by ·Comments Off on Halloween 2 (2009, Rob Zombie)

I figure since Zombie made the already kinda boring Halloween series even more boring by going nuts on the psychological back story, this sequel was his chance to cut loose, to make a proper slasher picture. But no, more psychological crap, more fuckin’ Dr. Loomis, and another undistinguished movie. This time instead of Michael’s background and trauma leading to his becoming an indestructible serial killer, we focus on sister Laurie’s Michael-caused trauma leading to her becoming a serial killer (one assumes – I’m not gonna watch part three).

Dourif, an island of cool in the horror-movie muck:

I’m glad to see Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael’s mom, but I’m not glad that she’s dead, appearing in Michael’s mind along with his own child self and sometimes a white horse (the psychological significance of which is spelled out by the opening titles). Also glad to see Brad Dourif, but I spend the whole movie feeling bad for him, since it’s bookended by the torture and almost-killing of his daughter two years earlier, and the final torture and killing of his daughter. Not even slightly glad to see Malcolm McDowell, but only because he’s playing Samuel Loomis, the least appealing regular character in any horror series.

McDowell admiring himself:

Picks up right where Halloween left off. The coroners truck carrying Michael hits a cow in the road, Michael wakes up and kills the surviving coroner, disappears for two years before rampaging back to Sunnydale or wherever on Halloween night to torment Laurie, who finally goes over the edge and kills (I hope) egomaniac Dr. Loomis.

Oh right, Haddonfield:

There’s an awfully long dream sequence (or WAS it) in a hospital where pretty much everybody is killed except Laurie. Lois Lane plays Laurie’s therapist, with a giant extremely-white-horse-looking inkblot painting on her wall, saying things like “he’s objectively dead, but he’s living in your mind and he’s living in your heart and your emotions.” Some movie talk: Brad Dourif gets excited over Lee Marvin and Cat Ballou. A dude gets his head stomped, and lotta people get killed from brutal, brutal pounding and knives aplenty. The girls’ slutty friend is predictably killed. Lots of unmotivated camera angles. And as Halloween night approaches, the movie starts getting boring right when it should not be getting boring.

The girls work at an indie coffee shop, a rare look at Rob Zombie the junkman collector who I’ve been missing ever since his first movie:

Scout Taylor-Compton (who filled time between Halloween movies appearing in a direct-to-video horror called April Fool’s Day) returns as Laurie and Danielle Harris (no stranger to crap horror videos herself) is her buddy Annie (Dourif’s daughter). Sabretooth returns as Michael. “Love Hurts” plays over the final scene, the final dumb nail in the stupid coffin.

Michael and his imaginary friends:

by ·Comments Off on Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli)

Handicam horror, but not all blair-witch super-shaky (or cloverfield or whatever). Dude hears that his girlfriend has been haunted since she was little (she rolls out the backstory gradually since there’s not much else in the way of plot development) so he gets the camera and tries to document her hauntings. Psychic tells them it’s demons not ghosts, shows them a clip from The Exorcist and skedaddles. Doors open themselves, chandeliers shake, footprints appear. The dude escalates things by buying a ouija board, spoiling things for everyone, including the viewer who’d been enjoying the general lack of hackery up to that point.

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Movie is as great as advertised for the first half – I was scared to death. The ouija thing takes it from convincing-fake-doc into clearly-scripted territory, where it remains as she reveals more backstory and discovers a long-lost family photo in the attic of the boyfriend’s house. Then the ending (one of a few, apparently) didn’t do it for me. She sleepwalks downstairs, screams until he comes running, then slowly comes back upstairs holding a bloody knife. No problem there, and apparently the theatrical version ends into “she was never seen again” title cards, but mine had the cops come in and shoot her dead when they saw the knife. Halfway worth the hype, then… still impressive for indie horror. Let’s see if its sequel can avoid the Blair Witch 2 trap.

by ·Comments Off on Collapse (2009, Chris Smith)

“In the new human paradigm everything will be local.”

L.A. policeman starts by talking about the CIA smuggling drugs into the country, moves on to the recent/current financial crises, explains the concept of peak oil (we’re running out) then leads us down the Road to global devastation, huge drops in population, suburbanites starving in their homes.

