Ted Elliott

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) It’s slightly weird to call The Puppet Masters a disappointing imitation of The Body Snatchers, considering that it’s (loosely, almost accidentally) adapted from a 1951 story by Robert A. Heinlein that slightly predates Jack Finney’s 1954 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But you certainly know which version made it to the screen first—and that makes all of the difference. (What’s more, the film version eschews the explicitly science-fictional future setting of the novel.) Anyway: if film producers can’t get the remake rights, maybe they can get the rights to a similar novel. Suffice to say that the film adaptation gets back to basics: back-riding alien slugs taking over their human ride’s actions and going for world domination. An early script for screenwriting duo Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott (I remember reading an essay of theirs on Usenet describing their disappointment with what happened with their script), it ends up being a very middle-of-the-road alien invasion film—a bit evocative of a zeitgeist that was just getting started on The X-Files at the time. There are a few good sequences here and there, and a somewhat exemplary performance from Donald Sutherland making a B-movie more fun. More thriller than horror, The Puppet Master can be a reasonably entertaining watch if you’re interested in mid-1990s SF paranoia, but keep your expectations firmly in check.