Getting in the Mood for Halloween

Hey all. I've notice it's been slow going around the Empathetic Egotists' office these last couple weeks. I think we're all busy with our own stuff. I'm looking forward to the next installment of the "Gin Rummy", so if you're out there Mr. Nice Guy, get on it.

I've been spending my time in a nostalgia time-warp watching movies from 1985 to get ready for our Ultimate Movie Showdown '85 event. Then I got temporarily side-tracked on Netflix instant watch, as it's easy to do when you start clicking around. I ended up watching a series of Full Moon Productions schlock films, many of which were straight to video during their time.

I started with "Demonic Toys (1992)".



This is why I love Full Moon's movies. It has all the elements I want in a crappy horror film: the perfect mix creepy yet cheesy looking monsters, a thin premise and plot, characters that don't take themselves too seriously, and plenty of over the top gore. The clown-in-a-box and Baby Oopsie-daisy are by far the best characters, especially with the foul-mouthed baby doll that drops the F-bomb constantly throughout the film.

Netflix recommended I keep mining this vein of creepy toys and suggested "Dollman vs Demonic Toys (1993)" and "Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (2004)". Before I dined on those delicacies however, I chose to go back to the source and watch "Puppet Master (1989)".



I love this movie. The Puppet Master series is Full Moon's flagship product, in my opinion. These movies were inspired largely by the recent success of "Dolls (1987)" and "Child's Play (1988)". The puppets in the Puppet Master movies are unique in that they exist in this gray area between villains and heroes. Yes, they kill people, and in horrible ways, but they are usually killing Nazis or people that have wronged their master in some way and "deserve" their deaths. If their current master goes too far or threatens the puppets, then their strong sense of self-preservation overcomes their loyalty and the puppets eventually turn on their master. The puppets' creep factor comes from their lack of speech other than grunts or other weak types of vocalization. Also, the scenes where the puppets are manually operated are usually far creepier than those where they are stop-motion animated. Because they are supposed to be puppets, the manual operation looks appropriate and life-like. Pin-head is one of my favorite puppets, due to his huge meaty human hands, which gives him his personality.

Next up was "Dollman (1991)":



This is a terrible film, with a few funny moments. The trailer tells you everything you need to know about it. The first few minutes of the film are the best, where the police-cop is on his home planet shooting up bad guys and making them explode needlessly. The best element of the movie is that the villain is a disembodied head kept alive in some sort of life preserving floating saucer. They hint at how each showdown with the hero has ended in the villain losing a body part so that eventually all that was left was his head. For some reason they go to Earth where the hero is only 13 inches tall. They get a ton of mileage out of the "13 inches" joke. After he's on Earth it turns into your basic good people in the slums fighting the drug dealers story.

Once I had the previous films out of the way I watched the cross-overs:





Both of these were terrible films, but the Puppet Master/Demonic Toys mash-up was by far the worst. Dollman vs Demonic Toys was essentially a retelling of the first Demonic Toys film with the addition of Dollman and the nurse from "Bad Channels (1992)". They save some film by reshowing several minutes from both of those movies. In fact, you could skip the first Dollman entirely since you get the gist from watching this film. The toys are back with the addition of a GI Joe like character played by a stunt-man with a creepy plastic head. Baby Oopsie-daisy now inexplicably is male and wants to have sex with the nurse. Since the toys have to interact with "tiny" human actors now, there are several scenes where the toys have to be built on a large scale and never look convincing, although the huge clown-in-the-box head is nightmare-worthy. There are plenty more "13 inch man" jokes in this film as well.

Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys is horrible. This was made for TV. If you wondered what happened to Cory Feldman, well here he is. He over-plays the quirky puppet master and affects a terrible gravely voice throughout the film. The puppets have been remade and look more plastic and worse for the wear. Pin-head's signature human hands are now fuzzy pink muppet-looking gloves. The demonic toys are even worse. They've been given the plastic treatment as well and are far less scary looking. The sets are awful in this movie. For some reason they have these iron maidens that are supposed to look like Santa with the face cut out, but instead it just looks like a frothy vagina. They should not have tried to remake these films.

I've got the rest of the Puppet Master films on their way in the mail, since only the first two are on instant. I'm looking forward to these and I'm sure they'll get me in the mood for Halloween. If these don't do the trick I'm sure the Creep Shows or "Trick 'r Treat (2008)" will do it. If you haven't seen that last one, I strongly recommend it.



What are your favorite Halloween movies?