If any franchise was in dire need of a ground up reboot, it’s the Puppet Master movies. By 2017, depending on who you ask, there were twelve entries and not many of them were particularly memorable. Full Moon head honcho Charles Band attempted to give the deadly dolls a genre-mashing face-lift with the Axis trilogy, but alas the scripts and budgets were too weak to even do the notion of puppets vs. Nazis justice. Well, in the bizarre vein of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, a 2018 reboot decided to not only flip the script, but flip the alliances of the titular dolls to something far more villainous.
That’s right, while the original run of films frequently offered up prequel adventures that saw Blade, Pinhead and the gang square up to the forces of the Third Reich, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich saw the vicious little buggers as tools of the Nazis to shred the kinds of folks they were looking to eradicate. Taking a franchise that often tried to play it safe, we find none other than S. Craig Zaher (director of Bone Tomahawk and Brawl In Cell Block 99) is on scripting duties to ensure that these puppets get really nasty.
After a prologue that shows scarred Nazi war criminal Andre Toulon arriving in Texas in 1989, we discover that his tolerance for alternative lifestyles is weaker than a Homer Simpson sit up when he sics one of his killer puppets onto a lesbian couple that spurned his sexual advances. However, after he was tracked down by local law enforcement, he finally meets belated justice when a rookie puts four bullets in him.
Zipping ahead to 2019, we find recently divorced comic book writer, Edgar Easton, moving back in with his parents despite plainly being middle-aged. However, while he miserably works at the local comic book store for his rather misogynistic boss, Markowitz, things start to look up when he manages to start dating an old crush who still lives in the area. But what has all this got to do with killer Nazi puppets, I hear you cry – well, I was just getting to that. It seems that Edgar’s late younger brother owned one of Andre Toulon’s many peculiar puppets, and as there’s an auction scheduled to allow collectors to buy and sell the notorious killer’s many creations, Edgar, Ashley and Markowitz all head off to the Brass Buckle Hotel to see if they can get some cheddar by selling their lethal-looking plaything.
However, with over forty puppets brought to the same same location by prospective sellers (this iteration of Toulon was way busier than the original), things get quite dire when they all activate and start killing guests of the hotel that don’t match up to the Nazi’s twisted idea of perfection. Targeting the Jewish, people of colour and homosexuals first, puppets with names like Blade, Pinhead, Keiser, Mr. Pumper and Junior Fuhrer suddenly start pouring out of the woodwork and when the remainder of the guests panic, everyone is fair game for this littlest Reich.
While the Puppet Master franchise has had some occasional blips here and there that’s worth checking out (the first three are fairly respectable) I’ve always had a sense that any fans the franchise might claim are probably more in love with the puppets themselves than any of the movies they’re actually in. This probably means that they’ll be a couple of die hard fans that’ll recoil in abject horror at the thought of their beloved characters being rejigged to slaughter minorities while working with the Nazis – but if I’m being truly honest, this is a franchise in desperate need of new ideas. Of course, the fact that The Littlest Reich has chosen to emphatically go down the road of being as offensive as it can will piss people off regardless, but considering how shockingly bland some of these films have gotten, I’ll take a violently removed fetus any day over the week over such wilting bilge as Retro Puppet Master.
It also helps that some actual craft has been brought into play when it comes to the puppet redesigns, copious gore and the fact that the cast contains some actual recognisable faces and talent. Deploying an array of comedic actors such as Reno 911!’s Thomas Lennon and Scott Pilgrim’s Nelson Franklin – not to mention roles for horror stalwarts Barbara Crampton and Udo Kier – it proves to lightyears away from whatever jobbing actors stiffly fumbled through their lines in the last couple of movies. Similarly, while Zaher’s script isn’t as polished as you’d expect, the man who gave us that death from Bone Tomahawk certainly ups the gore content way beyond anything the franchise has ever seen before.
Throats aren’t just slashed, they yawn open while gushing blood; heads are pulped by the grasping hands of a Pinhead; and then there’s that showstopping sequence where a doll emerges from the belly of a pregnant woman clutching the fetus like a trophy. However, extra points have to go to the moment where one poor sod is decapitated while taking a leak only for his bonce to tumble into the toilet bowl where the body continues pissing on its own head – you didn’t get that shit in Puppet Master 5.
I actually quite like what the film does with the puppets themselves, although I know that Puppet Master purists will lament it like Vito Corleone mourning over the death of Sonny. Ditching a small group in favour of a mass produced army, nods are dutify given to some of the classics such as Blade, Pinhead and Torch (here inexplicably renamed Keiser), but some of the newer faces go to some truly weird places. There’s Autogyro, who’s essentially a drone that slashes limbs with it’s propeller, Mr. Pumper who pumps blood out of its victims and – most memorably – Junior Fuhrer, who is a baby doll with a Hitler mustache and a side parting who has the unnerving talent of burrowing into the back of a victim and puppeteering their body around like a flesh suit. Yes, the likes of Leech Woman, Six-Shooter and Jester are missed (hmmm, maybe not Jester), but if their loss means that we can actually get a Puppet Master movie that elicts geniune laughs rather than just frustrated boredom, then fuck it, do whatever you have to do.
Of course, there’s issues. Directors Tommy Wirkland and Sonny Laguna are certainly enthusiastic enough, but their uneven style fluffs a punchline or two, and some aspects of this very simple story are poorly explained and leads to confusion. However, it’s worst offence ends up being a deliberately confusing ending that’s not only strangely downbeat, but also shamelessly sets itself up for a direct sequel that will probably never actually come to pass despite the confidence of slapping a “To Be Continued…” title card on the end.
Deliberately offensive and downright nasty, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich manages to employ its smash mouth style and revisionist tactics to pump life into the franchise like never before. If you think that the film violates the lore too much, then I’d recommend going back and watching Puppet Master II again to get your heart rate back down; but if you want to see the puppets viciously revel in their new-found villainy, The Littlest Reich pulls all the right strings.
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