“It’s the kid from the spaceship. Get him off the car.”

Justin’s rating: Keith David, you’re always welcome in my scifi flicks!

Justin’s review: I can’t recall ever being aware of The Puppet Masters back in the ’90s, even while working at a video store. It did get a theatrical release, although that bombed pretty hard, and ever since this title seems to have fallen into great obscurity.

It could be that it lies buried under a lot of unintentional obfuscation. Some might mix it up with the Puppet Master franchise, which is that “mini murder dolls” thing that has no relation. And I’m sure whenever people think “Donald Sutherland vs. a stealth invasion of aliens,” they’re going to jump right back into Invasion of the Body Snatchers instead of this. Heck, there was even a pretty great Body Snatchers thing that happened a year before this with similar themes, and several other alien invasion-type movies and TV movies during the decade.

So maybe it was a victim of circumstance. Or maybe it’s just a plain bad movie. Let’s see for ourselves.

Based on a Robert A. Heinlein novel from the early ’50s, The Puppet Masters features an invasion of stingray-looking aliens that can control people if they latch on to their back. This all goes down in Iowa, Ground Zero for a not-subtle-at-all spaceship landing in a field with a big “PLEASE COME AND GET ASSIMILATED” sign flashing over its head. It’s so not subtle that the US government almost immediately sends in a team to investigate, and when that team disappears, sends another, more star-studded team to see what’s what in Podunk, USA.

Our team of heroes who will certainly not find brain slugs attached to their vertebra includes Donald Sutherland (Animal House), Julie Warner (Tommy Boy), Eric Thal (Six Degrees of Separation), and Keith David (They Live). There’s a bit of tension between Sutherland’s father and Thal’s son, but I’m sure that an alien invasion will do nothing but drive them closer together.

By the time they get to the town, it’s been pretty well suborned, the birds are all gone, and everyone is acting just as suspicious as they can. They even built a fake spaceship to draw in lookie-loos and infect them. Ratchet up the tension, paranoia, and conspiracy, and you’ve got something that might fill out a nice hour of The X-Files.

Very early on — like by minute 13 — the government team uncovers an alien and starts to realize what’s going on. When these little buggers aren’t setting up shop between people’s shoulder blades, they’re using a grappling hook-like tongue to jet about the place. If this movie was made just three years later, this would all be terrible CGI, but happily, the alien slugs are practical effects that look pretty creepy in motion.

I actually found myself grinning at Sutherland’s performance here as the Old Man of the CIA. He’s so wry and nonchalant when everything goes pear-shaped, as if this is an old hat to him, and he constantly makes the right calls. And his character uses a cane, more for wicked defense than for walking. Neat prop.

The strange thing is that The Puppet Masters starts in what would otherwise be the third act of a similar movie, with a conspiracy revealed, a nail-biting escape, and our heroes jetting off to Washington determined to win the larger war in the end. Here, that’s just the first 20 minutes! Now we’ve got to keep things going for another hour-twenty, and there’s no way to keep the intensity as high as what we get in the beginning.

It is kind of refreshing to see our heroes not kept in the dark but aware of the threat and trying to take the right moves to counter it. There are other scientists (Hi Will Patton!) who lend a hand, and about everyone in this film is possessed by an alien at least two times. And because the alien always snuggles up on people’s backs, about a third of the runtime is devoted to people making other people take off their shirts.

If The Puppet Masters displays some surprisingly sharp or clever moments, this may be due to David S. Goyer bringing some of the same writing talents that he did to Dark City and Blade a few years later. But he was merely a small part of the overall effort of what was reportedly a horrendously messy project featuring numerous writers and Disney interfering with every aspect of its creation.

Ultimately, it’s a movie of moments — and some of those moments are pretty freaky and intense. The race to see if an aware humanity or the motivated slugs will rule the planet feels up in the air for the most part, and the practical effects are top-notch for this sort of thing. I was pleasantly surprised all around.

Intermission!

• Baseball bat guy wears a suspicious head bandage
• No birds
• 320 dollars = 320 people assimilated
• She suspects the boys because they didn’t look down her top?
• “Did I really do that when we first-” “You’re still doing it.”
• “After all, we’re only human.”
• Man, these aliens have no interest in being covert, do they?
• Nivens is a master with that cane
• The escape through the TV studio as it’s broadcasting
• Need a guy off your car? Ram him into a phone booth!
• This alien invasion is brought to you by KFC
• A 3.5″ floppy holds every contingent plan for aliens since 1959
• He just inject himself with a ton of air?
• Aww aliens like to hold hands too
• Always bring an extra alien or two for bonus possessions!
• The skeleton view on the monitor
• “Welcome back.”
• Spotting parasites with increased heat signatures
• And now it’s time for a truly weird shower scene
• The night attack is pretty neat if somewhat confusing in the dark
• The aliens using kids as human shields… that’s smart
• DO YOU MISS ME SAM?
• “The general has been taken and we can assume that his troops are now our enemy.”
• The aliens reproduce exponentially
• Makin’ out with a slug girl
• The hive looks like a fun time for all involved
• …including falling into a watery pit of aliens
• Those CGI hive doors are hokey