#2 - Puppet Master (1989)
(dir.
David Schmoeller)
This is a silly movie. As far as the "killer puppet" genre goes, this is one of the most famous, but definitely not one of the best (I'd give that honor to Ghoulies II or Stuart Gordon's Dolls). A group of psychics are summoned to an old hotel by a former colleague, where they are stalked and killed by evil puppets that he controls. There is slightly more plot than that, but it's sort of dumb, so I won't bother.
This is not a great film, but it has its moments. Most of the kills are fun, but they are few and far between, and the filler is pretty dull. This movie could've been at least 20 minutes shorter without losing anything important to the story. The puppet effects vary in quality - there are some genuinely decent stop-motion sequences, followed by very silly ones where the puppets are obviously being controlled by hand. The design of the creatures is decent too, especially the "main" puppet that has a knife for one hand and a hook for the other. Too bad he doesn't do much with them.
Historically, this is a semi-important film - at least to the history of low-budget schlock, that is. This was Full Moon's first feature film, and it kicked off 25+ years of ridiculous crap about evil puppets, evil gingerbread men, and evil bongs. Producer Charles Band really has a thing for evil inanimate objects. Stuart Gordon did release a few films through Full Moon, so it's not all bad, but the majority has been direct-to-video junk.
I can't really recommend this one, unless you really love the idea of evil puppets. Even then there are better films out there.
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