Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018)

All hell breaks loose when a strange force animates the puppets up for auction at a convention for a series of infamous murders, setting them on a bloody killing spree that's motivated by an evil as old as time.

REVIEW: Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is the latest in a very long long long line of Puppet Master movies, a series that has pretty much Full Moon Entertainment's bread and butter ever since the 80s. For me personally though, I haven't enjoyed a single Puppet Master movie since about the 5th or 6th one back in the mid 90s. Every single one from Retro Puppet Master onwards I've pretty much hated, so initially I had no interest in this project. But then word came that it was being made by different people, and that it would be a fresh reboot unconnected to the larger series. Usually that would be stuff I hate to hear, but in this case it made me glad. Then reviews started coming in that it was actually not only good, but god damn fantastic. So suffice to say I went from not giving a shit to incredibly excited to check it out.

In the end, pretty much every single thing about this, from the effects to the acting to the directing to the story itself, just everything, is done so much better here than in the last handful of Full Moon's main Puppet Master movies. Like I stated above, this is a fresh reboot so throw out everything you know from the main series, as this definitely changes up the lore and backstories quite heavily, but it works for this movie. In addition the design of some of the returning dolls have changed and I admit that took a bit of getting used to, especially Blade's, but by the end of the movie I was loving them. Also, all the new dolls look fantastic as well and have easily earned their place among the classics.

Once you can get past the initial shock of all the changes made, you can just sit back and enjoy everything this fun little low budget horror movie has to offer. And for fans of horror and fans of this franchise, it has quite a lot to offer. It moves at a great fast pace, filled with fun characters to fill in the down times between the killer doll action. Most of the acting is passable to genuinely good (which is a surprise for a Puppet Master movie), and even though most of the characters are assholes, most of them are all likable in their own weird ways, mostly because of the comedy that the movie does with them, and does genuinely well with them. This is not comedy movie, don't get me wrong, but it does have a fair bit of legit funny moments, mostly with the dialogue and dialogue delivery.

This movie is also gory as hell, like shockingly so. It's probably one of the goriest horror movies I've watched in a long time and definitely the goriest of 2018 so far, and some of the gore moments are done in such despicable ways with such bad taste that you can't help but sit there shouting 'WHAT THE FUCK?' while laughing your ass off at the fact that you can't believe you just watched what you just watched.

A couple of shots throughout the movie didn't quite work for me, mostly during the initial doll uprising during the Torch scene (actually, Kaiser as he's called in this movie now), and the lead actor, while funny with his dialogue delivery at times, makes for a really wooden and boring lead as he's always monotone and largely emotionless no matter what's happening around him or to him throughout the movie.

Those issues aside though, this was one hell of a fun Puppet Master movie, and I really hope to see more entries get made in this new rebooted series because it wold be a shame to have the best Puppet Master movie to date (maybe second best actually after Part 3: Toulon's Revenge) not get any kind of continuation or follow up.

9/10 rooms in the Psych Ward