User Reviews

The attack doesn't come from puppets, but from shrunken humans, a la Dr. Cyclops. This isn't Technicolor big budget 1940 Paramount, but cheap, low- budget black and white American International, the pride of late 1950's drive in double features. In fact, this film salutes their reputation by showing two of the soon to be dolls watching "The Amazing Colossal Man" at the drive-in, giving audiences a thrill by being at the drive-in watching characters in a movie at the drive-in.

Better than professional critical reviews lead me to believe it to be, this is best described as a hoot. It all surrounds the lonely old doll maker John Hoyt who keeps the people he likes as companions by shrinking them to doll size and plans to do them all in when he is on the verge of being discovered so they can be together forever. Campy and fun, this is just delightful in every respect. It gets really funny when the doll-sized humans end up in a little party with champagne and music, jitterbugging as the pathetic Hoyt watches.

There really aren't any surprises, but the comic element keeps things moving at a rapid pace and the acting really isn't all that bad. John Agar and June Kenny are fine as the main two living dolls who put the plot together to get themselves back to life-sized humans. It gets more intense as his crazy plans are revealed, but the comic element remains, having Hoyt intermingle his dolls with the puppets he sometimes does show off on stage. Reversing the Colossal man and the 50' Woman, thus isn't as ground-breaking as "The Incredible Shrinking Man", but it isn't all wretched either. My only question is what became of the others left behind in the theater, as well as what ultimately happened to Hoyt after the final shot.

With the totally awesome working titles The Fantastic Puppet People and I Was a Teenage Doll, as well as the provocative UK title Six Inches Tall, this Bert I. Gordon auteur project - he wrote, directed and produced - was rushed into theaters by AIP to capitalize on the success of the previous year's The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was paired with War of the Colossal Beast, which is ironic, as this film features that movie's first installment, The Amazing Colossal Man.

Mr. Franz (John Hoyt, who was in everything from Cleopatra to Flesh Gordon) owns a doll factory and seems quite nice, but the lifelike dolls stored in glass canisters - his special collection - seem quite odd. That's because they're all real people transformed into dolls!

June Kennedy (Teenage Doll, Sorority Girl and the incredibly named The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent) plays Sally Reynolds, who takes a job with Mr. Franz. Before long, she's gotten all into salesman Bob Westley(John Agar, who has a vast career from John Wayne films to tons of B movies and science fiction films all the way to Miracle Mile; he was also the first husband of Shirley Temple), which seems to upset her boss. Before long, the guy is gone - just when they were about to get engaged and move away!

Soon, the twosome finds themselves part of Franz's doll collection, forced to act out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Keep an eye out for Laurie Mitchell (who played Queen Yllana, the ruler of Venus, in Queen of Outer Space) and Susan Gordon, the daughter of the director. She's also in his films Tormented and Picture Mommy Dead.

This movie is part of American history, believe it or not. On the evening of June 17, 1972, Alfred C. Baldwin III (in a nearby hotel as a lookout for the Watergate burglars) became so interested in the film that he didn't notice the two plainclothes detectives who made the historic arrests that led to the event known as Watergate.

John Hoyt is a doll maker in Los Angeles. He's an elderly man and is lonely. So when he finds himself liking someone, he shrinks them until they're about a foot tall and keeps them encase in glass tubes. They're still alive but unconscious unless he shakes them out into the fresh air, chats with them, and lets them play with each other.

When she threatens to leave his employ, he shrinks his pretty new secretary, June Kenney. And when John Agar becomes a little suspicious, he joins the merry group that consists of a mailman, a Marine sergeant, two teeny boppers, and another somewhat sleazy ex secretary. It's an understandable notion. After all, Hoyt has created a model universe in which he is the absolute (and mostly benign) dictator.

That's about it. You could almost write the rest of the screenplay yourself. During one of their R&R periods, the living dolls escape and use Hoyt's Extracurricular Anatomic Circumcisional Epenthetic Molecular Extractor (or EACEME, for short) to restore themselves to original size. Or at least Agar and Kenney do. The other twerps disappear without explanation. Hoyt is off to a jaunt in prison where he'll have plenty of company and they're all life sized, whether he likes them or not.

But the plot isn't really worth discussing. It's character development that counts. Unfortunately there is no character development either. The whole point of the movie is to put on display some special effects -- eerie noises, matte shots, giant sets that sometimes don't match each other. Nobody involved in a particularly memorable actor with the exception of John Hoyt, whose picture this is. His character is the most complex -- gentle, needy, and careless of others' fortunes. He was the Martian with the third arm in a "Twilight Zone" episode. He was also Decius Brutus in MGM's "Julius Caesar."

As a matter of fact this would have made a decent episode of "The Twilight Zone," resembling the touching story of Robert Duvall who falls in love with an animated doll who plays Mozart's pretty Sonata in A Major. Other sources, too numerous to list, include the physiologically oriented "Fantastic Voyage," "The Incredible Shrinking Man" which had metaphysical overtones, and "Dr. Cyclops," which didn't. Of course Dr. Praetorius in "The Bride of Frankenstein" had lots of fun with his miniaturized horny king and screeching queen, and not to mention the Lilliputians Gulliver ran into. Alice Liddel shrinks too but doesn't get nearly run over by a 1955 Ford.

I didn't find this too much fun. Kids might, but I'm not even sure of that because they've been bombarded over the past couple of decades by such elaborate CGIs.

This classic-era sci-fi movie is known for having a title that's more than a just a bit inaccurate. As I've noted in a couple of other films, puppets can be fairly creepy little things. Same with wind-up toys. But here we've got a bunch of little people, thanks to doll-maker Franz (John Hoyt). But these guys aren't exactly dolls, either. Franz has a cool gizmo that shrinks people, err, their molecules, which he explains in '50s hi-tech vernacular. Even for this anything-goes genre, the premise is odd, and the tone flickers among sci-fi, horror, and fantasy themes.

