Customer Reviews

Puppet Master 1

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Since there are a limited amount of reviews for this movie series, i'll give a quick synopsis for the first film:

Back in the late 1930's puppet-maker Andre Toulon (played by William Hickey) found the secret of life and has instilled it into his creations - various puppets with uncanny abilities to kill. Nazis are out to find out his secret but they are unable to (sorry, don't want to spoil it), and then the movie flash forwards to present day 1989. A group of psychics attempt to figure out Toulon's secret by staying at the hotel he was at in the past, but come to find themselves stalked by the puppets that he created!

A great and wonderful movie if you like this kind of thing. If you like movies like Dolls, Evil Dead 2, Night of the Demons, and Tales From the Darkside episodes, then chances are, you will love this film. It would be wrong of me to bash this movie like other reviewers because I cannot hold it up to the same criteria as I would other movies. It's just not fair. These movies are for b-movie horror fanatics. As a result of which, you likely enjoy a movie with a little extra cheese - and this one delivers! It also has a fair amount of gore and gruesome deaths. Often times, movies of this caliber pick up the pace as the series goes on, and i'd definitely say that the series gets better. Part 1 sets the groundwork, and as a result, you may have to be a little more patient with it. To it's credit, the dolls come out in the beginning. But there is a considerable amount of down time in between then and the time their killing spree begins again. This is the story setting itself up and I, at least, feel that it's worth it to get to the point of the story's cooler parts.

The dvd itself is from the now defunct Full Moon pictures. They did a great job on these dvds considering the fact that these are b-movies and often times all we get is the presentation, a menu, and a trailer (as was the case with Dolly Dearest). With this dvd, you get a behind the scenes featurette (the same one found on the vhs), cast bios, trailer, and some Full Moon ads for other movies and Puppet Master Toy Products. Although the latter is useless since the company isn't around anymore, it was fun for me to look at, if nothing else, to waste a little time.

It's a shame these dvds aren't in production anymore. If you want one movie, you'll pretty much have to buy the whole set. On here, the prices for these are outrageous. As of present day, you can get the whole set on www.fullmoondirect.com Nevermind the huge fees from sellers on here and ebay. You can purchase it directly from the company for a far cheaper price. The whole series is very fun to watch if you are a b-movie horror fan, and it's not fair that major studios haven't gotten their acts together and made this film series readily available. The series itself has their own fans and could welcome newer fans if they were easier to find.

My final verdict: If you like killer doll movies or cheesy horror flicks, then do whatever you can to view this set. If you are unsure about spending an extraneous amount of money for something like this, then go down to your local mom-and-pop rental store and pick up a vhs copy of the first. If you like it, chances are, you'll have fun with the rest of the series and can go from there to obtain the set for a reasonable price at fullmoondirect.com

All horror fans are familiar with Puppet Master whether they've actually seen any of the films or not. Full Moon's first and most popular franchise is also probably their best.
While Puppet Master will never be considered high art or pulse poundingly frightening, it's a fun movie. The first film is obviously the best of the bunch. It tells the tale of a group of psychics who are drawn to a hotel where puppet maker Andre Toulon hid his creations before his suicide many years ago. Seems that one of the psychic clan had gone out on his own to discover Toulon's secret of everlasting life and married the heiress to the hotel in order to find the puppets and discover the secret. Once at the hotel, the psychics-which consist of a feisty fortune teller, a horny couple who use their psychic gifts for more saucy studies, and the straight man who has dreams of the future-start falling victim to the evil puppets. Also roaming around is their old colleague who is now resurrected and in cahoots with the puppets.
The movie is definitely better than it probably should be. It's not scary but does manage some creepy atmospheric moments and has a good soundtrack. The puppets themselves are violent little critters. They don't speak, but utter sighs and groans and show emotion through subtle movements and facial expressions. Stop motion animation is used to show movement in the full body shots where the puppets have to run, walk, jump, etc. Some folks say it looks fake, but considering the budget, it really doesn't look bad at all. It's used briefly and sparingly, and in my opinion, looks quite good. Too many people are spoiled by the damn CGI anymore.
But any way you slice it, Puppet Master is a cheap, fun and entertaining little picture. It's just too bad Full Moon doesn't do films of this caliber anymore.

What I like about PUPPET MASTER is what I enjoy about many FULL MOON productions, that being it's weirdness. Here we have killer puppets, but not just some tired old clowns or whatever. These puppets are different! We get Blade w/ his knife and hook combo! Leach Woman and her mouth full of bloodsuckers! Tunneler's drill-head! And Pinhead w/ his super strength! There's also Alex (Paul LeMatt), whose pre-cognitive abilities lead him and his fellow psychics into the hands of the deadly dolls of doom! Oh sure, it's goofy, but it's also fun to watch...

She's perfect...gorgeous face, great figure, porcelain skin, raven hair down her back. She has only one flaw. She has a habit of gagging up thick, mucous-covered leeches while making deep, retching noises. Personally, I'd just think of England and avoid kissing her.



She's Ms. Leech, and the major delight of Puppet Master I is watching her and her other pint-sized companions, Blade, Pinhead, Jester and Tunneler do their stuff. We meet them in the Bodega Bay Inn when a small band of psychics arrive to learn why they seem to be getting strange mind messages from a former colleague, a man named Neil Gallagher. But it turns out Gallagher is dead...we see him in his casket. We also see him sitting in a chair and waltzing wearing white mask. We see him at the head of the table when his friends gather for dinner. Could it be that Gallagher discovered the secret formula an old puppet master named Andre Toulon used to bring life to his puppets? Hmmm. All we know for sure is that 50 years ago, at this very same Bodega Bay Inn, Toulon hid his puppets in a secret compartment, then fired a bullet into his mouth as Nazi agents burst in his room.



