A team of secret agents, led by Andrew Nivens (Donald Sutherland), and including his gun-toting son, Sam (Eric Thal), and NASA exobiologiest, Mary Sefton (Julie Warner), investigate a UFO in rural Iowa. They discover alien “slugs” have invaded, possessing humans by latching onto their backs. Unless they are stopped, they will take over the world.
Yet another alien possession film, The Puppet Masters is a mixture of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and that episode of the old Star Trek where Spock ends up with a manta ray on his back. Based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1950s anti-communist novel, The Puppet Masters (which came out before Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers), any cautionary messages about conformity in general (or the red menace in particular) have been wrung out of the story, leaving a reasonably entertaining sci-fi action pic. Unlike its superior cousin (I’m talking about The Body Snatchers, not the Star Trek episode), which creates a sense of paranoia by putting everyday folks into a hopeless situation, The Puppet Masters follows the adventures of larger-than-life characters, who are bound to find an answer with their super skills.
OK, so this is closer to James Bond than to Sartre’s No Exit, but who doesn’t like James Bond? There are chases, fistfights, and shootouts. A girl leaps out a window and the heroic spy sneaks into the alien lair. It’s a ’50s B-invasion flick, done better than they were done in the ’50s. And like those films, the scientist and government come up with a “silver bullet” to defeat the aliens. An extra ending, so common in ’80s and ’90s horror, is stuck on so you know the decade. It helps to give the film a bit of humor and some needed excitement, but the “oh, it’s not dead yet” add-on is particularly hard to accept in this case as it ignores what we’ve been told about the aliens.
I watched this story as an outsider, never pulled in. Only Julie Warner’s Mary is sympathetic. That doesn’t mean the other actors don’t do their jobs. Sutherland embodies the typical Heinlein, overbearing, smartass leader and Eric Thal has no trouble with the generic, muscled agent. I just didn’t care about them.
I gave The Puppet Masters an extra
for presenting a fundamental truth about males. Mary spots possessed males by noticing that they don’t try to look down her blouse as any free, heterosexual man would. We males are simple creatures.
The film may have lost an opportunity by bowing to American prudishness. In the novel, people take the logical step of going topless so that it’s obvious who has been taken over, and who hasn’t. But as the film avoids any kind of female nudity, the characters are perpetually taken off guard by the possesseds. If I knew that clothing could be hiding evil aliens, I’d insist on a shirtless environment. It makes sense, and it would have added some needed titillation in a film that’s only going for thrills anyway.