Retro Puppet Master

[Andrew]

It appears that Charles Band or Benjamin Carr (the writers and it could be both of them) saw "Dark City" and liked it.  Why do I say this?  Because the three bad guys in this movie are mummies with powers that resemble tuning.  That they dress in black, with sunglasses and derbies, should not surprise you.

In some ways this was a welcome change from the last three "Puppet Master" films.  "Curse of" was a mess of a movie with a murky vision of what the point was.  While 4 and 5 were just paint by the numbers scripts.  I will say that the 4th had some interesting ideas, like the demon and his minions - plus the minions dying when their respective puppet monster died.

Guy Rolfe appears briefly and he is probably the best actor to appear in any of the "Puppet Master" movies.  The actor who takes his place, as a younger Toulon (most of the movie is a flashback), is considerably less adept.  Plus the younger man's accent drove me nuts.

The plot concerns how Toulon learned to animate puppets with the life force of dead friends.  It fits in with the plots of numbers 3-5 pretty well.  The short version is that a sorcerer stole the secret of puppet animation/life transfer from the demon lord.  The sorcerer is wounded by agents of the demon's mummy servants and is taken in by Toulon, who runs a puppet show for the rich in Paris.  Knowing that he will die, the man teaches his art to Toulon.  The mummies kill most of Toulon's friends, but they are brought back in the bodies of puppets (I suspect that they animate the same that they controlled in the theater shows).   The mummies want to kill the puppets and puppet master, so of course there are a few fights.

The puppets in this one are much less engaging than the ones we are used to.  This could be passed off as the inexperience of the younger puppet master, but I suspect budget was the real reason.  All around, the acting is fairly poor and the "fights" are also less than intelligent work.

Not great, not terrible.  2 slimes.

[wuggles451]

why do the people at Full Moon think living dolls and puppets are so scary or even that interesting for that matter?

[Chadzilla]

I liked this one as well.  It had a rather refreshing look to it, must have been the snowy Romanian, uh, Paris setting.  Not great, but loads better than Curse of or Puppet Master 5.

[StatCat]

I hated this one truthfully and I'm a big fan of the series- pretty worthless boring crap if I were to judge it. I'll stick to the first three movies and try to forget the rest were made. Curse of the puppetmaster and retro puppetmaster are definitely the worst ones in my view.

[Haze]

meh. I found the 7th entry to the Puppet Master series to be a letdown, but it still pulled in some interest and was visually interesting. It gave up some nice ideas and a pretty decent production but the flick feels weak to many times. Average.

I thought Curse was atrocious, I thought between the wandering plot and the ,lack of focus upon the interesting assets to the series (the puppets). Worth a look for fans of the series only. Poor.

5 I thought was a fun popcorn flick and would have made a satisfying conclusion to the series. The puppets are well situated in the for front and I thought the story started in part  4 was a nice change from the first three. Decent.

The rest vary, 4 was about as good as 5, 3 was okay but nothing special, 2 was the best, and one was pretty darn entertaining.

I hope Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys is better than the last two at least.

[DARKWOLF]

There making that movie now? I liked Dollman vs Demonis Toys but one thing I hate about that movie is they killed off Tracy Scoggins in the first part of the film.

[BadMovieBuff]

Curse was good up until the lame ending!  And Retro sucks the big one.

[Jim Hepler]

The worst in the series..  It was just plain boring.  And I liked 1-4.

[Haze]

I must admit that I had high hopes for this one when I first saw it. Curse of the Puppet Master was by then numbers and degrading to watch. Although, I have thought of buying the cheap DVD... But I liked most of the series. What was given had promise but turned out to be gimmicky and strayed from the earlier origins of the Puppets by incorporating magic which made the earlier editions less interesting with its more scientific angle.

By the way, I was kind of surprised that most people don't like 4 or 5. I thought they were a delightful change in the atmosphere and felt more comic bookish in style. But, to each his/her own I guess.

[JohnL]

>By the way, I was kind of surprised that most people don't like 4 or 5.

I like them.