Review of The Puppet Masters (1994) by Nathan H — 05 Apr 2009

Imagine if "Killer Klowns From Outer Space" had taken itself seriously. Then imagine if some Hollywood studio decided to sink a respectable budget into such a stupendously stupid endeavor, pumping the script full of explosions and helicopter stunt scenes and horribly dated special effects.

That's "The Puppet Masters," another on a very short list of early-to-mid-'90s horror films, after the slasher genre had faded to obscurity and grown unprofitable (post-"Freddy's Dead" and "Jason Takes Manhattan") and before "Scream" re-popularized the teen horror film. Hollywood wasn't quite sure what to do with horror, and while there are a few interesting entries ("Candyman," which was sort of a leftover of the slasher era, and "In The Mouth of Madness"), most were simply exploratory, a mixed bag of horror tricks, the equivalent of throwing darts at a board and seeing what stuck. Many, in fact, were Stephen King adaptations, and failed miserably ("Sleepwalkers," "Needful Things").

"The Puppet Masters," I think, exemplifies all that was awful in this dry and horror-starved era of cinema.