Editorials
Crushed Skulls and Slashed Faces: The 7 Best Kill Scenes in the ‘Puppet Master’ Franchise
With Full Moon’s Puppet Master series getting a reboot this summer courtesy of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, it seemed like a great idea to revisit the original series of films and create a running tally of all the best death scenes.
Like I said, it seemed like a great idea.
Don’t get me wrong: I grew up on Full Moon movies and the original Puppet Master was a staple of my youth. I’m a fan. But the reality is that the deaths in the Puppet Master movies aren’t especially interesting. Unlike major mainstay franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, these aren’t movies defined by their inventive kills scenes. The fans return for movie after movie (11 and counting as of this writing) for the weird little puppets, as each one only has one way to kill someone – and a few barely even have that. I’m looking at you, Jester.
That makes coming up with a list like this pretty challenging, though it hopefully won’t be the case forever: based on the little bit of early word I’ve heard, any one of the deaths in The Littlest Reich will outdo every kill in the first 11 movies combined. This gives us a lot to look forward to when the movie is released later this summer.
Without further ado, here are seven of the best kills from the Puppet Master franchise…
Neil Gallagher (Jimmy Skaggs), PUPPET MASTER
Here’s the thing about the Puppet Master movies: almost every really good death in the series comes at the end of each film, when the puppets inevitably team up and combine their powers to kill someone more evil than them. It’s how at least half of the entries end. I’m giving the advantage to the original because a) it was the first to use this conceit and b) it’s pretty gnarly.
Neil Gallagher, thought dead by suicide at the start of the movie, reveals himself to be reanimated thanks to the secrets of Andre Toulon, the O.G. Puppet Master. He resents the little bastards, though, and makes the fatal mistake of insulting them and tossing one (Pinhead) across a room and even popping off its tiny head. Well, that’s all it takes for the puppets to turn on his undead ass, joining forces and each taking a turn using their unique ability to tear him apart: Tunneler drills directly into his calf muscle, then Blade cuts his fingers off as he tries to escape. Pinhead, having put himself back together, begins crushing Gallagher’s head. Blade stabs his other hand and then hooks his mouth open so Leech Woman can begin puking up leeches right into his mouth (a weirdly inefficient way to kill someone) while Tunneler continues to drill into his neck. They mess him up so bad that his widow, who just learned that her husband is an evil genius who brought himself back from the dead and has ordered the deaths of all the other characters, begs them to stop.
What really earns this particular kill a spot on the list, though, is that it takes a really, really long time, which makes it all the more satisfying.
Billy the Annoying Kid (Sean Ryan), PUPPET MASTER II
The first sequel in the franchise introduced a new puppet, Torch, who has a German Stahlhelm for a head and a flamethrower for a hand. Torch won my heart when he loses his patience with an obnoxious 10-year old and sets him on fire. It’s the most transgressive moment in the entire Puppet Master series. For that, I love it.
Joey Carp (Michael Guerin), CURSE OF THE PUPPET MASTER
As the biggest douche across all 11 Puppet Master films, Joey Carp really, really deserves what he gets in the sixth movie in the franchise. After repeatedly bullying town simpleton Tank Winsley (Josh Green) and threatening/attempting to rape Tank’s girlfriend Jane (Emily Harrison), Joey is finally killed off during an intense weightlifting session. He’s mid-bench press when Blade hops on top of him and slashes his face over and over, while at the same time Tunneler drills into his crotch. Good riddance, Joey. Anyone as rapey as you deserves to have his dick drilled.
Dr. Gerde Ernst (Tonya Kay), PUPPET MASTER: AXIS TERMINATION
The most recent of the Full Moon Puppet Master movies (and the third and final entry in the “Axis” cycle of sequels) suffers from the same budgetary restrictions that have neutered much of the company’s current output. That means that despite Charles Band’s promise that this would be the goriest entry in the franchise, the kills in Axis Termination are just okay, lacking the resources to make them spectacular in any way. The best death in the film again comes at the end when the puppets turn on psychic Nazi Dr. Gerde Ernsti for betraying them. She’s basically gunned down by Bombshell and Blitzkrieg, which is fairly uninspired but at least executed with maximum splattery squibbage. What elevates her death is that immediately after she’s shot, Dr. Ivan Ivanov (a fixture within the Full Moon universe, here played by George Appleby) removes her soul from her body and permanently destroys it. That’s some cold shit.
Nazi Driver (Neil Parrow), PUPPET MASTER III
Widely considered to be the best film in the series, Puppet Master III jumps back 40 years to WWII and acts as a prequel in which we get to see how Andre Toulon (now played by Guy Rolfe) gave life to his puppet creations. The bloodiest, most memorable death in the movie comes once again at the drill of Tunneler, who drills into a car seat and through the chest of the German soldier driving like some kind of puppet Xenomorph. I suspect Tunneler is involved in most of the memorable deaths in the franchise because he’s the only puppet equipped with a weapon that does the kind of bodily damage we often want to see in horror movies.
Klaus (Aaron Riber), PUPPET MASTER: AXIS OF EVIL
I mean, at this point I’m really just trying to mix it up. Maybe Klaus’s death isn’t that impressive, but at least it departs from the others in that it doesn’t involve Tunneler’s drill or Blade’s knife. Klaus, the Nazi soldier we first meet at the opening of the original Puppet Master when he arrives at Toulon’s hotel moments after he commits suicide, returns for the ninth film (played by a different actor) in a larger role. He’s killed with a throwing star to the eye from new puppet Ninja, who thankfully only lasted this one film. Klaus then gets his skull crushed when Pinhead drops a big statue on it. I don’t know. At least it’s a little different.
Leech Woman (Leech Woman), PUPPET MASTER II
The most inexplicably strange of the evil puppets meets her end in just the second entry in the franchise when she’s thrown into a furnace and burned alive halfway through the movie. The exact reason for killing off Leech Woman – and again, it should be pointed out that this is a puppet that pukes up leeches – is the subject of some controversy. The sequel’s screenwriter has claimed he was told to kill her off by Charles Band, who didn’t like the character; Band has said that it came at the request of Paramount, who found the character too bizarrely grotesque for even their DTV killer puppet franchise. She didn’t stay sidelined too long, of course; she returned in flashback form just one movie later (where it’s revealed that the leech-puking puppet contains the soul of Toulon’s dead wife, making the puppet that much weirder) and in every Puppet Master after part 5. She makes this list because she was the first puppet to be killed off and because the story behind her demise is kind of funny. She was just too gross to live.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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