Official Score = 2 1/2 Devils[/caption]Horror Movies and Science Fiction movies are an interesting beast… There are many reasons why I think that they are great, but one of the reasons that I thought that was particularly interesting about these two genre’s is that it seems like each decade starting from the 1980s on back had a seemingly different theme to what made those genre’s great…
An example of this being that in the 1980s Science Fiction became interested in… well many facets, but it seems like largely that Science Fiction movies tended to do with problems under water, (as is the case with such movies as, Labyrinth and, The Abyss), Cyborgs (As is the case with RoboCop and Terminator), and also Aliens coming to Earth…
Horror is very similar (although stronger) in that it seemed like the differences in the different types of sub-genres were more pronounced, (an example of this is that the 80s seemed more interested in popularizing slasher films, the 70s seemed to be more interested in monster movies, etc…)
Now I didn’t mean to imply that these sub-genres and decades never intermingled (because they did,) what I mean can be best described by the fact that Alfred Hitchcock created one of the definite slasher movies to ever come out in movie history, (it came out in 1960,) with the movie, Psycho (1960), and the same can be said about Science Fiction.
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Psycho... A genre defining movie if ever there was one![/caption]Another example is that the 50s produced some of the best B Sci/Fi|Horror Movies of all time!
What made them great? Well simply put I think it was primarily due to the amazingly entertaining, yet completely outrageous stories and the Special Effects were campy as hell (but in that fun sort of way…) Attack Of The Puppet People (1958) is one of these awesome Science Fiction Horror movies!
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A classic![/caption]Written by: Burt I Gordon (Empire Of The Ants), George Worthing Yates (Them!) and Directed by: Burt I Gordon. Starring John Agar (Tarantula), John Hoyt (Spartacus), Michael Mark (The Wasp Woman), June Kenney (Earth Vs. The Spider), Jack Kosslyn (High Plains Drifter), and Jamie Forster (Twilight Zone).
Attack Of The Puppet People, tells the story of a lonely doll maker who didn’t like being left alone, and who took his love affair of dolls and his loneliness a little too far…
What I mean by this is that Mr Franz (Hoyt) is the doll maker in question, he is a lonely old doll maker who used to work the marionette theater circuit in Europe (he was one of the best), he ended up working it until his wife left him for another man…
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The doll maker showing off one of his prized pieces...[/caption]At this, Mr. Franz decided to move to the United States and become a doll maker in his own factory…
Years later though Mr. Franz has become a kindly old man who has a hard time keeping anyone around him… (All of his secretaries leave him, he has no family, etc.) Well at this Mr. Franz sets to work and builds a shrink ray that shrinks people down to the size of dolls, and builds cylinders that keeps the people that he shrinks in suspended animation!
As more and more people begin to disappear around this lonely old man, it will be up to his newest shrunken toys to grow back to regular size and stop Mr. Franz before Mr. Franz can grow his very own human doll collection!
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Some of the new, 'toys' looking at making a, 'call'![/caption]One other thing that I thought that I would mention here is that this movie had something to do with the inspiration for the movie, Dolls (1987). I mean this movie is about a doll maker that shrinks his victims to become human dolls, and Dolls has to do with a group of people that while in an old mansion are all turned in to dolls.
In the end this movie is an awful lot of fun, and is absolutely worth the time!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnfviN13uyY&w=420&h=315]
