John’s Horror Corner: Puppet Master II (1991)

MY CALL:  Not nearly as good, charming or fun as the original.  But it’s still worth it if you loved the part one and even more so if you are hoping for something silly and weird.  Just lower your expectations…okay, lower them a lot…with beer.  IF YOU LIKE THIS WATCH:  I trust you saw Puppet Master (1989), which was far better.  SEQUEL SIDEBAR:  This movie picks up right where Puppet Master (1989) leaves off.

A team of four paranormal investigators and older psychic Camille (Nita Talbot; Frightmare, Amityville 1992) venture to the very same hotel as in Puppet Master (1989) to learn just what Dr. Whitaker (part 1’s survivor) saw that drove him mad.  [There’s a good way to reduce the budget of an already low budget horror: use the exact same set!]

Things get stupidly weird when the oddly wardrobed Eriquee Chanee, a thick accented man mummified in gauze, introduces himself as the hotel’s owner.  We quickly learn that he is actually Toulon, reanimated by his faithful puppets.  Listening to his over-hammed up alchemical lectures to his puppets in that awful accent is truly painful.  Puppet Master was a fun, playful romp that didn’t take itself too seriously. This character turns the franchise in a farcical direction.

So here’s Eriquee Chanee (actually Toulon), a Germanish-accented dude with a French name.  It looks like the invisible man started pimping to survive the down economy.  He even has a cane and some thick chains to complement the robe.

And, look!  Evidently Blade was designed to look just like Mssr. Chanee.

What’s worse is that this part two’s Toulon lacks the gentle, kind nature of part one’s Toulon.  They also gave him that ridiculous accent and basically made him into an evil, over-the-top villain with uber-weird motives that rely on freshly squeezed human brain juice serving as the necro-biofuel of eternal undeath.  In part one, he was just a normal sounding nice old guy who made breathed life into his puppets by whispering some ancient Egyptian incantations; it was much more graceful and in better taste.

Generally, the acting is more wooden than the puppets, which come with their own amusing flavors.  Pinhead has man hands (as in a stop-motion puppet with live-action human hands), Leech Woman magically regurgitates leeches, Tunneler has a drill on his head, Blade has a hook for one hand and a blade for the other but somehow seems the nicest, Jester strikes me as pure evil, and newcomer Torch has a flame thrower.  Sadly, the puppet kills pale in comparison to part one.

Bull’s eye, Tunneler!

Leech Woman

Newcomer: Torch, lightin’ it up!

This movie just gets weirder and weirder as it persists and this is largely the fault of this R-rated cartoonish Toulon character. The movie reaches its climactic ridiculousness when Toulon drinks some potion he makes from human brain juice, then slits his own throat above the open mouth of a dead victim he has fashioned into a man-sized female puppet so that the puppet-woman can drink it and assume the life of his wife who died by Nazi hands decades ago.  There!  Now did you really think I could say so many weird things in just one run-on sentence?  I thought not!

We lost a lot of puppets out there.  Good puppets!  Tunneler, you will be missed.
Tunneler is not the only puppet casualty in this movie.

Toulon looks like he lost a few steps over the last few decades in the grave.

So he kills a paranormal investigator, fashions his body into this, and then moves his soul into this ugly thing to live out eternity looking like a cheap wax museum yuppie.

Watch this for a beer, boobs and blood night with the guys. The movie will provide ample doses of the latter two, so you just need to bring a six pack.