Revisiting the Puppet Master series

 I had these user comments from late October 2006. It seems I must have watched an edit from cable television.

I revisited David Schmoeller's "Puppet Master" while it received cable play on AMC and must say it isn't quite as good as I remembered. Granted this version is cut for cable and commercials(argh!!), but most of the film is from what I remember.

Four psychics, including Paul Le Mat from "Strange Invaders", come to a manor on a cliff near a shore where Andre Toulon, a famed puppet maker, was living and subsequently died. They also attend the funeral of a colleague(Jimmie F Skaggs)after an apparent suicide. One by one, they are being murdered by an array of creepy puppets, many of them equipped with various weaponry such as the one puppet with a drill that bores a hole in a woman's face, one female puppet likes to spit out blood-sucking leeches, one has not only a knife blade on one arm, but a hook on the other. The funniest puppet has this massive torso and hands, but very tiny head, not to mention a court jester puppet whose face spins three ways.

The film is merely an excuse for people to be massacred by puppets with a little plot that deals with possible life after death..something Neil Gallagher{the colleague who killed himself)was studying from the late Andre Toulon's notes.

The cast tries to rise above a very mediocre screenplay which is meant to simply obliterate people in various ways with minimal development given to the characters who perish. Some unique killings from the wooden psychos is pretty much the reason to see it.

Though, I really do need to see the film without interruption from commercials or people's censoring.

This afternoon, though, I got reacquainted with the first of the Charles Band Full Moon Puppet Master series, starting with the first 1989 film. I noticed plenty of content already written on the first four films, posts from 2013, 2015, and 2016 on my blog which turned out to be extensive and more than adequate in depth and length. I think I really liked it more in 1993 or so the first time I watched it and still feel this hasn't aged well, but I seem to remember when this was shown on cable during a marathon "Puppet Master" with much of the violence intact. Mainly because even the Full Moon complete versions weren't excessively gory as much as campy with surreal use of alchemy/magic and psychics to tell a story about the pursuit of the secrets of Andre Toulon. Le Mat was a big name at the time for the film while Crampton just briefly appearing much to my disappointment...she must have been available at the time. I still think the various killer puppets and Richard Band's score come off best. You can scan the user comments on IMDb and see the mixed response, up and down and all over the place. Same with Letterboxd. This seems to have a sound following, though. I think a lot of folks grew up with it like me. The puppets do get a lot of the love, so Band saw no reason to not get the most of them. Hickey as the forever old man played Toulon as a seemingly gentle puppeteer seeing no way out but suicide. Toulon is played differently by each actor in the series. Skaggs was such an evil bastard but the dolls sure give him a once over. Bodega Bay is quite idyllic...looks like a nice vacation spot, big luxury hotel overlooking a cliff as the sunny ocean glistens. Too bad killer dolls sort of ruin a trip. Tragic what the characters of Alex and Megan suffer according to the next film.