And now, in 1989, in the dead of night and in this deserted Inn, Blade, Pinhead, Jester, Tunneler and Ms. Leech seek out the visiting psychics and the Inn's lone maid to slash, smash, strangle, burrow and regurgitate them to death. Only Alex Whitacre and Megan Gallagher, Neil's wife, will survive that night. They find themselves at that same dining table, this time with the bodies of their friends slumped in chairs...and with a live Neil Gallagher maniacally announcing his hideous plot to bring life, not just to puppets, but to corpses.



But what's not to love about murderous little dolls? If a cult film requires a silly but amusing plot, home-spun acting that brings smiles, a stuffed pekinese that shows a lot of talent and death charging at you at ankle level, then Puppet Master is one of the best of the cult films. Among my favorite characters were Irene Miracle as Dana Hadley, a whiskey-swigging voluptuous psychic; Jimmie F. Skaggs as Neil Gallagher, a thin, prancing actor with a face like one of his puppets; Ms. Leech, of course; and Tunneler. When Tunneler goes to work on your face you'll wish you were back in your dentist's chair having a root canal done.

I'm a big Puppet Master fan and I used to love this movie, but I watched it a few days ago and I thought that it was average at best. It's not bad at all, but it's nowhere near as good as I remembered. It's pretty damn boring! The puppets are awesome (O RLY?) and the special effects are pretty damn good, but the characters are very forgettable! I didn't really care about any of them. Basically, the puppets are the only interesting things in the movie. The parts without the puppets are not interesting at all. I'm sorry, guys, I used to love most of the Puppet Master movies, but now the only PM movie that I love is the third one. It's very entertaining, the plot is very good, the puppets are even more awesome than in the first 2 and the characters are great.

Watch the third one instead.

I bought this movie because I had seen it as a kid, and I loved scary movies. This is a typical 80's horror flick with bad special effects, but I was so glad that I found a copy of it since I didnt think it was being produced anymore. The cover was written all in spanish, but the movie is in english. I am very happy with the purchase, but beware that its pretty cheesy!

This tense Full Moon Features thriller stars Paul LeMat and Golden Globe winner Irene Miracle as two of a group of psychics who are summoned to a California hotel, not knowing it is for their executions at the hands of five murderous... puppets?

It may sound like a ripoff of Child's Play, but this movie has a far more ambiguous plot. The dolls don't really come front and center until the final third of the movie, and Irene Miracle is very good at playing the bitchy Dana Hadley. This DVD is in fullscreen, as the movie was released directly to video, although it was produced as a theatrical feature, so a widescreen print is out there somewhere. :) This DVD was made from a good print of the film and has the trailer, a making of featurette and bios for stars LeMat, Miracle, and William Hickey, as well as filmographies for the rest of the cast and crew.

There are several editions available of Puppet Master, but this is by far the best DVD you can find for it. The current "official" release is a Spanish-subtitled edition (in English with optional Spanish subtitles, and Spanish packaging) with decent quality, but not as good as this, and includes virtually the same extras. And there is also a 3D Uncut version available, but the quality is slightly below VHS quality and has no extras. The best value is in the Puppet Master series boxed set from FullMoonDirect.com and includes THIS edition of Puppet Master 1.

This is actually one of my favorite horror-films of all:)The story has a nice twist to it,but kind of drags a little.The killer puppets serve an unusual master in this one.The ending leaves some unanswered questions which should be revealed in the sequel but aren't mentioned at all.But beyond that it's a great movie!

The Puppet Master series has always been familiar to me, but despite being a horror film fanatic, I had never watched a single one of the 9 or so films. I just didn't feel that killer puppet movies could be interesting or entertaining. (Oddly enough, I like the first 3 Child's Plays films! Go figure!) So a friend of mine let me borrow his Puppet Master Boxset, after being shocked that I had never seen any of them. He said they were good, but to be honest, I wasn't expected much. After viewing this first film, I gotta say I was a bit surprised in the fact it was a pretty decent movie. For what kind of movie it was, and how cheaply it was made, you can't ask for much better than this. The basic story to the film was much more realistic than I had thought it would be. The story is about 3 psychics who visit an Inn to find a former colleague of theirs, who they think has somehow summoned them all there for some special purpose. It is later found out that the former colleague has discovered an ancient secret that allows inanimate objects to come to live from studying the works of a puppeteer named Andre Toulon. The acting, though not great, wasn't horrible, and the effects were actually done fairly well (considering the budget this film was made with). Again, don't expect anything amazing here. The movie's editing leaves something to be desired at times, and you can see strings on the puppets at times (and even part of an arm of a puppeteer in one shot!)But the title of the movie itself should let you know what to expect out of a film like this one. With that said, this a decent little independent horror film that it definitely worth a viewing or two. Definitely recommended for horror fanatics!!!

Low-budget horror movies are often unwatchably bad. A lot of thought and effort went into this one, however. The result is that it's something of a classic in the killer doll/killer puppet genre. Of course, it's meant to be funny, but not in a self-consciourly ironic or over-the-top way. It still has elements of genuine horror. The sequels seemed to get progressively worse, but 2 and 3 aren't bad.