I need to start growing vegetables in our back yard this spring. Quitting my job, opening a bicycle repair shop. Can rain barrels be used for drinking water?

by ·Comments Off on Dread (2009, Anthony DiBlasi)

Stephen (dreamboat Jackson Rathbone from M. Night’s Last Airbender and the Twilight series) is a black haired film student who meets Quaid (edgy dude who studies fear). Stephen’s editor is a vegetarian girl, and I remember what happens to her from the short story. Abby is a girl with a dark goth birthmark all over her face and body – I liked her best.

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The ol’ “kid upstairs watches his family get killed by a maniac below” bit. Didn’t I see the same scene in Giallo last week? Everyone in this movie has tattoos and listens to teen hard-rock. It’s like the vision of underground youth culture put forth by 8mm or Blair Witch 2. Whoops, there’s my favorite M83 song over a clubbing/sex/film editing montage so I guess I’m guilty too. They hang up their fear-study flyers (on red paper, of course) among gratuitous ads for the new Dresden Dolls album.

A stupid, awful, violent little movie. Makes sense that the vegetarian-trapped-in-room-with-rotting-meat scene from the short story would make it to the movie intact. There’s nothing horror movies enjoy more these days than a psychological (yet gruesome) torture chamber. This also shared a hint of the ending of Martyrs, the torturer gaining enlightenment by staring into the dying eyes of his victim, but that movie somehow seemed both far more violent and less gratuitous. Stephen ends up killing everyone, gets away, ho-hum.

The writer/director has his hands on most Barker-related movies of the recent past and near future, including Midnight Meat Train, Book of Blood, something called The Plague and the upcoming Hellraiser remake.

by ·Comments Off on Nightmare Detective 2 (2008, Shinya Tsukamoto)

As the title character in childhood flashback sits for minutes at a time on the floor while his mom quietly cooks hamburgers I’m thinking that Tsukamoto is punishing the people (fans? studio?) who insisted on a sequel to the great Nightmare Detective. I didn’t ask for this, just enjoyed the first one and trusted the director enough to watch another, but he gave me some bullshit, reminiscent of Noriko’s Dinner Table following Suicide Circle (fortunately not quite that bad).

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Seems like horror series usually save the long, unnecessary backstory scenes for part three (or for the remake, in Halloween‘s case), but we’re gonna explore the ND’s troubled past right here in part two, making a third movie unnecessary. His mom was psychic, became afraid of everything and everybody including her own son, and finally hung herself. ND can hear thoughts as well, but he’s less afraid than perpetually miserable. Somehow that two-sentence backstory takes up half the screen time, mostly through ND’s dream sequences which don’t do much to build atmosphere or further character development, but just begin to hang around and repeat themselves.

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Meanwhile some high-school girls (led by Yukie) terrify another girl Kikukawa (Hanae Kan, a star at 11 in Pistol Opera then the unrelated “family member” in Nobody Knows) who proceeds to haunt them Elm Street style. ND is interested because Kikukawa has the same fear issues as his late mother, gets belatedly involved after the deaths of two girls.

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At least Shinya’s got enough energy and interest to pull off a mysterious dream-murder scene among all the boredom and backstory. Yukie and friend Mutsumi nod off in class and dream a restroom in the gymnasium. K. appears, face hidden, walks backwards towards them and tosses a glass of water into Mutsumi’s face. Y. awakens, sees M.’s head has fallen through her school desk. Shades of Elm St. 4 minus the fumbled inhaler and sucking-face joke.

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Same video look but little of the epilepsy camerawork of the action scenes in part 1. Some cool imagery near the end, especially the N.D. stepping through Yukie’s body, dropping it like a rubber suit (which in fact it is), entering her dream to confront the out-of-control Kikukawa.

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by ·Comments Off on Puppet Master 4-6 (1993-1998)

Puppet Master 4

“Full Moon Entertainment presents”

FM was on fire since the last Puppet Master sequel. They’ve got a Jeffrey Combs sci-fi pic, the aforementioned Netherworld, more Trancers and Dollman and Subspecies movies, at least two dinosaur pictures, two kids movies, four or five more sci-fi movies, and Charles Band involved himself in a castle horror starring Adam Ant.

“starring Gordon Currie”

“THE Gordon Currie,” you might be asking, “twelfth-billed in Friday The 13th Part 8?” That’s the guy. He’d go on to appear in the intriguing but disappointing Waydowntown and play opposite Kirk Cameron in the Left Behind movies.

