Back to my bread and butter with this blog; trailers for terrible old horror movies, and I think this first week I'll start with the first few Puppet Master films. Now Full Moon, a company that grew from the ashes of the old Empire Pictures label, was and still is an absolute factory in the field of (mostly) straight-to-video entertainment (although that last word is debatable for some of their output). The Puppet Master series is probably the franchise of theirs that you are most likely to have heard of, partially for being a fixture of rental stores for years, partially for how bloody many of the things there are (it's eleven, plus "non-canon" entries, a reboot, and some spin-offs!), and for the fact it's a horror franchise where their action figures of the characters can be actual size.
Now the first film in the series is a bit of an odd duck; it actually starts with a neat prologue about where the puppets came from, who made them, how they came to be hidden at the hotel where the story takes place etc. After that intro though, the story following a bunch of psychic researchers at the hotel, and one of their number being resurrected, doesn't feel that connected to that opening. Yes, it's the puppets killing them, but it feels very disconnected from their creator Andre Toulon's story. Honestly, you could have swapped out the puppets for any other monster, ghost, or whatever, and the plot wouldn't need to change. It really feels like they just came up with the design of the characters and their origin story, then just grafted that idea onto a completely unrelated script. So yeah, outside the first quarter of an hour, it's really not an auspicious start for such a franchise, although the murderous marionettes themselves are a fun bunch. Mind, even they are a mixed bag, as only two of them, Pinhead (not that one!) and Blade (not that one... I should look at those trailers some time), are effective killers. Of the others, Tunneller is only useful if the victim helpfully stays still, Jester has that cool spinning face but does nothing else, and Leech Woman's ability is one of the most inefficient ways to kill someone imaginable. However, things would improve, both for the puppets and the audience, next time...
