90’s by churning out an endless supply of killer puppet movies and I was there, lapping up every spoonful. This is the grand daddy motion picture that kicked them all off; Puppet Master. It’s probably the best example of what Full Moon was capable of and I had quite the obsession for it when it first came out.
During World War II, a bunch of Nazis are sent to capture Andre Toulon, an
old man who has the secret of giving life to puppets. Before he can be captured, he kills himself, taking the secret to his grave with him. But before he does, he hides his trunk full of puppets in the walls of the Bodega Bay hotel along with his formula. Years later, a group of psychics
are contacted by a former colleague who made a big
discovery in Bodega Bay before committing suicide himself, under mysterious
circumstances. Naturally, for the sake of furthering the storyline, they all show up at the hotel and soon, through a lively mixture of live-action puppetry and extremely well done stop-motion animation, Toulon’s puppets are running around killing everyone in site. The first Puppet Master is a very well done movie with lots of scares and a great gothic atmosphere to it. It’s easy to see why this is the movie that put Full Moon on the map. The thing is, the puppets are the “gimmick” in this picture. Later entries in the series tend to focus on the puppets a lot more than the main characters and because of that, become a little bit more schlocky. Make no mistake, I LOVE schlocky… but I am aware that not everyone does. I’m just letting you know that the first couple Puppet Master movies really set the tone a lot more than some of the later sequels tend to do. Will you like it? Well, it’s definitely lower budget than the Child’s Play movies, but as far as killer dolls go, I’d take Blade, Pinhead, Tunneler and Leech Woman over Chucky any day. -Scotch