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“Screenplay by…”

Holy crap, five writers! This is gonna be great! Among them, four are mainly known from this and part five, but Douglas Aarniokoski broke out into directing, assisting Robert Rodriguez and Terry Gilliam before helming his own Highlander sequel.

“directed by Jeff Burr”

Experienced horror director Burr had recently helmed Stepfather II and Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. IMDB reviewers rave: “Okay!” “Worth a look!” “Good enough!”

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Judging from the glowing metal box during the credits, it seems Puppet Master might be trying to rip off props from the Hellraiser series. Oh and now they’re stealing the short glowing-eyed druids from Phantasm. “It is known that those in the upworld are close to discovering our secret, the secret Andre Toulon stole from us those many years ago.” You can tell we’ve got supernatural underground beasties here, and an attempt to get all mythological and use fancy english. Should be no trouble with five writers.

A girl in a lab is working on “The Omega Project” (not the jazz jam band, the “hot nude babes” website or the Japanese film production company – it’s something involving robot arms and colored blocks), receives a package containing a murderous alien puppet, then gets clawed to death. This is one of those movies where every time something happens, we’re gonna see the druids watching it in their magic pool of liquid. Same thing happens ten minutes later to her colleage in another lab. Are subterranean aliens hoping to harness the power of robotic arms moving colored blocks??

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Enter our star Rick, a laser-tag-playing robot programmer prone to talking into a microcassette-corder who lives in the ol’ hotel with his doll Hook, until a visit from his girlfriend Susie, her hot psychic friend Lauren and some asshole named Cameron, Rick’s robotics rival. The artificial-intelligence thing is a nice addition, but come on movie, another psychic in the same hotel? And did they shoot this through a mirror? What is all this glare on the lens? A Bob Vila joke right next to a SCUD missile joke – timely.

Cameron, R.I.P.
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The kids happen upon Toulon’s trunk as Puppet-Toulon lurks outside. They resurrect the killer puppets with Toulon’s formula, marvel at them for a minute, then go off to bed when lightning knocks out the power. Good idea! C&L pull out the series’ first ouija board while Rick plays laser tag (no shit) with Tiny and Drill. The ouija opens a gateway through which more alien demons appear and mangle Cameron to death.

Laser Puppet Master would have been a great title:
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Guy who plays a security guard appeared the following year in crappy Donald Sutherland flick The Puppet Masters – no relation!

The “magic to create life” is in a numeric formula on Rick’s computer. Decapitron’s head turns into a cameo by Toulon. Apparently the puppets are no longer mad at him from the events of Puppet Masters 1 & 2. I think at this point we’ve “rebooted” and are pretending those two didn’t exist. I think when Toulon, speaking through the unconscious third girl, says “you must transcend linearity,” he is telling us to forget about parts 1 & 2 and just go with it. Physics according to the movie: laser tag guns can wound alien puppets, light travels at around one foot per second, and even though puppets are made of cloth and wood they can still make kung-fu punching sounds when they collide

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Toulon dubs Rick the new puppet master, the evil alien is defeated (but not destroyed), and we proceed to part five, which I’m guessing was shot right around the same time.

–
Puppet Master 5

“Full Moon Entertainment presents”

In between parts 4 and 5: a Lovecraft adaptation, some sexy business, more sequels, and Shrunken Heads from Richard Elfman, director of Forbidden Zone.

Aaand we’ve got the same director and stars as part 4. Confirmed, shot at the same time.

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“Kind of a queer doll for a grown boy to have.” That’s Duane Whitaker, who appeared the same year in Pulp Fiction as one of the dudes who ties up Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames. Since then he’s been in both Rob Zombie sequels. A real movie star in a Puppet Master flick!

Dreeeeam seeeeequence:
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We join Rick at the police station where he’s being arrested for all the deaths from part 4, then it’s on to the first recap of the series, greatest hits from part 4 (there’s some laser tag, of course).

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Some dullsville setup: the new head of Rick’s robotics company is pulling some weapons-dealing trickery, hires the lamest thugs to break into the hotel and steal the puppets. Meanwhile, with no Phantasm monk assistants left, the giant underground puppet transfers his soul into a demon puppet in a drawn-out bit of hammery, saying junk like “drink deep from the fountain of evil, my child.”

