Year: 1958
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Cast: June Kenney, John Agar, John Hoyt
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes
And just like that, it's Halloween again. I'm hoping to be back into fighting shape to do a full three-part Cardboard Science/Census Bloodbath crossover with
Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue next year as part of what will be our 12th annual Great Switcheroo, but traditions must be honored in whatever way we can, so for this 11th Switcheroo we're trading a single title once again. He will be covering a 1980s slasher over on his blog, so keep an eye out, while I have been assigned the 1958 sci-fi movie
Attack of the Puppet People from B-movie stalwart Bert I. Gordon, who we've encountered thrice before with
The Cyclops (terrible),
Beginning of the End (cheesy), and
The Amazing Colossal Man (solid). Midway plot spoilers will abound in this review, so if you're genuinely curious to see it before reading ahead, I highly recommend that you do so!
Spoiler #1: There are no puppet people in this movie. Spoiler #2: They don't attack anything, certainly not a dog, using a steak knife. And you thought slasher posters were big ol' liars!
So,
Attack of the Puppet People, after a brief ominous prologue, picks up with Sally Reynolds (June Kenney of B.I.G.'s
The Spider) answering a want ad to become the secretary of Dolls Inc. While Mr. Franz (John Hoyt of
When Worlds Collide), the unusual owner and sole employee of the doll factory, makes her nervous and want to back out, he press-gangs her into starting right away. As she settles into her role, she falls for salesman Bob Westley (John Agar of
Revenge of the Creature,
Tarantula,
The Mole People, and
The Brain from Planet Arous) for reasons unknown, all while nursing a growing suspicion that the mysterious disappearances of people around the office building must somehow be related to Franz, his eerily lifelike collection of dolls that look like the missing people, and his secret locked room in the back of the factory.
When she tries to quit her job and leave town with Bob, she finds out that her suspicions were entirely correct. Franz goes haywire and shrinks her down to doll size. You see, he's been lonely since his wife left, and whenever other people threaten to leave him too, he turns them into dolls so he can love them forever. Don't worry. They go into a trance state when they're in their jars, but he takes them out and revives them whenever he can think of something fun to do with them. They soon meet other people who have been doll-ified, including Georgia Lane (Laurie Mitchell of Queen of Outer Space), who's kind of into being pampered by Mr. Franz and not having any responsibilities, and Laurie (Marlene Willis), a teenage girl who Franz keeps trying to force to sing. There's also a bland square-jawed military guy and a blond guy whose name I can't remember who does not seem to have any character traits, so we're actually fitting quite well into the slasher tradition of cardboard filler characterizations here.
Never say these crossovers aren't well-conceived. Meet the Meat, everybody!
Attack of the Puppet People is the rare 1950s sci-fi picture that works both before and after the big reveal where the special effects sequences kick in. While Sally is kind of a flat protagonist (we learn next to nothing about her desires, personality, or even where she lives), Mr. Franz more than makes up for it with an eccentric, layered performance from Hoyt that is easy to bounce off of with a wide-eye stare or two. This helps keep the tension cooking in the mystery portion, and once the doll people are unveiled, the second half of the movie is jammed to the brim with escape thriller setpieces that hum with vibrancy.
While Franz is finding it increasingly difficult to hide his involvement in the growing roster of missing persons cases and trying to juggle the intrusions of his overbearing friend Emil (Michael Mark of
The Wasp Woman and
Return of the Fly) and the suspicions of policeman Sgt. Paterson (Jack Kosslyn of
The Amazing Colossal Man,
War of the Colossal Beast, and
The Spider), the doll people are trying everything in their power to escape. Well, the male ones are. This is the 1950s, after all.
As much as it makes me seem like I've hit myself in the head with a hammer before writing this review, this portion of the movie reminded me of nothing other than What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in the way it is constantly able to string the audience along with attempts that seem like they just might work before going invariably awry. This stellar parade of thrilling moments is aided by some of the best special effects work of the notorious B.I.G.'s career.
It's pretty easy - and cheap - to make people seem small. Just make some big props and mount the camera up high. This is exactly what they do, in fact, and it works like gangbusters. But this also allows the bigger and more exciting sequences to feel convincing and dangerous in a way that the superimposed locusts of Beginning of the End simply do not. Sequences like climbing up to a giant doorknob or being forced to perform opposite a marionette (an exquisite giant puppet that is effortlessly creepy) just plain work and hold up quite well to modern scrutiny, largely because those props and setpieces were actually present on set with light hitting them and everything.