Other than the principle couple Sally (June Kenney) and Bob (John Agar), the other doll-people seem strangely complacent about their predicament; one of them actually likes it, as she doesn't have to do anything, having no responsibilities. The nonchalant attitude does allow for the surreal party scene with the girl singing a doll-themed rock-and-roll song. One gimmick that works is the movie-within-a-movie, especially as The Amazing Colossal Man on the drive-in screen features the opposite premise, a guy getting gigantic.

The actual puppet/doll interface is probably the best scene of all. Franz's Mr. Hyde puppet scares the heck out of Sally; but soon her and Bob escape. Suppose though, that the dolls were used by Emil (Michael Mark), or both him and Franz together, to 'liven-up' Emil's puppet shows. That would set up some quirky scenes, and inject horror diectly into the script.

I can't see why Franz is so negligent as to show the little girl the whole deal; even without the suspicious detective, she could certainly blow the lid off of Franz's secrets. After all, people who've had contact with Franz have been disappearing from the beginning.

There is a fairly tense escapade, as Bob and Sally have to get back to the lab to 're boot' themselves, dodging domestic animals and cars along the way. The denouement occurs off-screen, as Sally confronts Franz after she's 're-sized'. We do get a rather pathetic picture of Franz, whose little people have now abandoned him.

That hints at a stronger psychological sort of horror, with Franz as a tormented Dr. Frankenstein type; but, like the puppet show stuff, a character study is left lurking in the background, not fully explored.

Attack of the Puppet People is worth watching for the special effects and a few interesting scenes; but the story is kind of a let-down. 6/10

This is the case of a horror film whose title is much better than the film. So much of the title is wrong--a much better name would have been "Doll People Who Mostly Just Sit Around...and Stuff"! There is nothing at all resembling an attack and the people are shrunk to the size of Barbie dolls and are NOT puppets in any sense. But think about how creepy and wonderful it would have been if puppets really did come to life and have a reign of terror!! What an opportunity wasted.

The film is about a creepy and lonely man (John Hoyt) who sells dolls but also turns people into his own special living dolls. The dolls are kept drugged and in suspended animation in plastic tubes and he takes them out occasionally to amuse himself because his life really sucks. It's hard to be horrified by the guy--he's more just some old creepster who is rather pathetic. And, eventually when the living dolls (at least two of them) are able to restore themselves to their original size, the film just ends! There is no real resolution or satisfaction--just an ending that leaves the viewer wondering why they gave up on the movie towards the finale (such as it was).

The biggest problem with the film is the super-limp script. There is nothing particularly interesting about it other than the main plot idea--no chills, no excitement,...nothing. The scale of the doll people also often changes--showing that the film was rushed into theaters before it could all be worked out well. About the only interesting thing about the film is seeing two very familiar TV actors of the age in non-traditional roles (John Hoyt, who seems to have done practically every sort of role over the years and Hank Patterson, who played 'Fred Zipfel' on "Green Acres"). Otherwise, it's a dud.

** minor spoilers ** Despite the fact there is really no "Attack" and the "puppets" are really people, the film is a bit of a rip-off of the more successful Incredible Shrinking Man.

The plot is quick and predictable. A toymaker whose wife had left him many years ago learns how to shrink people to six inches tall. He does this so that he won't be alone. This man is Mr. Franz, played seriously by John Hoyt, a character actor whose been in all kinds of sci-fi, from the crazy rich guy in a wheelchair in "When Worlds Collide" to the doctor in the pilot episode of Star Trek.

Franz keeps running out of secretaries (shrinking them and putting them in bottles is bad for business) and so he hires another one; blonde and alone like him. She falls for Bob (John Agar, whose appeared in many cheesy scifi flicks of the 50s).

Bob does the right thing: he proposes marriage in a drive-in which is playing "Attack of the Colossal Man" (through an incredible coincidence this film was also directed by Bert I. Gordon, the same director as "Attack of the Puppet People.").

As the police close in, Franz decides on a murder-suicide but the little people will have none of it.

The plot fades, we never learn the fate of the other shrunken people and Franz stands in a lab, alone -- the worst fate! Plot holes galore: How did a toymaker, doll manufacturer and part-time puppeteer find the skills and knowledge to create an advanced scientific device that shrinks organic matter? Why did he waste this on people when he could have made a mint as a respected scientist? And what happened to the other shrunken people who escaped into the theater? You'll have to watch to find out!

I remember seeing this odd little movie as a kid and enjoying it, I guess because of the puppetry and "little people" angle, which has always fascinated me. After seeing it several times since, I still like it. It's nothing profound, but the sets for the "dolls" were pretty good for the time. The title is just Hollywood talking -- it doesn't make any sense because the little people aren't puppets and they don't attack. I don't think Mr. Franz, played by John Hoyt, is an evil man at heart, just driven to do what he does by his extreme loneliness, which in the end destroys his moral judgment. This is an old movie in my collection I'll watch from time to time for nostalgic value and continue to enjoy.

An extremely cheap and cheerful B-movie from the notorious Mr. B. I. G. (that's Bert I. Gordon, incredibly still alive at this point in time). It plays with his obsession with giant-sized creatures or miniaturisation, but as a film it's quite the slog and seems almost entirely lacking in plot. The set-up takes forever and then there are only a couple of mildly perilous 'little people' scenes before the ridiculously anticlimactic ending. Sure, the acting and FX are what make this fun, but it's hardly one of the decade's enduring classics.