The Puppet Masters (1994)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

Coordinates: Alien stingrays hook their barbed wieners to people’s brains to control them to work toward the common goal of something.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• Two poor farm kids, I assume inbred, are throwing a hubcap over a moat in the yard. They don’t have a football? Or a real frisbee? Losers.
• An alien beam comes down nearby, probably wondering what the fuck they’re doing with that hubcap. 
• A neighborhood hillbilly comes around and the kids blast him in the head with a bat. Did they do that because the aliens took control of their minds or because they’re just rotten assholes? Probably both. 
• And Donald Sutherland as the clumsy waiter!
• The dubbed voices are so quiet it’s like everyone is whispering their dialogue that they’re reading in an underwater tunnel. 
• The alien redneck kids build a fake ship to fake out people coming to see the real alien ship. 
• Julie Warner says she thinks something is wrong with the redneck boys because they weren’t staring at her tits. It’s pretty silly, but she’s exactly right.   

• Apparently 80% of this town is infected with space herpes. 
• Looks like the aliens attach to peoples’ backs and hook their dicks into their brain stems. They look like space stingrays and are pretty cute. 
• Donald Sutherland sounds like he’s trying to talk to his angry wife on a phone in the middle of a cubicle row in a really quiet office. 
• Everybody acts like the only time they could film was between 2 and 4 am. 
• Richard Belzer is an alien. And also in this movie he turns out to be an alien. 
• “Julie Warner, take off your shirt and bra.” “Fine, see, no alien.” “Alien??”
• Richard Belzer commits suicide in the hospital by emptying his IV bag and then blows air into it and injects the air into his IV line. The most interesting part of the movie so far is the debate Brad and I had about if that would work at all. I say no. 

• Belzer had a crate of alien eggs in his apartment. Where in god’s green fuck did that come from??
• So I don’t know, there’s stuff going on and it’s ok enough, there’s just not much to write about. Alien people infect others with aliens and then run around when they’re detected. It’s fairly dull and everyone’s acting couldn’t be flatter if they were made of pancakes. 
• I’m unclear what the goal of the aliens is. World domination? But they’re pretty much sticking to this one town. Why not get on a plane and infect everyone and they can infect two people, and the they can infect to people, and so on and you make more money with every new person added to the pyramid. 

• The aliens basically bore their dick tubes into their brains, and I’m no doctor but I think that would kill them. 
• They experiment with the parasites on chimps and it’s absolutely adorable. 
• Really it’s the worst thing is the aliens attached themselves to their assholes when in that way. 
• Julie Warner is making it with this Sam character and there’s an alien on her back. How did he not feel that? One of the main things you do when heavy petting is heavily pet the lady’s back. And then you tickle her elbow. 
• To fully drive home how thrilling this movie is the finale takes place in the nonstop action town of Des Moines, Iowa. Was Wichita fully booked?
• Why does the Des Moines City Hall look like the fucking Astrodome? 

• I think there’s a lot of exposition in this alien hive scene but you can’t understand a god damn word, like every other scene. 
• They spent a lot of time earlier experimenting and talking about how to remove the alien without killing the host but it’s twice now that they just ripped it off. 
• So they introduce some kind of infection into the alien population that kills them.  Everything is taking way too long. Especially Schlocktoberfest. And life. 
• Donald Sutherland is infected in the least surprising moment since my wife told me she never loved me. 

• Automatic pilot on a helicopter??

Scare Stars: I suppose it can be pretty scary when you turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue and then something louder happens.

Gore Galaxy: Some blood, not nearly as much as you’d expect from a Donald Sutherland movie.

Nudity Nebula: Julie Warner in her bra for a bit and the main protagonist guy crying his bare ass off in the shower.

Space Vacuum: There’s the alien beam in the beginning, a fake saucer, and the goopy hive in the Astrodome City Hall, but no actual space.

Best Transmission: “When did you quit smoking, Richard Belzer?”

Best Visual: I enjoyed the part with the infected chimps and I wish the entire movie had been about them.

Worst Visual: Again, the worst aspect of this movie is you can’t hear a motherscratching thing anyone is saying half the time. I don’t know if it was just the version we were watching was weird or what, but if they gave out Razzies for audio recording this would have been the last one received because it couldn’t get any worse.

Universally: There are worse aliens-who-take-control-of-people-and-you-don’t-know-who-to-trust movies out there, but not many. It’s kind of a shame because the budget seems decent and there’s a cool cast in place, but they give all the heavy lifting to Some Guy who’s barely heard from again. I do wish they had explained what happened with the Demonic Toys from the last movie.

Analysis: 3 (whispering) ……………….. (out of 10)