2024 Flashback: TV

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TELEVISION

2024 TV Shows I Missed That I Wish I Had Seen Before Compiling This List: Baby Reindeer, Fantasmas, The Sticky

2024 TV Shows I Missed, Don't Regret Missing, and Will Go Out of My Way to Continue Missing Until the End of Linear Time: Sausage Party: Foodtopia, American Sports Story, Doctor Odyssey, High Potential, Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage

Top Seven Episodes of 2024

#7 "There Will Be Blood" Chucky

There are definitely elements of season 3 that have gotten too out there, but this episode is a prime slice of Chucky kookiness. An elevator full of blood and a William Shatner needle drop sure do lift the spirits.

#6 "Kid in a Candy Store" Dexter: Original Sin

I've never watched a single episode of the original Dexter, but I've been enjoying my sojourn into this prequel starring Patrick Gibson in the title role. Even though the show is still failing to integrate Dexter's father and sister as well as it wants to at this point, everything with Dexter himself has settled into an excellent place, and I absolutely adored the recurring gag of him eating categorically too many cubano sandwiches.

#5 "Valley of the Dolls" Only Murders in the Building

Look, any episode that somehow managed to get a catfight between Meryl Streep and Melissa McCarthy onto my screen is going to end up on the list. I'm only human.

#4 "Familiar by Thy Side" Agatha All Along

I usually hate side quest episodes that take a long break from the main plot to drill deep on a single character. But this one contained some very fun twists and turns and ends with Kathryn Hahn delivering the performance of a lifetime while absolutely covered in mud, so color me surprised.

#3 "Home" Heartstopper

Heartstopper seasons 2 and 3 have been very up and down, but the highs of this show are still incredibly high. And this episode that separates Nick and Charlie while the former is on vacation and the latter is having a particularly low mental health moment finds all the best heartstrings to pull.

#2 "Headhunting" What We Do in the Shadows

I grew instantly tired of Laszlo's attempt at creating a Frankenstein monster, but the material where Nandor and Nadja attempt to help Guillermo succeed at his new office job is top-shelf comedy dynamite.

#1 "Lonely Fans" The Charlie Puth Show

This is a show that has no reason to exist. The fact that it's a scripted Roku Channel original about Charlie Puth trying to put a reality show together is simply unhinged. But the fact that it's actually secretly hilarious is even more wild. This episode, which follows Charlie finding himself surprisingly pleased with rumors that he's dating an elderly fan, includes many of the show's best moments and displays an intoxicatingly playful approach to language, from the off-kilter phraseology Charlie uses to describe a plaque that he's been given to the way multiple characters inexplicably drop the "the" from "the Internet."

Bottom Three Episodes of 2024

#3 "War" Mary & George

Although Mary & George starts off promising, injecting a period costume drama with a heaping helping of human messiness, sex, and violence, this finale unspooled the last bit of story in an impotent and tedious way that made me question why they even bothered in the first place.

#2 "Maiden Mother Crone" Agatha All Along

Forget the cheap Ren Faire costumes and the terrible wig they clearly put on that child actor in order to punish him, this episode spends so much time explaining stuff that truly needed no explanation, wasting everyone's time by indulging in the show's worst instincts (AKA assuming that "Ballad of the Witch's Road" is a strong enough song to be used more than twice in the entire miniseries).

#1 "The Prophecy Comes True" Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Completing our trio of bad finales, here comes ol' Percy Jackson season 1 once more after churning out some other notably bad episodes in late 2023. This final episode is incoherent drivel that provided the last nail in the coffin of my assurance that the chorus of people insisting this show was better than the Logan Lerman movies have lost their sweet minds.

Best Actor: Kayvan Novak, What We Do in the Shadows

What We Do in the Shadows has one of the funniest ensembles in modern television, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give Kayvan Novak his laurels before it's too late. In the show's final season, Nandor is just as unique and bizarre a character as ever, and some of Novak's line readings are so unexpected and hilarious that you might need to double check that your insurance covers busted guts. His physical comedy is also impeccable. Him smacking a counter with a mop while pretending to be a janitor just might be one of the best moments of the show, period.

Best Actress: Kathryn Hahn, Agatha All Along

I believe I already mentioned her slam-dunk performance while covered in mud, which should be enough to convince you I've made the right call here, but she effortlessly twists from drama to comedy without breaking a sweat, and manages to craft a coherent character out of teleplays that constantly let her down.

Best Supporting Actor: Mike O'Donnell, The Charlie Puth Show

This is Mike O'Donnell's first role in anything. As far as I can tell, he's not an actor. I think he's just Charlie Puth's actual friend. So why is he giving such a winning comic performance here? Honestly, he's even better than Charlie, who has charisma but is obviously trying to act. Mike just has it.

