Puppet Master: The Legacy

I am being honest when I say that I enjoy the Puppet Master films. They have and always will hold a place in my imagination. But this crock of a movie is certainly NOT the zenith of this series. In fact, if Puppet Master 3 was the zenith, then this film is the nadir. First note that I did not put a note above saying that this review contains spoilers. In fact, it does not contain spoilers. But that is not because I want to guard you from having your experience ruined. It is because there is literally nothing to spoil about this "movie". I used quotations because The Legacy isn't really a movie, per se, but a series of clips of stock footage from previous films framed by 25 minutes of new footage to form a pointless new story. I am a forgiving critic, usually able to appreciate the effort put into a movie, but this one has no effort to speak of. It is a celluloid, parasitic byproduct designed to leech money from fans. If this were a TV special on SYFY channel, I could forgive it, because it does recap the series with some competence for those who are too lethargic to watch the real movies. But if you're one of those sloths, then I pity you, because this Puppet Master is not seeing the series at its best. This is seeing schlock money-grubbing at its worst. I hope I don't have to say such unkind words of these puppets again.

I'm thrown for a loop trying to think of how to write a review for Charles Band's 2003 film "Puppet Master: The Legacy." I actually, honestly cannot think of a way to summarize it. I grew up watching copies of the earlier "Puppet Master" movies behind my parent's backs (they didn't approve of the gore until I was a teenager), so when I recently got the "Puppet Master" box-set as a nostalgic gift from my father, I popped this one in, thinking it would be an interesting film.

Oh... my... god.

Words cannot describe this movie.

"Puppet Master: The Legacy" is essentially a 15-minute long short film, that is padded with about an hour of footage from the previous films, as a character explains the plot of the series to another person. Yup, that's right... this is the horror movie equivalent of a sitcom clip-show. You know? Those lame episodes where the producers would run out of money and just string together a series of clips from prior episodes, with a lame bookend scene of the characters recalling the old clips? This movie is one of those!

And what makes it even sadder- the "story" that is used to string together the clips is one of the most poorly written, insanely plotted and hilariously cheaply-shot "plots" I've ever seen.

The abundance of old footage actually serves two purposes, to actually be fair. One- for the reason I stated above, to give the producers fodder to release a new DVD of this awful clip-show, and Two- to try and fix a few continuity problems that existed within the series. This film does this by making the overall plot even MORE confused and convoluted (so now the first film is technically the third film, and the second film is technically the eighth film?), and by flat-out disrespecting characters and ideas from previous entries. (Including a moment where the main character from the fourth and fifth film is killed by a single line of dialog- our villain says: "Oh, I uh... killed him." and that's it. So disrespectful to the fans.)

The plot of the new footage is this- a man named Eric Weiss (unknown actor who we'll never hear from again) is captured by some rogue agent chick named Maclain (unknown actress who we'll never hear from again) who forces him to tell her the story of the puppets from the movies. That's it. It's stupid.

The kicker is that the new footage doesn't even try to LOOK good. It's some of the laziest, cheapest footage I've ever seen. It looks like it was filmed on an 80's VHS camcorder, the lighting is abysmal, there is no real set-decoration or design to speak of, and the acting is hilariously bad.

As a fan of the series, this film just felt like a cheap, cash-grabbing insult. This is a 1 out of 10, plain and simple. (Yet somehow isn't as bad as the pain-inducing "Puppet Master VS Demonic Toys." Saw that once about five years ago, and it still makes me angry.)

The problem with Legacy isn't the fact that it the majority of it shows all the past movies with a very small subplot. The problem is that it was horribly edited and with a better storyline could have meshed the current situation with Peter and the previous story lines so much better. I'm actually kind of a fan of the idea to playback all the memories but the wrong scenes were shown and it didn't flow. It's not a good movie at all, the eighty percent of old scenes were boring and the new twenty percent were highlighted with a couple of horrible acting and more questions than answers. The lady agent is just horrendous and her story is completely far-fetched and laughable. I'd stay away from the movie or else just fast forward through the past events and check out the terribly cheesy plot that comes in and trickles out every so often. Since this is chronologically the last movie in the series I'm looking forward to the possibility of a franchise rejuvenation in the near future.

Puppet Master - The Legacy is basically a clip show of the previous movies which came before, so if you have seem them, you can skip this and don't miss anything new, except maybe 5-10 minutes of two people talking in a cellar. Everything else is really just one big lazy as can get clip show so many series and sitcoms are doing to fill an episode to save money.

But even if you haven't seen the previous movies, I wouldn't recommend it. Because it is not doing a too good job retelling the story. Thought it at least tries to gather the loose threads and tries to explain a few plot holes. I think it only points them out even more so.

I actually stopped watching the films after this, and I liked the first three or five, they weren't very good, but charming and had some good stop motion animation, but they were getting worse, and this one is really one of the worst and laziest movies I ever saw. The charm and puppeteering art of the Puppet Master movies is not to be found in "The Legacy".

Literally 15 minutes of passive exposition and the rest is a bunch of cut scenes from older movies. This was directed by the company owner or something like that. Basically it was an easy money.

I seriously couldn't give this movie anything more than a one. It tries as doing absolutely nothing.