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Ever since trying to gain some goodwill by fighting nazis in part III, the series has been going out of its way to bring Bad Guys into the series to become puppet victims, not just innocent psychics. It’s okay for Jester to nail one of the petty thieves in the balls with a meat hammer, but the demon puppet does all the real killing. These guys aren’t evil enough to deserve Death By Jester, just some slapstick. Hey, it’s Torch! Was he even in part 4? The Demon shoots ghost lasers at Torch until Six-Shooter wounds it. Aaaand Rick talks to his computer which is channeling the now-hospitalized psychic girl from part 4.

The filmmakers apparently confused computer code with German:
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Timely references: a gross country guy uses the phrase “achy-breaky”

Up to the 65-minute mark it’s kind of boring. The thieves’ deaths are all demon-scratches and red lighting, and as before, everyone makes a huge deal of Decapitron, who doesn’t even seem all that cool to me. Oh wait, I looked down to type this and now Doctor Whoever, the weaponry robotics bigwig, is fighting Rick with a giant wrench in the elevator. Oh good, Torch is unharmed from the laser hit, and he and his buddies don’t take kindly to the bespectacled man who just konked out their friend.

Decapitron is not cool:
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Epic (well, three-minute) puppet battle follows. All puppets survive, the demon doesn’t, happy epilogue. The movies are becoming disappointingly tame and formulaic. Fortunately they changed things up in the next movie, but unfortunately it’s the worst-rated in the series.

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–
Puppet Master 6

“Full Moon Pictures presents”

Our six favorite puppets are in cages while a new fake Toulon runs off and burn/buries another cage on a cool-looking night-and-fog set. Hope he buried Decapitron (update: no, it was the deformed puppet body of his former assistant, but Decap isn’t in this sequel anyhow). Lots of editing and fancy angles… we may be in the hands of a Raimi disciple.

The poster is for a mid-60’s Italian swords-and-sandals flick:
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“Curse of the Puppet Master”

So we’re done with the sequel numbering. A montage of puppet scenes from earlier movies plays over the credits, and it’s not for recap purposes like in part five – just good ol’ footage recycling.

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“directed by Victoria Sloan”

This is actually David DeCoteau from part III. Why would the guy who has only ever made bad movies use an alias for a bad movie? In fact, his previous Puppet Master entry was one of the good ones – you’d think he’d want some fan recognition. Maybe the DeCoteau table at the conventions was getting too hot. From the writer of Hellraiser Deader, ugh.

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“Another Magoo goes to college” says the fake Toulon to his daughter. So the lead’s name is gonna be Magoo, huh? And now a guy named Tank whom I recognize from the video box. Picked-on sensitive Tank (Josh Green, who made it to 42nd-billed-in-Pearl-Harbor before throwing in the towel) makes fancy wood figurines, gets hired by puppet-crazy Mr. Magoo, introduced to our gang, who are let out of their cages for dinner. Movie doesn’t look so bad but this is some clumsy-ass dialogue.

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Magoo bought the puppets at auction? So much for the long careful setup stringing the sequels together. Oh um Magoo (George Peck – best known as “man with luggage” in a Susan Sarandon flick) is being questioned by the cops about the disappearance of his previous assistant in an extremely drawn-out scene. Come to think of it, 30 minutes have passed and nothing has happened (pre-credits foggy mystery doesn’t count).

Magoo wants the boy to make a 444-piece puppet – that’s 2/3rds of the devil. Maybe it comes with a 222-piece accessory pack. One piece is the size of his hand – the puppet will be as big as the house!

“What is man except a being at war with himself.”
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Jane Magoo (Emily Harrison – the best actor here – who went on to play “girl” in a David Spade film) is back and there’s some kissing and what not. Tank roughhouses with hooligans. Mr. Magoo pep-talks Tank. The last 30 minutes of this movie had better be pretty cool.

A hooligan broke Tiny! Puppets are sent after the hooligan and we have our first groin-drilling of the series. I am liking the drunkenly tilting camera. An investigation follows and our puppet friends become cop killers. The effects in this movie ain’t worth a damn – no stop-motion or cleverness, just out-of-frame hands waving puppets around, and sometimes strings I can see.

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Magoo turns Tank into a way silly Max Headroom robot and the puppets, who were totally cool with all this a second ago, decide to kill him. Roll credits? I like the bonkers ending and the short runtime, but let’s face it, I’m just trying to stay positive over a turd of a movie.

