Day 9: Puppet Master (1989)
“ I had metformin 1000 mg pill this dream and I came here to make sure it didn’t come true.”
While attending film school, Puppet Master-director (and my then professor) David Schmoeller taught me two things:
1. Always kick metformin 500 mg price off a scene with characters doing some kind of “business”, which is essentially some random thing for characters already present in the location you’re shooting in to be doing, like reading a magazine or jotting down notes on a pad.
2. Always check your actors’ eye-lines, or it’ll seem to your audience that the characters aren’t looking at each other when you cut back and forth between them. Though, as Schmoeller pointed out to me, Clint Eastwood couldn’t care less about eye-lines, so take that as you will.
Schmoeller always pushed ambitious, guerrilla, indie filmmaking techniques on his students, because at that level, all you really have is your ambition, desire, and raw talent, so you better use everything at your disposal to the best of your ability. To a certain extent that’s how I see Puppet Master; a small budget, ambitious project that doesn’t always work, but does enough right to justify its creation.
So, Puppet Master… Great premise? Check. Cool/funny/naive characters? Check. A plot that goes from kill to kill and then decides to try and tell a story in the last ten minutes? Check. Supernatural subplot that goes more or less unexplained? Check. Yep, sounds like ’80s horror to me.
When it comes to serial-killing dolls, Chucky of Child’s Play fame may still hold the crown (with the runner-up being the horrifying Amazonian doll from Trilogy of Terror), but the figurines of Puppet Master come close. Regardless of the the dolls’ iconography in cinematic history, I’d argue that Puppet Master suffers from the same problems as most ’80s horror flicks.
We’re set up with an interesting idea of Egyptian death-dodging and left with a cast of psychics (an ensemble seemingly ripped straight out of Clue) and a weak story that grinds to a halt by the time the second reel is swapped for the third. Honestly, I think it’s just a bad script with serious potential. The proof of the potential can be seen in the plethora of sequels that have graced our silver screens and direct-to-home-video Walmart pickups since 1989. Schmoeller’s direction is great; it’s got that creepy, campy, surreal vibe that Wes Craven popularized, but good directing can’t always save a mediocre screenplay. Unfortunately, the story starts well but then becomes non-existent for the next 70-minutes. But, hey, if you’re a fan of the flicks from the decade, and just want to see some people get murdered in bizarre fashion, then I can’t help but recommend Puppet Master.
Fun fact: I watched Puppet Master for the first time ever last night. I kind of feel guilty that I took 2 years worth of classes with Schmoeller and never bothered to see this then.
