BAD MOVIE REVIEW: Curse of the Puppet Master (1998)

Curse of the Puppet Master is a weak but welcomed addition to the Puppet Master horror (if you can call it that) franchise. Hailing out of the wildly crazy Full Moon Pictures it is one of the late bloomers that really fell short towards the end of Full Moon's first attempt. I've greatly enjoyed a lot that Full Moon has put out and hopefully with their revival and some new Puppet Master films they can bring back the spark of a lost genre.

Now when I say its a welcomed return for the Puppet Master I mean this: the puppets are back to kicking ass, slashing faces, and murdering people again. Halle-fucking-lleuah!! Although I enjoyed the insanity and out-in-left-field attempts put together in Part 4 & 5, Part 6 (or The Curse as it has been deemed) brings the puppets back to their evil ways. Albeit they are loyal to their master and cute for the townsfolk, but when they are unleashed to do some killing...they really know how to do it. Case in point: Tunneler tearing through some dude's crotch while Blade is shredding his face to pieces....awesome, just awesome.

This film had its faults (as they all did) but after it was all over I was fairly satisfied. I liked the "human experiment" angle they went with. No more juice for the batteries. And Decapitron is happily gone. Kind of cool, but ultimately embarassing to look at. The actors did very well in my opinion. The old man was nice and cynical at the same time, the daughter was very attractive and perfect for the part, and the boyish carver did a very convincing job of being nervous all the time.

So where did they fuck up? All over the place, sometimes you might see it, other times you won't. Mostly the moving puppet sequences were cuts from the previous movies. Once in a while you'd see a black backdrop in a white room and you'd notice but mostly the editing was pretty good. Otherwise when they had the puppets moving around they were just regular puppets being moved by hand, no motion whatsoever. Really lame. And the granddaddy of complete fuck ups on this movie is the final brand new "human to puppet" robot thing. WTF! is with that? The entire film he was carving wood and then we have a laser shooting puppet robot. Where in the hell did that come from?

Mostly though I liked it. I like the Puppet Master films and they do take different directions. I like that, but I'm just happy they're evil again. The effects were a bit sluggish but sometimes effective...especially at the end with the failed experiment...that fuckin puppet was creepy as hell.