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I am Puppet Master’d out, so there will be a very long delay before I move on to part 7…

by ·Comments Off on Antichrist (2009, Lars Von Trier)

I told Katy I wanted to call this “post-feminist cinema” but she said “anti-feminist” would fit better. I’m gonna read what everyone wrote about this later on, but for now my first impression was that it’s a beautiful film of a less-beautiful story. Charlotte and Willem lose their young son and since he’s a psychologist he tries to help her through it using dodgy methods like taking her to the place she’s most afraid of. So he’s either doing a good job, or he’s misguided but still trying to help the best he knows how, or he’s an awful person who hopes to further incite his wife’s trauma so he can write an exciting book about it. I go back and forth, but what I’m sure about is that Charlotte turns out to be an evil witch. She watched her son die and did nothing to stop him, she drilled a metal rod through Willem’s leg, and she acts generally psycho until he stops her and is confronted by the ghosts of a hundred dead forest witches. Or something. Gotta say I actually liked it a whole lot, found it an effective and gorgeous horror movie, despite any political or character misgivings.

by ·2 Comments

“What we need is a flamethrower.”

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Apparently this played in one theater for one week before going to “VOD” (whatever that is). I don’t know anyone who has this “VOD,” which was also the rumored resting place of Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and where all Soderbergh’s movies are said to be sent the same day as their theatrical releases. Is it something you watch on those portable playstation games? Is it a website? Can I get an invite? Not willing to buy a satellite dish or a fiber-optic link to hollywood or whatever I’d need, I borrowed a copy of the movie from a connected friend to close out this year’s successful SHOCKtober season. Sorry, Mr. McDonald, but rest assured I’ll be buying the movie and the book as soon as I figure out how.

“Mrs. French’s cat is missing” says a sinister voice as a blue waveform bounces across the wide screen, before the title breaks through in a blue vortex, each letter appearing from the inside out until it spells TYPO a few seconds before PONTYPOOL. What with the movie’s play with language, that can’t be accidental.

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Next half (or more) of the film has fallen big-city talk-radio DJ Grant Mazzy in his sound booth, with his producer Sydney Briar (great names) and assistant Laurel Ann sitting in the main room. It’s snowing and damn cold outside, it’s early morning, and Grant is trying to show off his “take no prisoners” attitude and start rumors. The camera is always gliding at a constant speed, which kinda bugs me though I can’t think of a more pleasing alternative offhand. Gradually we start to hear of a disturbance in town, “herds” of people banding together and murmuring, breaking into buildings and tearing residents apart. The descriptions get weirder, until Grant is saying things like this on the air: “That was our own Ken Loney interviewing a screaming baby coming from Mary Gault’s eldest son’s last dying gasps.”

The actions outside are so disturbing and unbelievable, that by this point characters and viewer are dying to break out of the radio station and walk around – but we never do. Instead the herd tries to break in, preceded by the slightly loopy Dr. Mendez who may know how the whole thing started (he tells us it’s a virus infecting words in the English language) but is never given enough time to explain himself because Laurel Ann becomes infected. They stay in the sound booth, depriving her of language to feed off, until she explodes.

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More word games, and then Grant (who, as a popular talk radio host, may have been helping spread the virus all morning) comes up with a cure that doubles as a last-minute romantic ending, defamiliarizing the infected word, changing its meaning. “Kill is kiss, kill is kiss” makes me think of Killer’s Kiss.

I wasn’t aware of Stephen McHattie though I’ve seen him before. He went from playing James Dean in a 70’s TV biopic, to Canadian thrillers in the 80’s, to a ton of TV and voice (no surprise) acting, to A History of Violence and The Fountain to major roles in Hollywood action flicks (300, Shoot ’em Up, Nite Owl in Watchmen). McDonald is known for a handful of cult road flicks and the interesting-sounding The Tracey Fragments, and also directs a ton of TV. I’d only seen his short Elimination Dance, but will be seeking out more.

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McDonald: “Zombies are undead and these people are not. They’re people who have difficulty expressing themselves. It’s a very common, very modern virus.”

