dougdoepke People are disappearing and it seems to center around a doll-maker's office-repair shop. Sweet young Sally applies as receptionist at the office and marvels at the life-like detail of the owner's array of dolls. Maybe this is a job she shouldn't have taken.Oddball slice of 50's sci-fi. Franz (Hoyt) may be a mad scientist, but he's hardly the standard cruel stereotype. Nonetheless, with an infernal machine, he does shrink people down to doll size and keep them in little glass cylinders. But, he's not power- mad like the usual nutcase. Instead, he's a lonely old man who must have company when he needs it. Thus his human dolls can be resuscitated at will so he can watch them party and have a good time. His situation is rather poignant instead of infernal. He really means them no harm, though he's clearly lost perspective.Rather surprisingly, Hoyt is excellent as the benighted Franz. The actor usually plays cruel types, but here he's almost genial and without a single snarl. Special effects are simple—an unobtrusive split screen separating the normal from the miniature. Thus, we get the two worlds coming together on the same screen. However somebody should have caught the fleeting shadow cast against a process screen near movie's end. I confess to liking this cheap indie, maybe because it breaks so many of the mad scientist rules. Nonetheless, the title is misleading and I can see 50's drive-in hot- rodders and their dates feeling cheated from a lack of scary scenes to cuddle up over.

LeonLouisRicci Somewhat Charming with a couple of Terrifying Scenes, this MR. BIG(an affectionate nickname for Director and SFX wizard Bert I. Gordon) Movie is Entertaining enough and the Director sure knew How to use Props and Mattes for some Low Budget Thrills.His Movies always had a "Look". A High Contrast Otherworldly Appearance that gave His Stuff an Ethereal Atmosphere of Another Place in Time Space. This one is a Cute "Little" Story about a Lonely Man, John Hoyt, in a Soft Spoken Endearing Performance, that "Makes" His own Friends by Scientifically Shrinking Anyone He "Likes having around.".There are some Good Action Scenes when the "Dolls" Escape and a few Interesting Scenes with a Cat, a Dog, and a Jekyll and Hyde Marionette. Overall, Worth a Watch for Fans of B-Movies, Drive-In Fare, Fifties Psychotronic Pictures.

flapdoodle64 Bert I. Gordon (BIG) stands out as one of the more successful grade-Z auteurs of 1950's films, having made within a few short years a slew of monster/scifi ultra low budget films, all of which involve fantastical changes in the size of people or animals. BIG never made films as good or subversive as Roger Corman, but BIG made a lot of super-cheap films in a short time that made money, provided employment for actors, and provided material for drive-in theaters.Most of the BIG films involve people or animals that become giants, but this one involves a mad toy-maker who shrinks people so as to fulfill some kind of weird personal fetish. There is a crisis point about 2/3 way through this film where Mad Scientist Hoyt decides he must kill his shrunken pets...there is a hint of genuine horror at this point, and I was reminded of the real-life horror the Andrea Yates case, herself guilty of infanticide and simulatanously a victim of both poor mental health and fundamentalist religion. BIG borrows heavily here, from sources as wide-ranging as the Bride of Frankenstein to The Incredible Shrinking Man, as his visuals go. As far as BIG's patented FX techniques go, this is one of his more refined pieces, along with War of the Collosil Beast.Eternally geriatric John Hoyt, who was good in 'When Worlds Collide' and as Gene Roddenberry's original choice for the doctor of the starship Enterprise, plays the mad villain, and does a fine job of it. Hoyt's performance holds the film together, and despite the mad scientist schtick, he is ultimately more engaging than John Agar, to whom I have assigned the title World's Most Unlikable Actor.This is standard, mid-grade BIG fare, which is to say, an enjoyable waste of time for those who enjoy Drive-In era films. The story is not terribly complicated, and I think BIG padded things out so that this film would have sufficient running time for theatrical release, otherwise it could have been done as an episode of the Twilight Zone.BIG made this film for peanuts. Ten years after its release, TV schlockmeister Irwin Allen tweaked the concept slightly, and made the series 'Land of the Giants,' which at the time was the most expensive TV show ever produced, and ultimately much more tiresome than this quaint artifact.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** Director Bert I. Gordon went from making movies about 60 foot giants like "The Amazing Colossal Man" to 6 inch human puppets in "The Attack of the Puppet People" within the space for a year in order to show his versatility as a film maker. Unlike in Gordon's "Colossal Man" where Glenn Manning went nuts when he found out that he'll never return to his original size in the "Puppet People" the diminutive human beings came to their senses and revolted against the person who made them small doll manufacture Dr. Franz, John Hoyt, by making him pay for what he did to them.Lead by super salesman Bob Weshey,John Agar, and his fiancée Sally Reynolds, June Kennedy, Franz's secretary the puppets revolted against their master Mr.Franz when they found out that the crazy and mixed up guy was planning to do them in together with himself after an encore performance of "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" that they were to star, as puppeteers, in! Franz who thought that he was in fact loved by his puppets got the surprise of his life when he found out that they in fact hated his guts!It was with this cockamamie device that he invented, a hopped up photo enlarger, that changes and rearranges a persons molecular structure that Franz was able to turn full size human beings into six inch puppets. Fraz came up with this idea after his old lady checked out on him back in Luxembourg with an acrobat at the circus that he, with his puppet show, was preforming in! Feeling alone and unwanted Franz felt that turning people into puppets or dolls would fill the gap or void of loneliness that he got when his old lady left him. Instead it turned him into a crazed and power driven maniac who not only threatened the lives of those whom he was in control of, his puppets, but both his own life, and sanity, as well! That he was more then ready to throw away together with his live puppets before the cops and men with the white suites and butterfly nets broke into his secret laboratory! And thus took his away in a straight jacket to the nearest mental institution for both treatment and mental observation!