When those around her start dying in strange circumstances, a young woman
is forced to reconcile with her family's dark past.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Brandon Christensen
Starring: Caryn Richman, Michael Páre, Alyson Gorske, Zachary Le Vey, Angel Prater
With his first two movies –
Still/Born
and
Z
–writer/director Brandon Christensen marked himself as one of the
most talented filmmakers working in today's low budget horror field.
Both of these films felt like throwbacks to the TV movies and drive-in
fare of the 1970s, with Christensen working economically and ingeniously
within restricted budgets. Like so many of the best low budget horror
movies, they relied heavily on the performance of a female lead to make
up for the lack of showy effects, with Christensen proving himself a
director equally gifted in directing actors as in placing his camera.
His third film, the black comedy
Superhost, was by comparison somewhat sloppy and unfocussed, but had its
charms.
For his fourth feature, Christensen suffers from lofty ambitions even
his skill at working with low budgets can't quite achieve. Where his
previous films were confined, all three mostly playing out in a single
location, The Puppetman is more expansive, owing much to
the
Final Destination
series but with a fraction of its budget, meaning Christensen is unable
to pull off the sort of outlandish set-pieces that franchise is known
for.
The lack of budget begins to show from the establishment of its primary
setting. The movie takes place on a college campus, but there's no
hustle and bustle of the student body, no keg parties, no crowded
classrooms. It's winter break and only a small group of friends have
decided to remain on campus (there doesn't even seem to be any security
or maintenance staff in the place). They've done this to be supportive
of their troubled friend Michal (Alyson Gorske), whose father,
David (Zachary Le Vey, whose surname proves a chilling case of
nominative determinism here), is set to be executed by lethal injection
for killing Michal's mother when she was a young child, an incident
detailed in a bloody prologue.
David has always maintained his innocence, claiming some supernatural
force took over his body. Michal spent her subsequent childhood and teen
years in a variety of foster homes before aging out and entering
college. With her father's imminent execution on her mind, Michal grows
increasingly stressed, cutting her arm, sleepwalking at night and
smearing a symbol consisting of three parallel lines on the wall in her
blood. When her best friend, Charlie (Angel Prater), leaps to her
death from the roof of their dorm, Michal believes she was responsible,
that the same force that took over her father caused Charlie to kill
herself.
What follows is a cross between the sort of investigative procedural
horrors that were popular in the aftermath of the success of
The Ring, with Michal searching for answers, and a
Final Destination knockoff, with those around Michal
perishing in a gruesome manner (there's even a direct nod to a death
from Final Destination 3).
Christensen puts together some effective sequences, with a scene that
cross cuts between two characters' impending deaths a standout, and for
two thirds at least The Puppetman is an involving little
chiller. It runs into trouble in its final act when the film struggles
to make sense of its own mythology. Like Death in the
Final Destination movies, The Puppetman is a metaphysical
villain, but where the Final Destination films at their
best managed to make us acutely aware of Death's presence at all times
through its tense Rube Goldberg set-pieces,
The Puppetman fails to pull off the same trick. Part of
this is down to a failure to fully establish the rules of this myth. The
film seems to be playing catch-up and making things up on the fly, and
by the climax the viewer is confused as to the very nature of The
Puppetman as an antagonist. Too much heavy lifting is expected of
Gorske, who puts in a decent final girl performance but struggles with
an exposition heavy script. It's a shame as there's potential here for
an ongoing series, but it may require a larger budget for Christensen to
realise his ambitions. The puppet strings may be hidden here but the
purse strings are all too visible.
