In short: Puppetmaster (1989)

Four psychics of varying type – even the stuffed dog owning one – (Paul Le Mat and his lucious hair, Irene Miracle and said stuffed dog, Matt Roe and his leer, and Kathryn O’Reilly and her breasts) are drawn by dreams of their deaths to a closed down hotel somewhere at the coast of California. There, they learn their old partner in psychical research Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F. Skaggs) has committed suicide, leaving an unexpected wife (Robin Frates) behind.

When they were still a team, the group was after the ancient Egyptian secret of bringing inanimate objects to life. They traced this secret to the old puppet master Toulon (William Hickey), whose death the audience gets to see before the main plot starts up. Things seem to have stopped there for our psychics for some reason, though. But wouldn’t you know it? The hotel just happens to be the place where Toulon killed himself in 1939. Not surprisingly, Toulon’s coterie of living puppets is roaming the place, and quite a few psychics will end their stay just as dead as Neil.

David Schmoeller’s Puppetmaster is, of course, a milestone in producer Charles Band’s rule of an increasingly decaying empire of direct to video movies featuring some kind of living dolls as their monsters or heroes. However, it was made when Band still had a modicum of money reserved for the act of actual filmmaking, and when people with a degree of talent and experience like Schmoeller hadn’t jumped ship for less doll-obsessed and impoverished shores yet. So, depending on your tolerance for cheese and utter silliness, Puppetmaster is quite a bit of fun.

Of course, if you shy away from killer dolls who puke leeches while moaning lasciviously, or those who have a drill built into their head, you’ll hate this one as much as later, crappy, outings in the mighty franchise. I can’t say I’d blame anyone for that, but I also think it means missing out on a well-shot movie that just wants to have a bit of fun dancing on the line where the grotesque, the silly, and the gruesome meet.

I for my part find it difficult to resist a film containing said killer dolls, or a cynical female psychic who travels with an unexplained (and probably inexplicable) stuffed dog, or a psychometric who uses her powers mostly for kinky sex with her lecherous husband. It’s as if everyone involved had thought: well, we might not have much money, and we don’t have much of an idea what our film’s actually about, but by Cthulhu, we have a pretty imaginative special effects crew, and we know our ways around a movie set, so we’ll have as much fun with this thing as possible, and just hope our audience will have some too.

Which is pretty much what happened.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,david schmoeller,paul le mat,william hickey,irene miracle,robin frates

Three Films Make A Post: She's out to score for more of what you love her for!

Witchtrap (1989): Kevin Tenney clearly was a horror director with many faces. With Witchtrap, the face he wears is that of the purveyor of awkward crap that is highly entertaining in all the wrong ways. Visually, this reminds me of the less interesting local productions of about a decade earlier, with a smidgen more gore and Linnea Quigley's breasts added, and a slightly more moveable camera. The film's real comical high points are the dialogue and the acting though. What comes out of people's mouths is a mix of "how dumb people think educated people talk"-speak, some of the worst "sarcasm" ever to flow out of a character's mouth (James W. Quinn, I'm looking at you), hare-brained discussions of faith and disbelief, and slightly Ed-Woodian non-sequiturs pretending to be dialogue. All this the actors deliver with all the style and verve of someone reading a newspaper aloud at the coffee table, with emphasises that suggest nobody involved even understood what the sentences they were saying were supposed to mean. To make matters even more interesting, most of the dialogue seems to have been post-dubbed. It's really quite the thing to listen to for ninety minutes.

Gonger (2008): Thanks to various cultural factors too annoying to get into here, not many horror movies beyond semi-professional gore movies have been produced in Germany after the Second World War. Consequently, even a minor, totally derivative (of "J-horror" in particular) TV movie like Christian Theede's Gonger is something to cherish. It helps that the film, quite in the tradition of TV horror, may have no original idea in its body, but is decently acted, competently made and doesn't overstay its welcome. The film's biggest negative point is really that you could imagine seeing its plot, set-up and locality used in much more interesting and complex manner. But that's not how TV, and certainly not German TV, works.

Catacombs (1988): This David Schmoeller film was made during Charles Band's Italian phase, which provides the film with some fine locations, an excellent Pino Donaggio score, and an Italian co-writer who gives the film some of that thought-after Italian movie weirdness. Of course, the last element also leads to a film whose plot developments are not always logical, and whose characters are erratic to say the least. What it curiously does not lead to is an abundance of weird gore. In fact, the film's body count is relatively low, and while some of the deaths are rather strange (there are not many horror films having the theological chutzpah to have someone killed by a Jesus statue come to life), they mostly seem to be beside the point of Catacombs.

Said point seems to be an attempt to reconcile possession type horror with non-crazy Christianity, something the film mostly achieves while also being one of the few horror films that shows monks as actual human beings. It's more an interesting effort than a completely successful film, but it's certainly worth a viewing or two.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,italian movies,in short,horror,kevin tenney,david schmoeller,christian theede