That proves quite difficult, particularly since just about everybody gets taken over at some point, heroes included.

The challenge, of course, is to identify, contain and eradicate them before they multiply and go forth to take over the world. These burrow into their hosts' backs and deprive them of humor and sexual feeling. Sent to the location of a possible UFO sighting in a small Iowa town, they find its citizens infested with parasites that are equal parts stingray, slug and anteater. That subtlety was seemingly unimportant to Abel Ferrara (director of last year's 'Body Snatchers') or Stuart Orme, a Brit making his American debut with 'Puppet Masters.' Actually, the film most often resembles television's 'The X-Files,' though it's more graphic.Ĭentral to the plot are Andrew Nivens (Donald Sutherland), no-nonsense chief of the secret Office of Scientific Investigation Sam Nivens (Eric Thal), his alienated son and an OSI agent to boot and Mary Sefton (Julie Warner), a NASA exobiologist (she's into alien intelligence). Mostly, though, the problem is the seeming echo of themes and devices, original and shocking in 1951, but now familiar through other films, including three versions of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Jack Finney's book was written three years after Heinlein's, and both were sci-fi satires on the dual dangers of communism and conformity during the McCarthy era. Unfortunately, the grand master of sci-fantasy probably deserves a better telling of his story of earthly invasion by alien slugs who take humans over by penetrating their brains and spinal cords with tendrils, immediately gaining mind and memory control.īoth fitfully entertaining and on occasion sufficiently scary, the film is undermined by some things not uncommon to genre fare (budget limitations, script flaws, uneven acting).

Heinlein's 'The Puppet Masters' 43 years to make it from small print to the big screen. 'The Puppet Masters' (R) By Richard Harrington

The puppet masters heinlein