The One About Puppet Master

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The One About Puppet Master by Ander Monson

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1. My favorite horror movie franchise is Puppet Master.

2. The Puppet Master movies are not fine movies but I love them for reasons a little bit beyond me.

3. It’s not surprising I like movies about the animate inanimate. But the thing I admire about the Puppet Master franchise is how many there are of them (there are 16 as of the Blu-ray box set I bought midway in the pandemic). Why would they keep making them after the first couple, which aren’t very good at all?

4. I’m writing this watching mixed doubles curling in the Winter Olympics. Aside from ice hockey, curling is my favorite Olympic watch. There’s something nearly but not quite erotic about it. 

5. It could be that I just admire and get so easily invested in the attention paid to such small things: the making and manipulation of puppets, the minutiae of the turning rocks. 

6. The apparently small stakes—the disinterest from most of the viewing public—only raises my interest. 

7. The amateur quality of the Puppet Masters is to me part of the appeal. They don’t have much budget. The plot is nothing to talk about. The scripts are thin. I don’t understand the rationale from the studio. Why these sequels? Why’d they get green-lit? Will they just go with any movie idea in this series?

8. I should say I’ve only watched the first five so far. You can only watch so many Puppet Masters without taking a break.

9. The idea is that André Toulon, the eponymous puppet master, or the initial one in the series anyhow, brings puppets to life. Sometimes they’re forces for evil. Other times for good. Nazis inevitably get involved. The movies keep tweaking or outright reinventing the mythology.

10. It seems that several of the mixed doubles teams are couples. I can’t quite imagine being romantically involved with someone who shared my intense concentration on this one somewhat fringe professional pursuit.

11. Like what if your partner doesn’t quite share your degree of obsession with your theoretically shared obsession? How long does that take before it amplifies to a fracture?

12. I’ll go to sleep after this match. I’m partial to Norway but am rooting US. I’m staying up late to watch.

13. I’m paying attention to the Norwegian team’s acne. I guess I’m just used to everyone looking perfect.

14. Daphne from myth, you’ll remember, wasn’t human, even before she was turned into laurel to avoid Apollo’s creepin. The daughter of a river god, she was a naiad, a female nymph associated with water.

15. Even if she’s not quite human, she’s a good stand-in for humans, at least as compared to gods. Apollo, as we say these days, should have been conscious of the power differential, or, really, no means no, motherfucker!, and Daphne meant no and meant it so hard that she took her only option which was to pray to be transformed rather than submit, and so it was.

16. In this way Daphne is where the human becomes the vegetal. 

17. She’s the reverse of the golem, where an inanimate thing is imbued with life to do its master’s bidding. Daphne takes the road the other way, in order to avoid doing someone’s bidding, she becomes inanimate, or a plant anyhow.

18. Are plants animate?

19. I guess it doesn’t matter. What I mean is nonsentient, rather. 

20. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses it’s not Apollo’s fault. It’s Cupid who shot him with an arrow. And even after turning into a tree, Apollo was still horny for her (I guess Cupid packs quite a punch) and became obsessed with laurel, the plant she was turned into.

21. Like many dudes thereafter, he could not take a hint.

22. The disturbing final grace note of the story is that Apollo claims the laurel as his emblem and fashions a laurel crown for use at his temples thereafter, as Miehea Mircan puts it in her introduction to the art show A Biography of Daphne. As she tells it, the crown is made “from a branch of Daphne’s new body, which still recoils from his touch.” So even in her inanimacy she remains animate—just—or at least enough to show resistance.

23. I can’t tell who the resistance serves: is it her or is it us? Or does it just turn the screw on her fate a little further?

24. I suppose the closer reverse analogue would be a sex doll, where a shapely but inanimate thing is used for sex (though obviously this is not sex). Daphne turned away from it and became inanimate. Thereafter, perhaps she was her own puppet master.

25. I do keep toying (ha ha) with the idea of trying to make a Puppet Master movie. Or writing one at any rate. I don’t know very much at all about making films.

26. But if I were to make a film it would be a Puppet Master film. Maybe about Daphne. I would really want to license Metallica’s Master of Puppets. It’s probably better as a thought exercise, but I assume someone at the studio has thought of this.

27. I watched Curse of the Puppet Master, the sixth movie in the franchise, last night with Paul and Megan. 

28. It might be the best of the bunch, but it’s definitely the best since the first one. Four and five were weak shades of the first one. This felt like a departure, with better developed characters and a stronger plot. 

29. The mythology shifts a bit with each movie: it’s an Egyptian spell that brings the puppets to life in the first movies. In 4 and 5 it’s a green substance that gives them life, and there’s a demon that’s trying to get it. I think there’s also a b-plot that involves the government trying to get the green substance from an AI robot thing that this dorky guy creates. 

30. I like how these different forms of lifelike-ness-but-not-quite life—puppets, robots, demons (I guess)—show up in the movies, sometimes in the same movie. 

31. I don’t know if the moviemakers know they’re making movies about golems or not. They don’t seem super interested in or even aware of the ideas in their movies. 

32. Curse of the Puppet Master introduces a new idea. A guy—I forget his name and it doesn’t really matter—acquires the puppets (he says) at an estate sale, and uses them as the centerpiece of his Oddities museum shows. They’re a spectacle, of course (how does he do that!? They don’t even have strings!?), but the real plot is that he finds and grooms a local yokel—hot but dumb, with incredible carving skills—to join his team. His daughter falls in love with the guy (cue sorta-saucy lines about how good he is with his hands) and when he tries to capture the guy’s soul to go into a new puppet, things go off the rails. 

33. The thing that interests me more about this movie is that it strengthens the connection between the puppets’ lives and how they’re powered by human souls.

34. The puppets themselves are the stars of the movies, and they switch between being heroes, villains, and avenging angels. 

35. They are of course just puppets.  

36. The human characters tend to be flat and often badly acted. These are not high budget films.

37. When we turned the movie on the director was credited as Victoria Sloan which I immediately made a joke about. No way is Victoria Sloan a woman is what I said. 

38. Lo, it turns out Victoria Sloan is actually David DeCoteau, who’s directed more than 100 movies (he CHURNS them out) under various names, including: Ellen Cabot, Julian Breen, Victoria Sloan, Richard Chasen, Jack Reed, Martin Tate, Joseph Tennent, Mary Crawford, David McCabe, and David Doe.

39. The movies vary wildly between genres and degrees of apparent seriousness.

40. They include Dreamaniac, Creepozoids; Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (this one I’ve seen); Lady Avenger; Nightmare Sisters; American Rampage; Dr. Alien; Murder Weapon; The Girl I Want; Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge; Beach Babes from Beyond; Naked Instinct; Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000; Young Blood, Fresh Meat; Petticoat Planet; Bikini Goddesses; Leather Jacket Love Story (his first non-speculative movie), Shrieker, The Killer Eye, Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy; Leeches!; Witches of the Caribbean; Haunted Frat; The Great Halloween Puppy Adventure; and Bigfoot vs D. B. Cooper. 

41. Among many others. It’s a wild videography. In interviews he’s very agnostic about genre and really about making good movies, which I’m not sure he makes. For him, it’s about making the movie he’s hired to make on time and on budget, and if he does that, he keeps working. I suppose that’s all we can really ask for.