The Puppet Masters - An elongated X-file

‘The Puppet Masters’ is famous for... well, not much really.  It kind of slipped under the mainstream consciousness in the wake of the (far superior) X-files and the general craze that aliens were about to knock on our door with ray-guns blazing.  However, just because it tries to be every (alien-related) X-files episode in one go doesn’t actually mean it’s a bad film.  Especially the opening anyway.

It starts off pretty damn good... an alien ‘something’ crashes in a small American town and we join a quartet of government agents sent in to investigate.  And, one of said agents is the wonderfully-dry Donald Sutherland, who cares about nothing more than thwarting the plans of those extraterrestrial nasties at all costs (and no matter who he has to whack with his walking stick to do so).  Naturally, they soon find that this is no hoax and the whole world is under attack from leaping jellyfish-like space monsters who want nothing more than to insert their slimy tongues into the backs of our necks and ride our collective bodies like race of particularly docile broncos.

However, once this is unveiled the agents leave small town America and go back to their base to study the creatures and work out a plan of counter-attack.  This is where the film kind of slows down a bit, which is a shame as it comes about an eighth of the way through the film and we still have practically an hour and a half left of run-time.

What follows becomes a lot less tense and far more predictable.  Donald Sutherland is sadly too old to really be the true ‘hero’ of the film and we’re left with his far less charismatic on-screen son to fight the good fight.  Don’t expect any Independence Day aerial dogfights either.  The aliens are barely seen and there isn’t a lot of action in it.  Overall it comes across as a bit of a 'made-for-TV' movie.

However, just because the film trails off early doesn’t mean that I can bring myself to hate it.  The Puppet Masters has always been a bit of a ‘guilty pleasure’ film of mine.  It’s cheesy and low budget and desperately wants to be a big budget A-list film, only it doesn’t have the star power or money behind it to make it so.  

If you like your alien invasion movies (or are stuck in a perpetual time warp where you’re in the nineties and still believe Area 51 holds the bodies of the Roswell aliens) then this one isn’t so bad.  I think one of the reasons it never did that well at the Box Office is because most people may resent paying full price for it.  However, in this age of internet websites which stream movies like this as part of a package, it’s definitely one to add to your watchlist if you fancy something that won’t stretch your mental powers too much.

Mulder and Scully were obviously on holiday when this alien invasion occurred.  

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that