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At first sight, Mr Franz (John Hoyt) is the kindest old gentleman, who
has no interest in anything but his puppets, formerly as a puppeteer, now
as a manufacturer. And yet, people in his vicinity seem to disappear. Sally
(June Kelley), his new office girl, has taken an instant liking in him,
even though she finds him a tad odd, especially when she catches him
talking to his puppets as if they were real people. But at the end of the
day, she figures him just another eccentric. Then he meets Bob (John
Agar), one of Franz's business associates, and she falls in love with him.
When he proposes to marry her in Vegas, she says yes, but then he fails to
show up to pick her up. When Franz tries to comfort her, the things he
says are more than a bit odd, so she eventually reports him to the police
for having done something to Bob, and when the police cannot find the hint
of a proof, she hands in her resignation ... when Franz makes her his
captive and shrinks her to one foot in size - seems like when
manufacturing puppets, he has somehow stumbled upon the secret of
shrinking people (?!). Shrunk Sally is soon joined by shrunk Bob and
four more shrunk people (Marlene Willis, Ken Miller, Laurie Mitchell,
Scott Peters), and together they device plan after plan to escape and/or
grow back to normal size, but always fail. Franz on the other hand is
totally unaware that his puppet people hate him ... The police however
eventually picks up the trail to all those missing people and follows it
back to Franz, who then decides to commit suicide with his puppet people
in style, in a puppet theatre. Sally however learns of his suicide plans,
and at the theatre, the puppet people finally manage to escape their
captor. Sally and Bob make it back to his factory and manage to reverse
the shrinking process, to hand Franz over to law ... As Bert
I.Gordon's giant creature films (in a roundabout way at least) go, Attack
of the Puppet People, a close relation to Jack Arnold's The
Incredible Shrinking Man, is one of his lesser efforts. The problem is
that this film takes pretty much forever to set up its feeble story, and
when the main narrative (the puppet people against their master) finally
does set in, it's devoid of highlights, the special effects are rather
sloppily handled, tension and suspense are kept to a minimum, and the
climax hardly deserves to be called that. To put it in simple terms, a
disappointment.
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