Cue the carousel music and get the marionettes out of the case: the straight-to-DVD Puppet Master series is hereby enrolled in a boxed set. These nine films are connected by a crazily jumbled chronology and the maddeningly catchy theme by Richard Band. It all stems from a puppeteer named Andre Toulon, who discovers the secret of reanimating puppets; the lethal little creatures carry on the saga even after Toulon himself is gone. Fans know them as Pinhead, Jester, Blade, Tunneler, and assorted others. Actually, Toulon (played by William Hickey) departs the scene very early in Puppet Master, but his character will return (played by different actors, notably Guy Rolfe) in other installments. The remainder of the 1989 movie has a boring group of parapsychologists investigating the Bodega Bay mansion where Toulon killed himself 50 years earlier. The puppets are out-and-out malevolent in this one, but in sequels we will actually be rooting for them.
In Puppet Master 2 Toulon himself gets reanimated. One of the worst in the series, this one's directed by Dave Allen, whose stop-motion animation lends a certain eerie quality to the puppets in the first few films of the saga. For Puppet Master 3: Toulon's Revenge, the story line jerks back to the early 1940s, where the puppets actually attack evil Nazis. Along with the goofy novelty of that idea, this sequel gives us a fun new puppet (Six Shooter, a cowboy doll with six arms) and an unusually good crop of character actors: Richard Lynch, Ian Abercrombie, Sarah Douglas.
The next two films were shot back to back and were intended to round off the franchise. Puppet Master 4 and Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter return to the present day, with the puppet crew turning heroic when supernatural monsters menace a new puppeteer (Gordon Currie). As usual the wooden performers far outshine the flesh-and-blood cast, and the arrival of Decapitron (who gets his name honestly) adds appeal.
Curse of the Puppet Master looks like an attempt to reboot the franchise, with a weird new story line about a young hick taken in by show people. Something's gone very strange when the young heroine hugs Pinhead and sighs, "You're my hero." Ham-handed as it is, this episode's got a pretty wild finish.
Retro Puppet Master once again goes back in time, and adds a couple of new puppets; bad as it is, it's better than Puppet Master the Legacy, a total rip-off that tries to fulfill a geeky need to put the series' various pieces in true chronological order (and is thus mostly made of material from the past films). Puppet Master Axis of Evil uses the beginning of the first film, then spins a new adventure for the puppets during World War II, when stateside Nazi and Japanese spies don't stand a chance against a new Ninja puppet.
A sequel-ready ending suggests we have not seen the last of executive producer Charles Band's hard-working wooden actors. Maybe after nine practice runs, we might actually get a good movie. --Robert Horton
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