When Nivens calls in military support, there’s a brief image of the army confronted by an group of alien-possessed children, and the off-screen carnage works all the better for suggestion.Įarly work from writers who would go on to create both Pirates of the Caribbean and The Dark Knight on script duties, The Puppet Master offers more paranoid fun that this film’s reputation suggests the idea of the enemy as a single organism does eventually land, and the final attack on the alien nest is well enough done, even if the helicopter finale is a blue-screen disaster. That’s all helpful to a scenario that resembles another groovy alien-possession B-movie The Hidden, but even if director Stuart Orme doesn’t have the budget for spectacle, there’s a few truly disturbing moments. Perks include Keith David as a tough soldier, Yaphet Kotto as a general, Will Patton as a helpful science-guy and Law and Order’s Richard Belzer as a possessed flunky.
Sam is an early victim, but his father manages to remove the creature it’s soon discovered that the invasion is not of many creatures, but one singular organism with super-fast reproductive abilities and the ability to swamp humankind within days if not stopped fast. They find the area overrun with nasty parasitical symbiotes that swiftly attach themselves to the spinal cords of their human victims, taking over the local cops, military and spreading across the community like a virus. Together with his son Sam (Erik Thal), Nivens travels to Iowa to investigate reports of a flying saucer, bringing along NASA expert Mary Sefton (Julie Warner) for additional insight. In an souped-up X Files-type scenario, a freshly laundered Donald Sutherland plays Andre Nivens, the head of a secret CIA body entrusted to stand between us and potential alien invasions. Dispensing with the futuristic dystopian setting of the book, it’s a rather muddled film, but does have enough striking moments to make it worth exhuming for genre fans.
The satirical thrust of 1997’s Starship Troopers is always a pleasure, but a few years earlier, there was a decent attempt to film his 1951 novel The Puppet Masters. The wholesome Disney + might seem like an odd place to do it, but I’ve been catching up on the cinematic adaptations of the work of Robert A Heinlein.
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