AV Club:

Primarily though, the film works as a tour de force for McHattie – a veteran character actor making the most of his character’s long, fluid monologues – and as a sly commentary on journalistic responsibility. At first, McHattie seems to enjoy anchoring a broadcast that’s drawing international attention, but throughout, his conscientious producer Lisa Houle pesters him about whether it’s really appropriate for him to be goosing the drama, as when he urges the station’s field reporter to get closer to the monsters. There’s a lot of subtext in Pontypool (and some of it isn’t so “sub”) about how meaningless conversation can be a kind of plague. Yet the greater evil may be the words that sound meaningful, but are really just diverting.

from D. Cairns short but essential interview with the director:

DC: The very idea of a “war on terror” is a very Pontypool idea, the war against an abstract concept or word.

MACDONALD: Right. So our ideas naturally come out about the manufacturing of fear by the American media […] the co-opting of certain words by the media, to label people or things. And it’s in a very sly and damaging way, often. “Pedophile” is a popular word, as a weapon, you know. To suddenly hint at that, you could destroy somebody. With something as simple as “You know, I heard he was a pedophile…” It just shows how powerful certain words are. Language is so loaded with great shit, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches for us, to know how to place some of these things. And there’s kind of a cultural thing too, like when the BBC guy comes on, everybody’s like, “Oh my god, we’ve got the real guy on!” you know? It’s like these backwoods colonial guys listening to the real deal. It’s such a cultural thing, with the French-English in Canada. And suddenly these sovereigntists or separatists become “terrorists,” that easy slip, how easy that is… “Oh, I’ve never heard the French ‘Quiet Revolution’ referred to as ‘terrorists’ in Quebec.” But you could…

DC: And a violent riot becomes an “insurgency.”

MACDONALD: Yeah yeah. So you start to see how just choice of words, there’s a certain WAY that the media talks, to create a drama, to create an ongoing story. … Myself having worked in the media for so long, you have an inside view of how these things go on.

Good news:

May 16, 2009
Acclaimed director Bruce McDonald returns to the director’s chair with Pontypool Changes, a sequel to his highly anticipated psychological thriller Pontypool. Producer Jeffrey Coghlan confirmed rumors in Cannes today that the Pontypool sequel is scheduled to lens in early 2010, reuniting McDonald with Pontypool screenwriter Tony Burgess, who adapted the original from his book “Pontypool Changes Everything”.

Author Tony Burgess shares a name with the author of A Clockwork Orange, another sci-fi novel interested in language.

From Bruce’s interview with Twitch:

– Let’s talk about the after the credits scene, the cookie.
– That used to be end of the movie, but before the credits. And people thought, what? What? Too much confusion. There is a tradition now where you have something at the end of the credits where you have an outtake, or hint of a sequel. The existence for it is sort of buried in there, well the title of the book sort of suggests it, Pontypool Changes Everything, and one of the things I’ve always love about the notion of this, is that the virus could affect something as abstract as the English language. It can leap into reality itself, change the fabric of how reality is perceived.

OCT 2017: Watched again in HD, still the best.

by ·Comments Off on Puppet Master Trilogy (1989-1991)

Puppetmaster

“Full Moon Productions presents…”

According to IMDB, this was Full Moon’s first feature. They’d go on to make some of my favorite direct-to-video absurd low-budget semi-horror movies of the early 90’s, including Stuart Gordon’s Pit and the Pendulum, the Louisiana sex/devil cult story Netherworld, and many Puppet Master sequels, plus movies that screamed “rent us” from the new-release shelf with names like Trancers, Subspecies and Dollman, but never quite seemed worth the three bucks.

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“A David Schmoeller film”

Or more accurately, a David Schmoeller VHS tape (were any Puppet Master movies released to cinemas?). He wrote and directed a Klaus Kinski torture film called Crawlspace, which I meant to watch last week instead of Pin… but foolishly did not.

“Puppetmaster”

Titles were re-capitalized to Puppet Master for the sequels, maybe to avoid confusion with Hsiao-hsien Hou’s acclaimed drama The Puppetmaster (whose runtime is longer than any two Puppet Master sequels put together).

“starring Paul Le Mat”

One could argue that Le Mat is an actual star, having played a title role in Demme’s Melvin and Howard and third-billed in American Graffiti. I didn’t find him photogenic, hence no screenshot… oh wait, this might be him screaming:

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“and introducing Robin Frates”

This was pretty much the last time anyone heard from Robin Frates, except those who saw Schmoeller’s follow-up film The Arrival (not the Charlie Sheen one), which sounds appealingly like a sort of alien vampire Benjamin Button.

