After the Puppet Master gang had to indignity of an honest to God clip show for their last movie, you wouldn’t think there’d be that many depths left to sink for the group of Blade, Jester, Pinhead and company. However, that was before some bright spark realised that throughout their previous eight installments, the diabolical dollies had never participated in a “versus” movie before. What with Freddy having beef with Jason the year before and Alien locking suggestive features with the Predator only months earlier, the concept of having Full Moon Studio’s highest earners throw down with an equally lethal toy team made a certain amount of sense (from a trash movie perspective, anyway) – but who could they fight?
Enter the Demonic Toys, Charles Band’s other gaggle of killer playthings who had already taken the versus route after having their stuffed butts handed to them by Dollman back in 1993 during Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys. Did we get a titanic, toy-based tussle for the ages, or was the best we could hope for was someing marginally better that Anaconda Vs Lake Placid?
Instantly making a mockery of the continuity straightening Puppet Master: The Legacy by add yet new wrinkles to the puppet’s tangled history, we find the dolls – or should I say four of them, at least – now the property of toy surgeon Robert Toulon, the great nephew of the original Puppet Master, Andre Toulon. Kicking out impressive nutty professor vibes with extravagant hair and gravelly line deliveries, he’s pouring through Toulon’s old journals in order to try and recreate the serum that’ll spark life into the puppets known as Jester, Blade, Pinhead and Six-Shooter once more; but as he’s aided by his precocious daughter, Alexandra, sinister forces are massing against them.
Brattish toy manufacturer Erica Sharpe is currently in the midst of a union with the spikey demon, Baal – who must be a fan of Halloween III because they’re planning to use purchasable versions of the Demonic Toys in Erica’s employ to kill as many children as possible on Christmas Day. However, while the jabbering, trash talking Demonic Toys are unquestionably lethal, Erica wants toys that are loyal only to her and seeks to covet Toulon’s puppets right out from under the nose of the bumbling toy surgeon.
Much like the title suggests (or threatens, depending on your point of view), we’re soon due a showdown between the team of Blade, Jester, Pinhead and Six-Shooter and the team of Jack Attack, Grizzly Teddy and Baby Oopsy Daisy, but after an initial attack on Toulon’s shop leaves the puppets broken and singed, Robert provides them with kickass bionic upgrades to even the odds. But even with lasers, bigger blades and a mace-arm for Jester, will this still be enough to vanquish the plaything-themed forces of Hell?
While I’m not for a single second going to suggest that Puppet Master Vs. Demonic Toys is some sort of hidden gem lurking within what would turn out to a rather experimental era of the Puppet Master cannon, it does have the tremendous advantage of being the first installment to be released after cynical laziness of the transcendently awful Puppet Master: The Legacy. While that entry was less an actual movie and more of a bargain bacement con job cum “lover letter to the fans”, here we have an actual story – such as it is – that takes the series into the most overtly comedic realms it’s ever been. As a result, I actually found the rampant silliness and blatant pantomime style acting something of a breath of fresh air after the turgid likes of both Legacy and Retro Puppet Master, and even though the film is willfully a dumb as a bag of low IQ hammers.
Unless i miss my guess, this would be the first real time the titular puppets would venture out from under the blanket of Charles Band’s Full Moon as this ultimately was a television movie made by SyFy and it probably the main reason that it feels so different. There’s probably a Full Moon completist out there complaining that all this makes PMVDT exempt from Puppet Master cannon, but considering that that cannon is famously all over the shop, I’m kind of pleased to be free of it for a bit and just go a bit silly. Actually, “a bit silly” may be something of an understatement as director Ted Nicolaou (something of a Charles Band/Empire/Full Moon veteran) plays the camp card even harder here than he did in 1986’s TerrorVision and if you’re vehemently against Troll 2 levels of acting, I could totally understand why you’d treat this movie like something stuck to the sole of your shoe.
However, much like gazing into the soul searing horrors of a multiple car pile up, I found genuine morbid fascination from watching Corey Feldman mug his way through proceedings like he’s acting like a host in a Saturday morning kids show with absurdly voluminous hair. Ensuring that he’s not the only “name” actor slumming their way through this cheapo fight film, Kingpin’s Vanessa Angel plays the role of the spoilt CEO who has aligned herself with a satanic being that inexplicably likes dressing up as Santa Claus. Again, while she overacts wildly as she feeds virgin interns to blood draining machines and demands fealty from a foul-mouth baby doll with a breast fetish, it elicits a terrible fascination about the film that sits somewhere between distain and infantile amusement as you wonder how bad this film will get.
However, as like every Puppet Master film, the movie eventually stands or falls on the usage of those titular toys and while the level of special effect are at an all time low, there’s genuine fun in seeing a movie play fast and loose with those classic designs. For what I’m assuming are budget constraints, we’re now down to a mere four puppets and only three Demonic Toys, but while the puppeteering is the jerkiest it’s ever been and the “fights” are kept to a bare minimum, there’s something endearingly comic booky about giving the puppets the sort of unnecessary bionic upgrades you’d get in a 90s Marvel comic. Six-shooter gets kitted out with the latest in cyborg eyes and laser blasting arms and Blade manages to dispatch a foe by literally pirouetting like a ballerina and using his sharper extremities to shred a foe to pieces. Although, I have to say, Pinhead gets something of a raw deal as his big mitts are replaced – by big robot mitts that just looks like they stripped the skin of the animatronic, which hardly seems fair when even the historically useless Jester has his body upgraded in a bizarre version of Pimp My Hide. Also, how long has the Puppet Master franchise been going and no one’s thought to put them in a Christmas movie until now!?!
Yes, it’s pretty awful – but compared to some of the shit the “official” movies had been offering, Puppet Master Vs. Demonic Toys takes the series back to the type of more fun-themed drivel you’d expect from part nine of a series about killer puppets. You’ll feel your brain cells dying one by one as you watch it, but you have to give trashy kudos to a Christmas movie that features a horny baby doll demon that travels by fart power.
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 