Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich

I've seen at least a little of every movie in Charles Band's incredibly long running franchise. The fact of the matter is that really only the first two movies were any good and everything after that ranged from barely watchable to downright awful.

The Puppet Master brand is basically all that has kept series creator Band's company Full Moon alive since the 80's and he has mercilessly milked it, sometimes openly cheating fans in the process. There were PG-13 sequels (rolls eyes), movies that were clearly shot back-to-back to save money (groan), and even a freaking clip movie (screams in anger)! So, when I heard that the brilliant, uncompromising genre author and filmmaker S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99) was writing the next film in the franchise I thought one of two things: either Zahler was a longtime fan that wanted to write the first truly great Puppet Master movie OR Zahler had a car payment due and knocked out a script in a weekend. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be what happened. Puppet Master Littlest Reich is not a great movie but it's still better than any other sequel since the second movie.

This film is a reboot which reimagines the puppet master, anti-hero Andre Tulon, into an outright villain portrayed by horror legend Udo Kier (Blade, Flesh for Frankenstein, Suspiria, Fear Dot Com). Kier is fantastic, playing a hideously scarred, wantonly sadistic Nazi sympathizer that wants to continue the Third Reich's mission of a pure white race and intends to do so, even after his death, with the help of black magic and an army of puppets he mass produced and sold prior to an unfortunate run in with the cops.

Flash forward to find a divorced, broke comic book writer (Thomas Lennon of Reno 911) in possession of one of Tulon's puppets, Blade, which he finds among his dead brother's things. There is a convention being held at Tulon's old house where collectors intend to auction off all the old dolls belonging to the notorious psychopath.

Everyone loads into a hotel, the puppets all come to life, and much, MUCH bloody mayhem ensues. Along the way we are joined by fantastic scream queen Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, From Beyond, and the original Puppet Master) as the retired cop that took Tulon down and professional b-movie tough guy Michael Pare (The Lincoln Lawyer and basically every Uwe Boll movie) as the cop currently on the case.

Let me just say that the script for this movie was either hacked to pieces or sorely underwritten. Concepts and ideas are introduced and dropped at a moment's notice. Crampton's character has no pay off, supporting characters fall in and out of the story, plot points are introduced only to be dismissed immediately after, the tone is all over the place constantly swapping from dumb fun gore to weirdly preachy anti-nazi talk, and the ending makes no sense and just kind of drops off with a lame bit of sequel baiting.

On top of that, the director makes some serious technical errors. Some scenes are underlit, the editing is at times hard to follow, and dialogue is recorded too low sometimes.

As far as its places in the franchise, the sloppy plotting is nothing new and this movie is a great deal faster paced than most of the other films which, after part 2, started leaning towards cheap time killing devices over actual action. The direction is unusually bad, though. Most of these movies had a generically competent, TV sort of vibe to them but this movie really kind of felt like one of those ultra-violent, straight-to-video horror films of the late 90s.

I'm fine with the revamp on Tulon, especially because Kier is so great in the role but I do really wish he had been in it more. I hate the redesign on the puppets. They look cheap and action figure like, lacking the artistry that made the original puppets so distinct. I also dislike that the puppets no longer have any personality. They're all just mean little killing machines. There's no real sense they are actually ALIVE and instead all feel like instruments used by a primary antagonist that's a little too off screen to really resonate.

Thomas Lennon and most of the rest of the cast are strong (with the exception his annoying, motor mouth boss) and I did have fun watching the movie. However, thinking about it afterward, I couldn't help but feel that this movie was a little too flawed to really say I liked. It was alright and gore hounds and puppet fanatics will probably have at least a little fun, but it could and should have been a lot better.

And I would argue more "fun". That is if you are not looking for morally responsible jokes or are not someone who is easily offended. The jokes are premature I reckon and there is a lot of blood and a lot of nudity. There is also a lot of quite disturbing humor. Now you may not find certain things funny, calling the movie "serious" though would be missing the point entirely (you sure you watched the right Puppet Master movie?).

