The greatest movie ever!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

OK, admittedly, I have not read the book. I am sure it is a beloved sci-fi classic. This movie is none of the above. I accidentally selected this on my streaming service, thinking it was one of the Toulon Full Moon puppet-master series. I saw some of the cast and decided maybe it was worth a look. It was not. Hard to follow, the actors all seemed to be in a daze. Walking around muttering pointless dialogue. Even the revered Donald Sutherland came off as a stiff. The production values were very low budget, I almost laughed at the first appearance of the "alien". No tension, drama, excitement involved. Julie Warner spent the first part of the movie frustrated that men would not ogle her boobs. I am not making this up. I would hope that this film is a very bad adaptation of the book. I had to turn it off about 30 minutes in. AVOID IF POSSIBLE.

It looks like a UFO has landed in a small Iowa farm town. A top-secret US government investigative team from the "Office of Scientific Central Intelligence" goes out to investigate. The three stars are: limping leader Donald Sutherland (as Andrew Nivens), his handsome son and partner Eric Thal (as Sam Nivens) and sexy alien biologist Julie Warner (as Mary Sefton). They are about to conclude the whole thing was a teenagers' hoax, but Ms. Warner realizes aliens have landed. The reason, according to Warner, is that no males on the scene have noticed her arousing figure or tried to look down her unbuttoned blouse. You can almost hear her say, "Don't look at that alien spaceship, dammit, look down my shirt!"...Now, these aliens attach themselves to your back (your spinal column, specifically) and they multiply quickly. The way to see if someone has been "infected" is to order the person to, "Take off your shirt!" Since this trick works, we're left wondering why most people in the cast are allowed to keep their backs covered. Most viewers would not protest Warner and Mr. Thal acting without their shirts (Thal goes without pants, too). If you don't mind wondering about plot confusions and contrivances like that, you could do worse than Stuart Orme's vision of Robert A. Heinlein's science-fiction novel. Thal and Warner are an attractive couple and Mr. Sutherland is a classic performer who can improve movies by simply being there.****** The Puppet Masters (10/21/94) Stuart Orme ~ Eric Thal, Julie Warner, Donald Sutherland, Keith David

Unfortunate enough to share a name with a brand of dirt-cheap Charles Band movies (but completely disconnected from them) I always figured that The Puppet Masters would be just as schlocky. It ain't art, but it is decent, low-brow, brainless entertainment.A bunch of alien manta-rays land in Iowa in a confusing opening sequence. The authorities arrive and discover that the locals are slowly being turned into mindless slaves to their alien hosts. Sound like the X-Files? It very much does play out like a 3-part episode with virtually the exact same character dynamic and interaction. The tagline for the movie is even 'Trust no one'.It also feels like a John Carpenter movie in some respects (the presence of Keith David, who really ought to be in every movie, only adds to this). And while it's a fairly non-epic movie it does feature some nice anamorphic Panavision photography and a bunch of character actors to keep you entertained in-between the silly plot developments.As well as feeling the X-Files it also comes across as an Invasion of the Body Snatchers rip-off, odd since co-star Donald Sutherland was in one of those movies. Four years later another very similar film called The Faculty also featured mind-controlling alien parasites, as well as the Brain Slugs from Futurama. But apparently it's taken from a novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein but with little in common, perhaps thanks to a zillion re-writes.These kinds of movies often have some kind of political subtext, but Puppet Masters embraces its low-brow but clever silliness and ends up a guilty pleasure.

Despite being one of the key dozen or so science fiction writers of the 20th Century, relatively little of Robert Heinlein's work has been filmed and, with the exception of Starship Troopers (turned on its idealogical head), nothing from the 60s onwards, when his work started to carry more serious subtext.The Puppet Masters, a book from the 50s, is essentially fairly lightweight, albeit the invasion motif is similar to that of much 1950s science fiction in echoing a fear about the spread of communism - indeed, the parasitic slugs in Puppet Masters form a single entity - a commune if you will - and are therefore a fairly obvious analogue for the red menace. The novel was also fairly saucy for its time, with large chunks of the population having to peel down to their skimpies and beyond to prove that their clothing was not hiding the alien slugs.Well, as usual, Hollywood doesn't like to present the naked body to the viewing public, so the protagonists in this film version of Heinlein's story encounter more difficulty than they need to, simply by virtue of everybody keeping their clothes on. Apart from that, it follows the main sequence of events fairly faithfully, albeit updated to be more contemporary.Donald Sutherland is a serviceable "Old Man", even though he is quite different to how I imagined the character from the book (which hardly matters). There are several well-known albeit minor names in the secondary case, but the main leads are taken by Eric Thal and Julie Warner. Neither has had major success before or since (Warner had a lengthy run in Family Law) and, to be perfectly frank, this movie gives a good idea why - they have little charisma, and no chemistry despite the fact that they supposedly fall in love during the film. The story demands lead players who don't come across as insipid, but it doesn't get them.There is relatively little in terms of special effects, but what there is does the job. The major effect is the slugs themselves, and they are pleasingly unpleasant..There is some offensive - and entirely unnecessary - use of the F-bomb. I don't mind it when it's there for a purpose: here it serves no purpose whatsoever. It doesn't advance the plot or illuminate character, it simply makes an unpleasant comment even more unpleasant, and it could have been omitted entirely without any detrimental effect on the movie.With some promotion, this movie could have been rather more successful than it was, albeit it came on the heels of what might have appeared to be similar epidemic-type stories. Perhaps Heinlein's time in movies is still to come.