Puppet Master Marathon – Part 1

I have taken it upon myself to watch all of the Puppet Master movies in rapid succession, as if attempting to pay penance for some ungodly sins from one or more forgotten past lives. Whatever atrocities I committed must have been unspeakably horrible to deserve this.

There is no better place to start than at the beginning, (except maybe for not starting at all, but that would be cheating). And so here we go with the original Puppet Master, the first of ten (10) Puppet Master films I will attempt to endure. By writing about this agonizing experience, I hope to draw others into this crusade so that they may bear witness to my burden and my pain, but without having to suffer as much as I do by actually viewing these films.

Rumor has it that the first installment is the best of the lot, so its pretty much all downhill from here.

The movie opens with a majestic-ish shot of the Bodega Bay Inn, 1939. A strange puppet whose design seems to be inspired by Attila the Hun is looking out the window of one of the hotel rooms, and then swivels its head to survey the events happening inside the room. This would have been a great time to give us a WTF moment or at least try to juice a little shock value out of a puppet moving entirely on its own volition, but no such attempt is made. The Attila the Hun puppet observes that there is not much going on within the room, just an old man painting the finishing touches on another puppet that looks like a court jester. Attila the Hun puppet seems as bored with this as we are, and again focuses his attention back out the window. So much for an attention-grabbing opening.

Cut to an extended scene outside the inn, shot at puppet’s eye level in first person perspective. Puppet-cam! It appears that some puppet is running around the perimeter in broad daylight, in an almost downright sneaky manner. We look through his eyes as he turns a corner and encounters a golden retriever who barks at him, and he flees in terror. We marvel that none of the many humans present notice this noisy puppet/dog interaction occur, nor do they seem to notice the puppet openly running around right in front of them. We witness a painfully cheesy moment when the puppet runs face-first into some doors, falls backwards, and we hear birds tweeting. Silly us, we thought he was a puppet, not a cartoon. The puppet picks himself back up and “sneaks” out in the wide open some more, making sure to go out of his way to run down the keys of a piano and make an awful racket for all to hear. With all of this brash carelessness we begin to wonder if perhaps the puppet is making a conscious attempt to get spotted and perhaps even caught, but no, turns out it is just poor writing and directing. Spoiler alert: lots more of that to come throughout all of the Puppet Master movies!

The puppet-cam reveals that the incredibly careless puppet has now made his way through the hotel to the elevator and up to the 6th floor, where he is finally spotted by a fat woman who screams at the sight of him. The puppet screams back at her, and we now see this puppet is the puppet known as “Blade”, and we are now thoroughly confused because, despite the fact that Blade has been huffing and puffing and making strange little baby sounds the whole time he’s been running around on puppet-cam, and despite the fact that he is now yelling his head off at a fat lady, Blade is known throughout the Puppet Master series as the completely silent puppet. (Side note: if you don’t like movies that have serious continuity issues, then the Puppet Master series is most definitely not for you.) Blade continues down the hall to a door, stopping to rap on it with his hook hand. The old man (who we now presume is the Puppet Master) opens the door, understanding that the puppet is trying to warn him that two men in black hats and trench coats are coming to kill him, but somehow, inexplicably, the old man already knows this. He craftily hides Blade in a trunk along with all the other puppets in a secret compartment in the wall of the room, promising that everything will be alright. He then sits down in a chair, puts a pistol in his mouth, and paints the wall with his brains just as the men in trench coats burst into his room. End of Act 1. And of the old man, who the men in trench coats reveal is “Toulon”.

The second act serves to introduce the main antagonists of the film and bore us even further. A psychic named Neil Gallagher has discovered Toulon’s secret of giving life to puppets hidden at the Bodega Bay Inn, and rather than picking up the phone, Gallagher sends brainwave messages to his fellow psychic friends network to come join him at the inn. His 4 friends rush to the inn only to find him very recently deceased under mysterious circumstances, not the least of which is telepathically telephoning them when he was already dead. They begin to investigate, and slowly uncover the secrets of the puppets.

The final act is where the puppet shit hits the fan. We meet Pinhead, a puppet with huge hands an a penchant for woman-beating, Tunneler, who has a drill for a head, and Leech Woman, who vomits up leaches. Blade shows us how he got his namesake, and Jester, the court jester puppet that Toulon finished painting immediately before dying, kinda hangs out and doesn’t really do anything. Strangely, the Attila the Hun puppet does not make another appearance in this or any other Puppet Master movie, and neither do several other puppets we spotted in Toulon’s trunk. In fact, each Puppet Master movie seems to feature a random selection of puppets, and the presence or absence of each puppet in each movie is never explained. More on this in future posts. Again… continuity: not something the Puppet Master movies give a flying fuck about.

I don’t usually give away the ending when I write about movies, but in this case I have to make an exception, because I have a pretty big gripe with it. In the end, the surprise reveal is that Neil Gallagher has used Toulon’s secret to kill himself and give himself eternal life, just like the puppets possess. The puppets have been running around this whole time doing Gallagher’s dirty work, ruthlessly and gleefully murdering everyone they come in contact with. We are led to believe that the puppets are completely under Gallagher’s control, and Gallagher is the new Puppet Master. But then, suddenly they turn on Gallagher for no apparent reason. Well, he does chuck Jester on the floor, so maybe that’s why they do it. But they must not really be under his control if they can turn on him like that. So are they, or aren’t they? It just doesn’t make much sense, and its at least partially responsible for starting the never-ending controversy over whether the puppets are actually good puppets who are forced to do bad things, or bad puppets who sometimes do good things. In the end, when you consider how many plot holes and continuity errors these movies have, its almost unfair to expect that the creator’s ever did anything as basic as stopping and asking themselves if the puppets are good or bad.

For as much smack as I talk about the Puppet Master movies, I actually love them for some strange reason, and the first one is still my favorite. “If you watch ONE Puppet Master movie this year…”

Related posts:

1. Puppet Master Trilogy?

Posted in: Horror Movies »  by: Morbidementia

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