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“special appearance by Barbara Crampton”

Star of Re-Animator and From Beyond! You’d think if her appearance was so special, she could’ve been given a better role than “woman at carnival.”

The theme music is nicer than this movie deserves.

Budget tip #1: Low-to-ground POV shots require no actual puppet effects, and are fun to watch. These are just great, the camera running behind feet and cars, jumping over suitcases and across piano keys.

William Hickey (Wise Blood, Prizzi’s Honor) is Toulon, the inspecifically-foreign-accented titular magician. He’s been discovered by sinister nazis, so he hides Happy/Sad Clown, Oriental Mustache and Hook-hand behind a wall panel and bites a bullet. The end.

The short-lived Toulon #1:
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No wait! “Yale University, present day.” A dumpy Paul Le Mat dreams in color that he is dreaming in black and white while being attacked by leeches (I hope that’s exactly how the scene read in the script). Is Yale a carnival, or have we changed location to a carnival? Enter “woman at carnival,” visiting a psychic (Irene Miracle of Inferno) who lacks a stereotypical gypsy accent. Ooh they’re playing the ol’ scam-gypsy-who-sees-real-visions card as Barbara dreams up a puppet attack.

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“I want you to recreate in your mind your wildest sexual fantasy.” Two sex-crazed psychic researchers (Balding Ponytail and Too Much Lipstick) call Le Mat (on the phone, disappointingly) to arrange a meeting at the hotel where Toulon died, where they’re met by their cynical psychic friend, their dead friend Neil, a crabby Mews Small (Scott Baio’s mom in Zapped!) and introducing Robin Frates.

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While our psychic friends creep around the place seeing visions and acting eccentric, Tiny (little puppet head and human hands emerging from a ribbed sweater) kills the peeping crabby lady and plays games with dead Neil. In true Friday the 13th fashion, the puppets go after the sexually active couple first – Too Much Lipstick is killed offscreen by Drill Head and a female puppet barfs leeches onto her tied-up husband. Tiny, boasting some impressive stop-motion, wounds the cynical drunk girl then Hook finishes her off in the elevator (if they were aiming for a Dressed To Kill reference, the editor wasn’t cooperating).

Dead Neil explains: “Metaphysically speaking, I killed myself, and using the techniques of the old puppet master I brought myself back to life.” But then Neil stupidly disrespects the killer puppets and they gang up on him, brutalizing a rubber hand before breaking out the drill and leeches (honestly the leeches aren’t very scary).

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Written and produced by Full Moon head Charles Band, who had produced everything from Laserblast and Robot Holocaust to Stuart Gordon’s Dolls, Trancers and Ghoulies, TerrorVision and Troll, Clive Barker’s disowned first two pictures, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama – pretty much everything I watched on HBO at 2am in 1992. Effects by oscar-nominated Dave Allen, who worked on The Stuff, The Howling and Equinox.

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–
Puppet Master 2

Hook, Clown, Drill, Tiny and Leech Woman resurrect Toulon using a magic potion before the credits even roll. This one is gonna be good.

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“Full Moon Entertainment presents”

In the two years between the original and the sequel, Full Moon and Charles Band have involved themselves in a parallel-universe thriller, a sexy fantasy-horror starring Sherilyn Fenn (premiering the same week as Twin Peaks), Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox and its Gordon-unaffiliated sequel

“directed by David Allen”

So they’ve handed the franchise right over to the effects crew. Part II is from the writer of Subspecies and cinematographer of Screwball Hotel (I’ll bet that’s not how they sold it on the poster).

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A U.S. government paranormal research van is poking around the old hotel, bearing bearded Lance (Demonic Toys), dark-haired Wanda, jokey cynic Patrick, serious Carolyn (of Robot Jox 2) and older new agey “truth comes from feeling” Camille (Frightmare, Night Shift). They tell us Paul Le Mat survived the first movie but wanted too much money for the sequel so he’s locked in an asylum. Then introducing the neighborhood Comic Relief Farmer and his pitchfork-bearing wife – “They say Satan’s got a suite of rooms in there!”

Tiny and Clown take care of pseudo-psychic Camille in secret, then Drill brains Patrick with everyone watching, is captured and dissected. I hope Drill will be okay!