Best Supporting Actress: Jenny Walser, Heartstopper

Tori Spring is really coming to the fore this season, and Jenny Walser has risen to the challenge of making a ferocious and prickly character the most instantly lovable of this entire ensemble.

Best Recurring Actor: Eva Longoria, Only Murders in the Building

Eva Longoria proved long ago that she's willing to poke fun at herself with her cameo in 2013's In a World..., but her newest turn playing herself onscreen is even more deliciously vicious and hilarious.

Best Trans/Nonbinary Actor: Yasmin Finney, Heartstopper

Look, I'm gonna stop awarding her when she stops knocking every one of her scenes out of the park.

Biggest Laugh: The Doorbell, Single, Out

So, I didn't mention Single, Out last year because I feel like it would just be punching down. This good-bad Australian queer dramedy might as well be a web series with its bargain basement budget and generally poor filmmaking and storytelling quality. But every now and again, it produces a moment so bafflingly perfect that it must be rewarded, like the scene in the season 2 finale when we are anticipating that the ex of the main character, Adam, might show up unexpectedly. Which is why we, the audience, are not surprised to hear the doorbell ring. However, Adam is. He turns to ask his mother a question. Instead of asking who that might be at the door, he inquires about when they installed the doorbell, which begins one of the show's signature loopy, loose, circular conversations. I truly don't know if that incredibly weird reversal of expectations happened on purpose or what, but it really caught me off guard and tickled my funny bone.

Biggest Cry: Charlie Asks For Help, Heartstopper

Joe Locke really nails the puppy dog eyes vulnerability thing, so of course the scene where his character Charlie admits to his parents that he has an eating disorder works like gangbusters.

Biggest Scream: The Salem Seven, Agatha All Along

Hey look, another Joe Locke scene! He's had quite a year. The sequence in episode two where he is trying to barricade Agatha's house while the creepy-ass J-horror coven approaches down the street is the stuff of nightmares.

Biggest Squirm: The Fingerprints, Uzumaki

This hotly anticipated (by me) Junji Ito anime adaptation was kind of a mess, but sometimes you can't help but stumble into a gold mine by simply putting one of the horror manga master's decadently macabre storylines on the screen, like this moment where a character cuts off her own fingerprints in a desperate attempt to rid herself of all spirals.

Biggest Thirst: Basically All Of It, Mary & George

This entire show is about Nicholas Galitzine using his body to seduce a lecherous king and all the other ways he weaponizes his sexuality to his advantage. The word "homoerotic" is, if anything, too mild to use as a proper descriptor for Mary & George.

Best Intro Sequence: Dexter: Original Sin

I know this is incredibly similar to the original show's intro, but it's an elevation of it. I think all of this is just tremendously effective. The back and forth of the Morgan family getting their day started is a perfect way of subtly establishing the differences in all the characters while also highlighting the more ensembley nature of this version of the show. And they also find so many delicious visual ways to compare the process of getting ready for the day to committing murder that it's almost criminal in and of itself.

Best SNL Sketch: "Papyrus 2"

Of course they were going to do a sequel to one of their most popular sketches when Ryan Gosling returned to host SNL. It was inevitable. What wasn't inevitable is that it's nearly as good as the original. They have the poster designers for Avatar 2 to thank for that, of course, but they really snatched that ball and ran with it.

 
Worst SNL Sketch: "Bowen's Straight"

"Straight man acts gay" has been a common trope for mining cheap laughs over the years, and it turns out that "gay man acts straight" is just as pathetic a ploy. Flipping the script isn't always the answer, especially if the script sucks in the first place.

Best Guest Star: Law Roach, The Charlie Puth Show

I'm not a fashion guy, so this was my first encounter with Law Roach, but I hope it's not my last. He is a volcanic eruption of charisma and totally unafraid to embrace the surreal, practically supernatural, version of himself that the show depicts.

Worst Guest Star: Jay Duplass, Percy Jackson and the Olympians

When you cast the Greek god Hades, you either need to go full terrifying or swing the opposite direction and have him be insidiously nice and charming. With Jay Duplass, you get neither of those things, just a middle-of-the-road milquetoast nothing of a character.

Best Needle Drop: "See You Again" Charlie Puth, The Charlie Puth Show

Really, I'm telling you, this is genuinely one of the funniest shows of the year. This track comes from the aforementioned number one episode of the year, where the end Charlie's fake relationship with an elderly woman causes him to reflect on their time together as underscored by one of his most achingly sincere songs. It's an obvious choice, sure, but the way it drops into the episode at the exact right nanosecond needs to be studied.

