Watched: 10/15/2024
Format: Peacock
Viewing: First
Director: David Schmoeller
It's important to note the budget for some of these movies.
Puppet Master (1989) has a reported budget of $400,000. That's about $1.12 million in 2024 dollars for a whole movie - or, roughly, the cost of bagels on an Avengers movie. And, people still watch this thing. So hopefully residuals are still making their way to folks who worked for cheap.
This movie is like someone took a bunch of ideas, threw them in a hat and then pulled them out whilst blind-folded. And that isn't necessarily a complaint. It's weird to see so many ideas in one movie, but they do work together.
The rough idea - for some reason a Puppet Master (William Hickey!) is tracked down at a hotel in the 1930's by Nazis? He kills himself rather than give them the secret of how to imbue puppets with life.
In the late 1980's, four psychics are summoned to the fancy hotel by a former colleague, Gallagher. To be honest, I do not know why he summoned them as he then kills himself before they arrive. One is sort of an everyman psychic, one is a fortune teller who gets glimpses of the future, and two seem to channel sex into their research, which is at least kind of novel. Meanwhile, Gallagher's widow is hanging about.
There are spirit visions and glimpses of people's deaths yet to come. A lot of rolling around on a bed. And nobody seems to have liked Gallagher.
Soon, the puppets who once were Hickey's pals are running around picking off the psychics. And each puppet kind of has their thing.
It's probably telling that the stars of this movie mostly don't have many credits. Hickey is a cameo and our star is really Paul Le Mat, who you'll keep squinting at, trying to remember what you know him from. I put the movie on because it said it had Barbara Crampton, but she's in it for 30 seconds as a favor to someone, and it managed to sucker me into watching it, so... well done, film producers from 1988 or so.
The puppets are kind of neat. It's all just... puppetry, but to its credit, it works. The Pinhead fellow with human hands, Leach Girl, Blade... just good ideas.
But there's oddly almost no... feel to the movie. They have this stunning location of the hotel, but seems like they had a few rooms somewhere, and decided to just light everything like a late 1980's TV show - ie: there are no shadows. It's sort of weird, visually, in 2024 to see something speaking in TV-language of the era.
The movie is just weird enough, by virtue of throwing ideas at you left and right, that it's not boring or repetitive. But it can feel like someone was just writing things down with no clear goal where it was going. And that's okay. I just don't think there's anything remotely scary about this movie. It's more... kind of interesting. Some really oddball stuff out there winds up drumming up multiple sequels and a fanbase.
I do wonder if this was made because someone say 1987's Dolls, a movie by Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator fame. Dolls worked for me when I saw it on HBO or something in probably 1989.* But Dolls was pretty creepy, if memory serves.
Anyway - it was fine. One more to check off the list.
*I wound up watching this with a good friend's mom. I was at his house spending the night, and she'd wandered into the room as the movie started, and my pal fell asleep, and so I wound up watching this goofy movie in a super awkward context, as she was clearly watching it and I didn't know if I could just go to sleep or turn off the TV or what. She also would go to movies with us and sit by herself so she could see, like, Dirty Harry: The Dead Pool.
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