The neighbor whose milky eye drives a man to despair and finally murder in PUPHEDZ: THE TATTLE-TALE HEART.
PUPHEDZ: THE TATTLE-TALE HEART
2002, Elite Entertainment, DD-2.0/+, $9.98, 26m 41s/ 33m 40s, DVD-0 By Shane M. Dallmann
We’ve all heard of “wooden” actors, but the Puphedz take the term literally. This award-winning short feature introduces a trav- elling troupe of four puppet per- formers who stage miniature Grand Guignol-esque entertain- ments from their carriage—and their initial offering is an elabo- rate spoof of a well-known Edgar Allan Poe tale. Against a variety of surreal, Caligari-esque sets and backdrops, the Puphedz employ nearly every humorous trick in the book (visual and ver- bal puns, vaudeville routines,
slapstick gags and even a delib- erately racist “blackface” bit), and season the mixture—in the un- expurgated version, at least— with buckets of gore. And they still manage to hit every story point as the saga of the tor- mented narrator and the old man with “the eye” unfolds.
PUPHEDZ: THE TATTLE- TALE HEART is presented in two versions on Elite’s DVD—the cre- ators (writer/producer/director Jurgen Heimann and co-writer Jim Kundig) prefer the “short” version for its pacing, but a com- pletely uncut “long” variant is also available. The short edit eliminates most of the sequences in which the narrator is seen tell- ing the story in flashback (and setting up punchlines which come complete with rimshots),
as well as a cameo appearance by “God.” In addition, the gore is obscured with graphics dis- pensing advice along the lines of “Gross! Don’t look!” (this still doesn’t make it family-appropri- ate). In either case, the Puphedz themselves are the real stars of the show (in both senses of the term) and their workings, a com- bination of traditional marionette manipulation and remote control engineering, are detailed in a 16m 3s documentary featurette also included on the disc. Do- mestic and foreign trailers, a photo gallery and “bios” for the wooden players are included. PUPHEDZ: THE TATTLE-TALE HEART certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but puppetry/horror fans with a taste for the bizarre will find it
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