Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #202 Puppet (1999)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
Over the course of my jaunt through the highs and mostly lows of disgraced former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart’s career I have found myself repeatedly faced with the question: can she act?
Fun fact: there are very few images of Puppet available online.
The answer seems to vary from film to film and role to role. Gayheart’s ferociously adequate performance as a pretty girl with a conscience in last month’s movie, Jawbreaker, suggests that Gayheart can act when cast in the right role.
This month’s Gayheart vehicle, the hilariously terrible 1999 action thriller Puppet, on the other hand, doesn’t just suggest, but rather angrily insists that she’s a singularly untalented would-be thespian.
Gayheart made a number of mostly forgotten low-budget stinkers that never made the leap from VHS to DVD, Blu-Ray or streaming but Puppet is particularly obscure. I had to watch a bad VHS dub on an illegal download site despite the film being of historical interest to Howard Stern fans and Mad TV completists thanks to troubled funnyman Artie Lange’s role as a Russian enforcer with an accent that splits the difference between Boris Badenov and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and whose loves include murdering people and filthy jokes.
If I might give Lange the very faintest of compliments, he dominates this flaming garbage fire of a motion picture but he’s not the only beloved chuckle merchant to pop up unexpectedly.
H. Jon Benjamin has a weird bit part as a security guard while a very young Jim Gaffigan is cast aggressively against type as a horny, naked newlywed who is giving his new wife the kind of sensual ecstasy most women can only dream about when a pair of Eastern European heavies begin threatening them in unmistakably sexual ways.
It’s weird enough seeing Gaffigan in the buff as a dude overjoyed to be athletically banging his hot wife. It’s even weirder seeing the famously clean, family-friendly stand-up superstar curse multiple times in a single sentence when his girlfriend gets upset about Lange’s character insisting she has a “nice beeg ass” and he snaps, in an utterly un-Jim Gaffigan-like turn of phrase, “Who gives a shit about your ass? At least we’re alive!”
Gaffigan’s character is lucky in that most of the folks who tangle with Artie Lange and his boisterous sidekick end up dead but I am getting ahead of myself.
Puppet opens with the marriage of vapid, beautiful white people Rick (Frederick Weller) and Lori Myers (Gayheart), an obsessive book-binder/dealer in rare books and ambitious fashion designer, respectively.
I know Weller primarily from his lead role in James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved. He has the persona of Fred from Scooby-Doo if he was addicted to cocaine, had a gambling problem and a few STDs.
He’s so smarmy that everything he says sounds sarcastic. He barely seems capable of reading or writing, let alone devoting his life to rare and old books yet Puppet nevertheless casts him as an earnest young man eager to make his way in the world with the model-gorgeous woman of his dreams by his side.
After getting married the two hop into bed for one of those sex scenes that consist of nothing but faces contorted in ecstasy and brief glimpses of decontextualized body parts ostensibly in the throes of sensual bliss. It’s as if the producers angrily demanded a little sex and they acquiesced as quickly and arbitrarily as possible.
Then one afternoon Rick buys his new wife a fancy puppet that would qualify as a cursed object even if it did not contain a fortune in stolen Russian jewels. In one of many exquisitely oddball choices, the actor who plays the nephew of the antique store owner who hides the jewels inside the puppet brings real BDE to the role. I’m talking Big Deezen Energy of course.
The bespectacled Poindexter with the nasal whine and off-brand Jerry Lewis vibe seems to have stumbled in from another movie altogether, a zany comedy about an incompetent young bungler who gets in over his head and ends up paying a terrible price.
But the real comedy comes from Lange, who may be a supporting actor in an action-drama of revenge, murder and the Russian mafia but turns the movie into an Artie Lange vehicle every moment he’s onscreen.
Lange seems to be of the mindset that if you’re going to be in a movie with no chance whatsoever of being halfway competent, let alone good, then you might as well enjoy yourself and the Dirty Work sidekick appears to be having an absolute blast playing a sleazy Eastern European killer who is way too into his job.
Why shouldn’t he be? He gets to tell not one but two off-color jokes, murder multiple people and terrorize our heroes. Best of all, he gets killed halfway through so there’s no chance of him wearing out his welcome.
Since he’s clearly ignoring a dreadful script and improvising all of his lines, Lange has the film’s best dialogue. I genuinely laughed when his portly man of violence looks at a picture of Weller and Gayheart being all skinny and beautiful and in love and quips, “Look at these two! My God, they must eat like birds!”
Oh, and he also gets to terrorize a young, profane, misogynistic Jim Gaffigan and his sexy young wife, like when he leeringly taunts, “Judging by the mouth of Mrs. Wonderful I don’t think Shorty is going to be able to satisfy her!” and “Shut up, before I cut off that miserable flap you call your manhood!”
In between all of this weird, wacky and wild comedy, bizarre stunt casting and hammy Russian accents Puppet adorably and unsuccessfully attempts to be a grim and powerful action-drama about revenge, the sins of the past and the conscienceless brutality of the Russian mob and organized crime in general with dialogue and acting that’s just a baby step up from The Room, which this resembles in many ways.
Gayheart’s boss, for example, is yet another kooky comic caricature that belongs not just in a different movie but a different universe altogether. He’s a flamboyant cartoon of an arrogant gay fashion mogul, prone to unwieldy utterances like, “Where were you yesterday? On the moon?!?” and “I’m CHARLES, you stupid slut!”, which is what he yells defiantly at our heroine when she musters up the courage to quit her job.
Lori has a dark secret. Her mother was raped and then murdered in front of her eyes and her father blinded BY THE VERY SAME RUSSIAN MOB that is now intent on murdering her for coming in between them and possession of the stolen jewels.
It’s an insultingly preposterous coincidence representative of the movie’s adorably amateurish, homemade approach to storytelling. It’s the kind of movie that has its heroes continually state how much they need money, and would love to have money, and how useful money would be as if audiences otherwise wouldn’t be able to understand why people in a capitalist society would want to get their hands on cold hard cash, ill-gotten or otherwise.
Gayheart scores an impressive body count in Puppet even if she looks wispy enough to get carried away by a strong wind. She’s a uniquely unconvincing action heroine in a uniquely unconvincing action movie.
Puppet’s jarring tonal shifts last all the way up until its final image, a weirdly lighthearted freeze frame of our heroes yucking it up in victory that would feel more at home at the end of a sitcom episode in the 1980s than a drama about a woman getting revenge on the monsters who raped her mother and killed her parents.
I had a great time laughing at, rather than with Puppet, an action drama that’s unintentionally hilarious when it’s trying to be serious and seriously exhausting when it’s trying to be funny.
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