Best Line: "Jake's hair is naturally curly, you monsters." Chucky

I love the fact that suggesting that Jake might have gotten a perm is among one of the worst crimes Chucky & Co. have committed.

Worst Commercial: "That's Magic" AMC Theatres

The original Nicole Kidman AMC ad was magical, so when they announced they'd be launching new versions of it, I was very nervous that they wouldn't recapture its guileless lunatic spirit. But I couldn't have possibly predicted just how wrong things would go. They did not introduce any new material. They simply cut down the existing ad from 60 seconds to 30, in a few different configurations, adding outtakes from the original shoot willy nilly. 

It's not like the original monologue was perfectly legible, but these cuts make an absolute hash of it. Like, she famously opens that monologue with "we come to this place for magic." That line that is removed from this particular cut. A cut that she closes by saying "that's magic," thus referencing a phrase she didn't actually utter in this version of the video. This is lazy garbage that mars one of the most perfect pop culture objects of the decade.

Top Five Melr0210 Episodes

My marathon of Melrose Place and Beverly Hills, 90210 continues! I've buckled down a lot this year, because I wanted to finish all 11,000 episodes before I hit retirement age. So this will all come to a close in early 2025, but in the meantime, here are my five favorite episodes of either show that I watched this year.

#5 "Trojan Stork" Melrose Place season 6 episode 2

This is just good, solid, meat and potatoes 1990s prime time melodrama. Michael microwaves a floppy disk of evidence. Taylor tries to steal his sperm. Et cetera. You know, the usual.

#4 "Homecoming" Beverly Hills, 90210 season 7 episode 6

Seasons 6 and 7 clearly got a budget that was missing from the earlier and later seasons, and the use of wildfire stock footage here worked perfectly with the slightly grander-scale production of this episode, where a house party is interrupted by flames descending from the hills. Plus, Brad from Teen Witch is here, along with that inexplicably hot guy from Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror. A great time, all around.

#3 "You Say It's Your Birthday" Beverly Hills, 90210 season 6 episode 31/32 

The season 6 finale takes some big swings! And I'm not just talking the cameos from Jim, Cindy, Andrea, and that unhinged Wings Hauser FBI character. There's a full-on San Pedro warehouse chase sequence that feels more Miami Vice than 90210, and it's a total blast.

#2 "Fiddling on the Roof" Melrose Place season 7 episode 15

Is there anything more Melrose Place than Jane and Michael getting married for the second time, deciding to get divorced at the reception, immediately cheating on each other, and having one crash through the ceiling onto the other, in the middle of said cheating? What a show.

#1 "Speechless" Beverly Hills, 90210 season 6 episode 6

Both of the main storylines here are full of wacky hijinks with the gang, which is a treat you can't overlook in these later seasons. Brandon loaning out his house to a film crew, only to realize that they're shooting Topless Pizza Party 3, is great. But the girls getting stuck at a convent where they have to take a vow of silence is even better.

2024 Crush: Cameron Bancroft

OK, I'm cheating. Beverly Hills, 90210 season 6 didn't air in 2024, according to my records. But good golly Moses, what a beautiful man.

Word Count: 5767

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Census Bloodbath: Ski You Later

Hello, everybody! It's been a while since I've shared a proper review of a 1980s slasher. Things have been real busy on my end, writing for Screen Rant full time and all. I have a tentative plan to get Census Bloodbath back up and running some point by spring 2025, but before then, please enjoy this review of a snowy slasher I watched as part of my duties at Horror Press.

Year: 1988
Director: Jeff Kwitney
Cast: Debra De Liso, Doug Stevenson, Lisa Loring
Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

Plot: In Iced, four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith of Hitcher in the Dark) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff's cracked ski mask who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge? 

The characters in question are Cory (Doug Stevenson of The Prowler), whose braggadocio and stealing of Jeff's girlfriend caused Jeff to go angry-skiing during a storm in the first place; Trina (Debra De Liso of The Slumber Party Massacre), said former girlfriend and now wife of Cory, who is obsessed with exercise; pediatrician John (John C. Cooke); John's resentful wife Diane (Elizabeth Gorcey); Jeanette (Lisa Loring, the original onscreen Wednesday Addams, also of Blood Frenzy), their transparently desperate single friend who just had a blow-out fight with her dorky boyfriend Eddie (Michael Picardi); and Carl (Ron Kologie of Cards of Death), the requisite irritating prankster who has the additional character trait of being addicted to drugs, aided by his high-paying job at a pharmaceutical company. Also on hand is the allegedly hunky Snow Peak real estate agent Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson, who wrote Iced in addition to starring in Berserker and The Slumber Party Massacre), who is desperate to impress his father and who Jeanette immediately throws herself at.