The filmmaker even has a pretty solid eye for the composite shots where Franz is interacting with the little people. The two main sets where this happens are built specifically so that walls in the back block off the doll people's environment, allowing the effects shot to have easy, square seams rather than trying to cut a silhouette around a moving figure (this trick does happen later on, with a tiny cat, and it looks as terrible as you'd expect). While the effects have their flaws, including the cat as well as the bits where the dolls are in their jars, which are clearly just 2D printed images, almost everything involving the core characters is convincing and grand, to the point that they show off a bit by having Franz set things on top of their squared-off environment and interact with them in ways that aren't just having him on the left side of the screen and them on the right.
This was probably a hell of a lot of fun to shoot.
While I'm not suggesting that Attack of the Puppet People is one of the great subtextual works of its time, these thriller moments are given added depth by Franz. He is superb both on the page and on the screen, with Hoyt and screenwriter George Worthing Yates working in tandem to deliver one of the greatest tragic antiheroes of the cinema. Franz's loneliness is intense and very real, and it drives his actions in a way that makes it almost impossible not to sympathize with him to some degree. While you're rooting for his prisoners to escape, you're also forced to contend with a deeply melancholy portrait of a broken man, whose position in the story is underscored by the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde marionette that makes an extended appearance in the third act.
It is perhaps telling that the final moment of the movie focuses on Franz, as it has spent an unusual amount of time developing him as a more layered - and significantly more devastating - version of the stock mad scientist character of '30s horror and '50s sci-fi. In fact, he's probably the second-best scientist character I've seen in one of these Cardboard Science movies, only behind Godzilla's brooding and brilliant Dr. Serizawa. Hoyt makes sure you can feel Franz's emptiness when he sees his friends running away from him, and it's a gut punch every time, even though what he's doing is categorically, well, mad.
So sure, I have some quibbles with the movie, beyond the ones I've already brought up. For instance, Agar's performance slips considerably during the scene where Bob has to panic. Maybe he's too much of an All-American Hero to feel those kinds of emotions, I don't know. Plus, the movie never actually follows up on the characters that Franz turns into dolls over the course of first act, namely his ex-secretary Janet and the mailman Ernie. The plot just forgets about them entirely and, even though we see additional dolls in his collection, focuses the entirety of the second half of the movie on Sally, Bob, and these four other characters we have no real reason to care about. It's a weird choice, definitely.
But with all that said, while Attack of the Puppet People is maybe not the best movie that Hunter has shown me over the years (we've covered Godzilla and Invasion of the Body Snatchers here, after all), it's damn close. I'm beyond delighted to have had the opportunity to give it a whirl.
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
*The explanation of the science here is deliciously wacky, comparing the resizing of humans to moving a slide projector closer to the wall. First, of course, Franz deatomizes them via a high sonic frequency. His example of this is a high note shattering a glass, which I would argue should mean that their bodies would just break into tiny fragments of bone and viscera, not atoms, but Cronenberg never remade this movie so I guess we'll never know.
*Bob and Sally fret about having to run the equivalent of six miles through the city in their tiny forms, and then immediately do so in the space of a cut. Somebody sign these two up for the Olympics.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
*The want ad that Sally responds to is asking for, and I quote, a "general office girl." Mr. Franz is cancelled.
*Men are constantly grabbing Sally by the shoulders within seconds of meeting her for the first time. She doesn't seem to mind, though, because she gets engaged to the first one who does it. But yikes.
Sensawunda:
*There's a long sequence where Bob and Sally watch The Amazing Colossal Man at a drive-in that was deeply unnecessary but reminded me of the joy of Switcheroos past, so I'm not mad about it.
*The "does anybody know the phone number for the police?" sequence sure taught me a lot about what a scattershot mess the telecommunications system used to be. Like, I'm glad I don't ever have to know what an "exchange" is.
TL;DR: Attack of the Puppet People is a surprisingly excellent thrill ride from one of the 1950s' least consistent purveyors of B-movie schlock.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1811
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