Mirror Mirror (1990)

Very LA goth teenager Megan (Rainbow Harvest, a name that brings up so many questions) and her mom move to a small town in nowhere, Iowa. Megan, being from the big city, shy, and a bit weird, does not hit it off with most of her new classmates. Only prospective class president Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), a friend of strays and weirdos, or so her vacuous boyfriend suggests, befriends her. Because Megan is not one to make her own life easier, she develops quite the crush on the nice-jock boyfriend of the school’s resident bitch queen (Charlie Spradling, only credited as “Charlie” for some reason), which does not make her social life any easier.

Because teen hormones and soap operatics are best taken with a bit of violence, an antique mirror left over from the earlier owner of the house Megan and her mom (Karen Black, alas not doing much) moved into turns out to be possessed by demonic forces. At first, it seems to react to Megan’s subconscious – and quite understandable – rage by magically murdering whosoever tortures or annoys the kid. Soon, however, Megan seems to control the destructive forces herself, while taking a nasty twist to her personality. Eventually, she’s outright possessed by the mirror and its powers. Only Nikki realizes something strange is going on, and tries her best to find out what exactly is up with Megan and her mirror, and get her friend back. There is, of course, a somewhat tragic story of sister love and murder connected to the mirror, and Megan and Nikki seem bound to repeat a variation on it.

Marina Sargenti’s only feature film – she did a bit of TV work later on, but only a couple of TV movies and a handful of episodes of various TV shows – is a perfectly decent entry into that horror subgenre concerning teenage misfits gaining some sort of supernatural power to take vengeance on the world that has treated them so badly. Its main problem is a certain lack of originality, so much of the character work feels a bit routine. So, Mirror Mirror goes through its well-worn motions, tropes and plot beats in an effective but not exactly riveting manner.

Of course, these tropes are well-worn because they are so relatable to many of the misfits at heart who have always made up large parts of the hardcore of horror movie fans (typically the people who stay with the genre no matter if it is in one of its cyclical upswings or downswings), and there’s nothing wrong with their presentation here. It’s good enough for what the film is doing, as faint as that praise may sound.

Also good enough for a decent time are the murders committed by the – mostly - invisible demon force; again, there’s nothing here that’s terribly original, but Sargenti’s direction is capable enough. As everything else about the movie, the horror set pieces are perfectly decent.

Really, Mirror Mirror’s main flaw is just that it’s so decent, competently made and keeping to the safest parts of horror country there’s very little about it you’ll remember as being actually exciting or weird. There is one scene of Megan dry-humping the mirror (who can hug back) that’s misguided and weird enough to please and so will in one way or the other reappear in the film’s three(!) sequels, but otherwise, this is very much the most average horror movie imaginable.

In short: Puppet Master II (1990)

Another group of doomed psychic researchers – though these are government-sponsored parapsychologist – visit the house of Toulon (Steve Welles), maker of living puppets to find out if there’s any truth to the insane gibbering of the last survivor of the first film. Little do they expect that the puppets have revived Toulon, who now roams the house bundled up like the Invisible Man. To keep his puppets alive, the puppet master needs them to collect glands (or whatever, but glands are the traditional thing to collect in such a case) from human brains. He’d rather prefer his puppets to harvest the stuff from outside his home, but the area isn’t exactly populated, and the puppets are not terribly good at keeping brain parts unroasted (which is what happens when you build a flamethrower into one of your dolls and send it out brain-gathering, I suppose, therefore Toulon only has himself to blame), so the researchers are still doomed.

Things become a bit more complicated when Toulon decides the research team’s leader Carolyn (Elizabeth Maclellan) is the reincarnation of his dead wife Elsa. Look, Toulon, bandages don’t make you a mummy!
I don’t think the second of many, many Puppet Master films of Charles Band’s puppet obsessed outfit Full Moon is as fun as the first one, but we are still at a point in time here when Band productions were at least trying to be actually entertaining films in the classic low budget tradition. Consequently, director David Allen (despite being more of an effects guy than a filmmaker in his own right for most of his career) delivers a decent little horror movie that – for my tastes – could use a bit more of the spirited weirdness of the first film (no stuffed poodle here, that’s for sure) but that’s working the few assets it has – a decent cast, puppets – as hard as financially viable.

There are certainly far worse ways to while away ninety minutes than with this variation of various mummy films, but with killer dolls. And because the cruel and uncaring universe had a pretty good day when it caused Puppet Master II to happen, it ends on a final scene so loveably bizarre I can’t help but approve of the whole Puppet Master endeavour up to this point despite my general annoyance with Charles Band as doll movie impresario on account of it.