Analysis: Unfortunately, like a lot of meat-and-potatoes slasher movies of the late 1980s, Iced does not have much to offer the seasoned horror fan. The acting ranges from competent (hi, Lisa Loring) to absolutely abysmal, averaging out much closer to abysmal than not. Joseph Alan Johnson in particular is a disastrously beige nonentity. 

The movie’s pacing and structure are also baffling. There are almost no murders beyond the opening kill for a good half of Iced’s runtime, which forces you to spend time watching this group of people have a pretty mediocre ski vacation where they’re constantly sniping at one another and not doing much else. When the kills do come, they zip past you at a too-rapid clip, hardly giving you time to pay proper attention to them, like chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.

There is next to no tension-building in the movie because of this, just a lurching sort of stop-start motion that will make you seasick. By far the most exciting and visceral moment of the movie is a scene where a character is wandering around in the dark and bangs his shin on a coffee table. Tragically, the skiing is also not that thrilling to watch. While it’s competently shot, enough to be legible, it seems to be beyond the limits of director Jeff Kwitney to turn it into something propulsive and exciting. Thankfully, the movie pretty much forgets about skiing after the first act, anyway.

Although the sum of its parts is pure blandness, there is plenty that Iced does quite well. For instance, the movie was shot in Utah and thus comes by its iciness naturally (sorry, Jack Frost, California doesn’t quite cut it), crafting a unique setting for a late-period slasher with a frigid, moody atmosphere. I’m also a sucker for themed kills, and the use of a ski pole, an icicle, a snowplow, and a hot tub do a lot to spice up the proceedings.

For the gorehounds in the audience, only one of the kills is particularly bloody, though they are nearly all well-rendered by their own standards (there’s an electrocution that relies on performance rather than effects, for instance, and does stick the landing). And even the offscreen or underwhelming kills end up being useful in the Final Girl sequence, when their frozen bodies provide a gruesome and effectively bleak tableau.

As far as exploitation movies go, Iced also has quite a bit to offer on that front. Nearly every member of the cast takes off all their clothes at one point or another, chilliness be damned, and there is a reasonably equitable division of male and female characters wandering around bare-chested, which always feels shockingly progressive when you’re watching a 1980s slasher. Plus, the sequence that is the most undignified (a topless corpse is seen with snow piled on her breasts) actually works for the tone, as the indignity makes her death feel that much more tragic, while the piled snow emphasizes how impossibly long the character has been exposed to the elements.

What else is good? Well… The killer’s POV is depicted by showing a view through the crack’s in Jeff’s visor, which provides a neat new image for a type of shot that is otherwise pretty standard for a slasher movie.

However, Iced ultimately exists in this nether space between interesting and boring where it never particularly feels like a slog, but is oh so withholding when it comes to meting out exciting moments. I’ve seen dozens of slashers that are much, much worse, so it’s hard to get angry about what this 1988 entry is bringing to the table. That said, this one is only for die hard fans of the subgenre, or for people who desperately need a snowy horror fix and have already seen everything else from The Shining to Wind Chill.

Killer: Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson)
Final Girl: Trina (Debra De Liso)
Best Kill: John getting stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole while sitting in the car evokes Halloween in a fun way, is the best themed kill, and is also the most showstopping gore moment, simultaneously.
Sign of the Times: A man who is supposed to be inconspicuous is seen wearing a red headband over a teased blond mullet.
Scariest Moment: The killer is seen reflected in a makeup mirror while one of the characters is standing at the bathroom counter.
Weirdest Moment: Jeanette and Alex share an intimate conversation while lying in front of the fireplace and start hardcore making out, after which point it is revealed that everybody else is still in the room with them, and has been the whole time.
Champion Dialogue: "I didn't have any tits hardly, and I was terrified my secret would be discovered."
Body Count: 7

1. Jeff dies in a skiing accident after falling on some rocks.
2. Eddie is run over with a snowplow.
3. John is stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole.
4. Diana is stabbed in the eye with an icicle offscreen.
5. Jeanette is electrocuted in a hot tub.
6. Carl has both feet caught in bear traps and dies somehow.
7. Alex is kicked out of a window and shot simultaneously.

TL;DR: Iced is bland but hardly the worst slasher out there, mostly thanks to its unique snowy setting.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1222

Cardboard Science: Be a Doll

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

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)