Puppetmaster 2
When setting out to make a horror film, when you know you havenāt the talent and ability to make it good and scary, the best advice is to chuck all pretense to the wind and focus on making a goofy piece of shit instead. Thus is the case with this 1991 sequel, a surprising improvement on the original simply because Producer Charles Band had realized that his prior attempt at making a good, serious horror film had failed due to his own goofy tendencies and instead came up with something that is Mystery Science Theater material from the get-go, with the Puppets reviving their dead master Toulon from the grave and then setting a breakneck pace as things get progressively dumber. Sadly, William Hickey (so enigmatic in the first movie as Toulon) does NOT return, replaced instead by a (cheaper) actor named Steve Welles, prancing around wrapped in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man and sporting a VERY fake sounding German accent to boot. Also of note is the fact that Toulon is portrayed as pure evil in this installment (unlike the later films), setting his puppets out into the nearby area to kill innocent victims, but at least weāre treated to the sight of a morbidly obese hillbilly woman being broiled alive like a screaming pig at a roast. The plot, what there is of it, concerns a group of professional āparanormal investigatorsā (whom it is obvious donāt take their line of work too seriously) setting up shop at the same hotel location from the first film due to what we are told is from the testimony of the Paul LeMat character (who apparently went batshit insane), only to quickly have one of them disappear and another get his brains drilled out by the Tunneler puppet before Toulon himself appears (under an assumed name) in his macabre get-up and these āinvestigatorsā donāt even seem to care or bat an eye (much less ask Toulon if he knows anything about the puppet who killed their friend). The cast list itself is even less to write home about, consisting of a lead female actress prone to going off on an awkward self-reflective moment of epiphany about every ten minutes, a trio of mostly effeminate males, and a super hot girl played by Charlie Spradling who teases and tempts the viewer with her sex appeal (and even gets a decent nude scene off) but comes off as such an airhead bimbo that she is utterly unconvincing as a researcher specializing in ANYTHING but acting ditzy. Soon Toulon gets it into his gauze-wrapped head that the lead female is actually the reincarnation of his dead wife, and determines to set it up so he can kill her and place her soul into a life-size female puppet(?!). The improvements as said include a quickened pace, with the puppets getting more face time than in the original and not allowing the human actors to work at curing insomnia, plus some of Toulonās dialogue soliloquies actually come off as so bizarre as to actually be engaging, and then of course thereās the ending, as Toulon disposes of his own zombie-like corpse into a fresh new life size wooden puppet, which winds up pissing off the other puppets to no end, especially the newest member who has a flamethrowing ability andā¦well, itās pretty wild, weird, and freaky to say the least, but in the end elevates the flatness of the original into something that would make ol Ed Wood proud, and itās that watchability that makes this just somewhat better than its predecessorā¦
7/10