You don't even have to have seen all the previous entries (something I did) to have fun with this. You may enjoy certain parts more than others, but overall this works as a stand alone. And while the "love story/part" of the movie may be considered serious, it is not as big a part that should make this movie less of a party film. Some attendees at the festival may have gone way off limit with their cheering, but the movie does support that kind of behaviour overall. Not for the squeamish, rather for those who just want to shut off, sit back and enjoy mayhem on screen

It's not entirely clear to me whether "The Littlest Reich" is a remake of the cult semi-classic "Puppet Masters", or just another 318th-or-so sequel. Let's just agree it's an addition to the long-running franchise, and the greatest addition since 1991 for that matter! It clearly looks like this film was written (S. Craig Zahler) and directed (Sonny Laguna & Tommy Wirklund) by avid fans of the 1989-original and its first couple of sequels, and they were probably very upset with how the series deteriorate afterwards. Let's bring the essence back, is what they must have thought, so "The Littlest Reich" is a straightforward and unhinged gorefest with nasty killer puppets, very imaginative slaughters, odd characters and a whole lot of bad and politically incorrect humor. The movie doesn't have much of a plot (the original didn't either) or any suspense whatsoever, but it's never boring and once the bloody carnage kicks in; - it never stops. We are talking here about a movie in which a cut off head end up in toilets and gets peed on, and an unborn fetus is being transformed into a crawling mini-Hitler; - what else can I say? Maybe one more thing: Udo Kier briefly appears as André Toulon, and the film stars Barbara Crampton who's sixty years old but still sexy!

It's not your typical horror movie with puppets. It's got some great writing by S. Craig Zahler which elevated the movie the way Shane Black can do.

I thnink people are giving this bad reviews because it takes a while to get to the action. And frankly, I liked the beginning character development more than the horror part.

It was smart and funny and different.

Make sure you see Zahler's other movies! Especially one of my fav films of 2019 -- Dragged Across Concrete

Being sold as the goriest film ever, I have to say, no. It's a Puppet Master film if you've never seen any of those it's hard to say you MUST see this one as you probably don't have to. But if you have seen them you'll see this as one of the better ones, it drops the annoying Gremlins sounds that, for me, pretty much ruined the first film, and for the most part the rest were all down hill in budget and quality with part 3 being probably the best of them. Like Part 3 in a way this deals with the Nazi backstory of the Puppets and even this time deals with the Holocaust and Nazi agenda the puppets are carrying on. There is humor but it's played straight which helps, the main humor being from several super gorey show stopping moments--though most of the gore is pretty routine--within the context of gore done in say the 1980's way--practical effects as they call it now.

The downsides to this film is that is has virtually no visual style at all and is dingy looking, the actors all look old and haggard most of the time, and for some of the old actors in particular this does them no favors as it makes them look really old. The old horror name actors all do well, aside from looking kind of dreadful, but be warned UDO KIER has very little to do. Crampton is quite good.

They story does stop for awhile when the movie turns into a series of gore scenes, but the story is frankly pretty good.

The Puppets are seen rarely for much of the film, and often are used the way MUPPETS are--there is sadly no, from what I can tell, animated Puppets in the film---the brief stop-motion moments in the original films were all highlights and you'd hope a done real, not CGI, reboot would take the time to do some stop motion animation--but strangely they don't--which mostly keeps the puppets from doing much that is new, or even as good as, the best moments from the original series.

Music score, by another Horror name, is too sparse as the film feels very flat for much of the first 30 minutes.

But the film does build well and has a great post credit scene, so be sure to stay turned for that. It's a reboot in mostly a good way and certainly, though low budget in look, done better than original producer Charles Band is able to do these days.

So a decent start for what hopes to be a new series of films by a also rebooted brand name Fangoria. This film is also better than the previous attempts at film production done under the Fango banner in the early 1990s.