30. Class of 1999In the distant future of 1999, street gangs have carved out free fire zones that cops will not enter around schools in major cities. These gangs, armed with automatic weapons and explosives, act as their own form of law in these lawless territories, where they murder, rape, pillage, abuse drugs, and do whatever else they want. The government does not like this, so the local school board of Seattle joins forces with the Department of Education and Defense as well as a private company to unveil the latest in education technology: military robots converted into teachers to handle both education and punishment. When the robots inevitably buck their typical programming and revert to war settings to kill off the gangs, it's up to a small group of street kids to take them out.
First of all, that is an awesome idea for a movie. Second of all, the killer robots here are played by the likes of John P. Ryan, Patrick Kilpatrick, and the always wonderful Pam Grier. While the movie gets 1999 incredibly wrong(it was released in 1990, so no Internet), it's a gritty cyberpunk future that has a tinge of the post-apocalyptic that I love. Escape from New York, 2019: After the Fall of New York, 1990: Bronx Warriors, Split Second...it's this kind of movie, and it fits right in with a lot of other popcorn flicks I have adored over the years.
The film is a sequel to Class of 1984, though in name and central themes only. As far as I can tell, there are no direct connections between the two films outside of punk gangs and inner city schools, and while in 1984 it was a hero teacher against killer students, now it's hero punk gangs against killer teachers and Stacy Keach's mullet. Yes, Stacy Keach has a dyed mullet in this movie. No, I don't know why.
Anyway, this is occasionally a quite violent movie, with teachers cutting up or blowing up students from time to time. One guy even gets pulled through a wall and ripped in half in one particularly awesome moment. Man, the future of education is awesome.
31. Puppet Master 6: Curse of the Puppet MasterThis one's for Michi.
Michi wrote:I’ve heard that the further along the sequels go, the worse they get, so I’ll just be sticking to the first three. I’ll leave the dregs of anything beyond that to Ack.
You actually watched the first five, so here's Puppet Master 6 for you!
Let me start this off by saying that I own 9 of the currently 12(and possibly 13 if Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich ever comes out) Puppet Master movies. I have also never watched any of them. So of course I totally decided to hop in where Michi left off, in the midst of the sewage that is any long-running horror franchise post-"final chapter" film.
In Puppet Master 6, the puppets find themselves in the hands of Dr. Magrew, who runs a cabinet of curiosities and believes the puppets represent the absolute perfect being. To this aim, he hires a local orphan nicknamed Tank who is perhaps mentally challenged but a savant with a carving knife and has him create a puppet. Unfortunately Tank has some enemies in a group of local douche bag bullies, and he's also incredibly muscular in a way that Dr. Magrew's daughter is totally into. Plus there's a jerk sheriff who thinks Dr. Magrew may be involved in his previous assistant's disappearance, and he's not above committing a few acts of police brutality to prove it.
There are numerous problems with this movie. First and foremost, it spends all its time focusing on the budding relationship between Tank and Dr. Magrew's daughter...a relationship I do not care about and find somewhat creepy and awkward. Tank comes across like that Simple Jack joke in Tropic Thunder, and I kept expecting him to swat at butterflies with a mallet and ask why his eyes rain.
Our hero.
I wish I was kidding about that Simple Jack joke.
I really wish I was.Second, not only are the puppets more in the background, but they only get to kill a few people. This horror movie has a body count of 4 officially, and it ends as the fourth person is dying. While the deaths are generally quite bloody(Michi mentioned Tunneler not usually getting blood on his drill. He totally does here), they're over pretty quick and for the most part performed by Blade and Tunneler...though Jester joins in on one, apparently making it the first time he ever actually kills someone. Still, the highlight of this one is Tunneler teaching one of the douchebag bullies why he shouldn't rape by going straight for his groin. Nasty.
So yeah, creepy relationships, few deaths, and poor pacing hamper this one. But what about the puppets? Well, this one only has the classics: Blade, Tunneler, Leech Woman, Jester, and Pinhead are here, along with Six Shooter. Torch and Decapitron are officially out of the series at this point. There are two new puppets, but one is a throw away to reveal what happened to the old assistant.
Didn't I see him in Hotline Miami?And then there is the new puppet, the one that Tank was building and then supposedly gets turned into...and it has some serious problems. I watched Tank build this puppet throughout the movie. I watched him carve its feet, work on its legs, and shape its wooden body. So how in the hell did it end up with tank treads and a TV screen for a head? Having seen pictures of the various puppets over the years, I am happy to report that the Tank puppet is the dumbest design of the series:
Obey.Just look at that. Let it soak in. Better yet, here's another, heavily pixelated look at it:
I scowl into your soul.WHAT THE HELL?! HE CARVED FREAKING FEET FOR IT YOU DOLT! YOU
SHOWED US THAT HE WAS CARVING FEET!
Anyway, Tank fights with magical shitty post-production lightning. It looks like the kind of lightning you would find on a Geocities website next to a bunch of spinning unicorn gifs. Class of 1999 showed us a late 1990s that could have been. This was the actual late-90s that we got. Tank is the AOL of the Puppet Master series: somebody at the time thought this was a good idea and now everyone universally recognizes it was shit.
I look forward to watching more Puppet Master movies in the future...and making fun of them.