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The filmmakers overestimate the computing power of an Amiga 2000:
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Toulon (a new actor) wanders in with an Invisible Man getup, calling himself Eriquee Chaneé (get it? Chaney?) claiming the hotel is his, then the group is joined by Collin “Corbin’s Brother” Bernsen, our first glimpse of star power (heh)

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The farmer’s brains are removed by Leech Woman (movie is really into brains; I sense a zombie connection) who is then melted by the wife, immediately replaced by Torch, who burns her up, in a particularly poorly-lit scene. So Toulon is collecting brains to brew up a new batch of magic puppet juice and live another 50+ years as a puppet himself.

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Flashback: Toulon remembers years ago in Egypt when he was a powerful magical puppetmaster but a crappy actor, and as punishment, an old merchant burns up the puppets using his mind. Hmmm.

The scene I remember best from the entire series (below): a boy is torturing his GI Joes with a whip, tries to play rough with Torch. The scene I remember least: pointless seaside romance between Carolyn and Corbin’s brother. Even adding a flamethrowing puppet and resurrecting Toulon from the dead, it’s not a better movie than the first one, which at least had characters which weren’t all interchangeable sexy college students.

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Hook carves up Lance and Wanda, Puppet Toulon (I like him, a short guy with hard marble contact lenses) threatens Carolyn, and I’m not sure why the puppets turn on him then resurrect Camille to go terrorize an institute for “mentally troubled” children, but there you go.

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–
Puppet Master 3

“Berlin – 1941”

Nazi experimenters succeed in reviving the corpses of dead soldiers. A young puppetmaster is interested.

Looks like something out of Day of the Dead:
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“Full Moon Entertainment presents”

This was Full Moon’s year. They had Stuart Gordon (Pit and the Pendulum), Trancers II (the Helen Hunt-starring sequel to a mid-80’s Charles Band film), and future sequel-bait Subspecies and Dollman.

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“starring Guy Rolfe”

Finally a consistent Toulon – he’d play the part through 1999. Guy had been around – not just in stuff like Dolls (in which he also played a puppetmaster), but in Tashlin’s Alphabet Murders and Nick Ray’s King of Kings in the 60’s.

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“directed by David DeCoteau”

The prolific Mr. DeCoteau had made such classics as Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama (which I have seen more than once) and Dr. Alien, would go on to make such classics as Frankenstein Reborn!, Final Stab and Wolves of Wall Street.

Sinister Eric Stein confronts Toulon about the Hitler-mockery satire of Toulon’s puppet show. Mrs. Toulon (Sarah Douglas of the first two Superman movies and Return of the Living Dead III) looks on. The stop-motion effects are still cool and still only one second long at a time. Two important and great new additions: the six-shooter cowboy puppet, and giving the puppets wordless voices (cowboy’s Jack Nicholson laugh is my favorite).

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Gestapo Krauss (Richard Lynch) and Dr. Hess (Ian Abercrombie of Inland Empire) fight over Toulon’s fate. T’s wife is killed in a raid, then Tiny and Drill kill the nazis escorting T into custody – can’t argue with that. While T cries over his wife (along with the puppets, making the ending of part 2 more inexplicable) and gives his revenge monologue, the main general (a Bond movie regular) calls on the search. Leech Woman is still not interesting, even when she’s supposedly T’s murdered wife recurrected to kill Stein.

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A distractingly weird-looking “young boy” (turns out it’s a short 22-year-old), also on the run, stays with Toulon while Six-Gun takes out the general (plenty of stop-motion plus a fall from a high window – along with the period costumes, looks like Full Moon is ramping up the budget). Toulon creates Blade, modeled after Krauss (who himself is modeled after Klaus Kinski), replacing his broken Hitler doll.

Kraus/Kinski/Blade:
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There’s actually a story here, not just a bunch of idiots at a hotel getting killed one at a time. Hess turns out to be decent (well, as decent as any nazi scientist trying to reanimate dead soldiers can be), the father of the “boy” turns traitor to win his freedom, both die, Toulon strings up Krauss and escapes Germany with the “boy.” Weird to turn a slasher horror flick into a nazi adventure, but there you go.

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“Photographed at Universal City Studios Hollywood” – there’s that budget I was talking about. Too bad it won’t last.

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EDIT: Thanks to Frederic for pointing out the correct model of computer the filmmakers are misusing in part two. Apologies to Commodore 64 heads for the error.