Puppetmaster 3: Toulon’s Revenge
After the second chapter of this belated saga, Producer Charles Band and Full Moon Entertainment had literally written themselves into a corner as far as continuing the franchise, so they came up with this: a REBOOT of the entire series starting with this prequel that tells the story of Puppetmaster Andre Toulon in 1941 Berlin and how he incurred the wrath of the Nazi Gestapo (and probably resulted in them coming for him at the beginning of Puppetmaster 1). To that end, they cast Guy Rolfe (nearly 80 at the time of filming) as Toulon along with Sarah Douglas (a long way from her salad days as Ursa in Superman 2) as his ill-fated wife. And the truth is, Rolfe does a hell of a job with the role, infusing Toulon with equal parts dignity, nobility, and indignant rage against the Nazi regime. Turns out Toulon was merrily putting on his puppet shows for the children of Berlin, except that he was using a Hitler puppet which was treated with mockery and contempt (he explains “Political satire is the hallmark of a healthy society.”) He also (as we know) had his “special” puppets which took on a life of their own, which turns out to be a crucial element the Nazis need to implement their own program of re-animating dead soldiers to keep them fighting on the front lines in Russia, but ultimately instead of making a deal with him, it is decided that making fun of their precious Fuhrer is more important, so they storm his theater, murder his wife, arrest him, and set his place ablaze, all the while thinking that this will convince him to help them out with their own experiments. Alas, Toulon escapes with the help of his little friends and he’s none too happy, setting the puppets out to kill the Nazi bastards responsible. Rolfe is ably supported by three first-class character actors in supporting roles, that being Ian Abercrombie (best known as “Wise Man” in Army Of Darkness) as the Nazi scientist who stresses that brute force is NOT the way to get Toulon to cooperate and ultimately takes on a sympathetic air; Walter Gotell (best known as the KGB Boss from The James Bond Franchise) as the Nazi general overseeing the project with a taste for (very hot) German prostitutes; and best of all low-budget horror movie supervillain Richard Lynch as the Nazi officer who vows to hunt Toulon down along with anybody who helps him. All three bring an air of legitimacy and class to the low budget ($800,000) project, even as it suffers from the limitations of such particularly by using unconvincing establishing shots consisting of obvious grainy stock footage. I also could have done without Aron Eisenberg as an awestruck little boy who becomes Toulon’s assistant, walking around with an Augustus Gloop-like gait as if he had perpetually just shit his pants. Nonetheless, what IS fascinating is the fact that nearly the entire movie was filmed on the old Universal backlot, which is the same one they used for filming the 1930s classic versions of Dracula and Frankenstein. In addition, the film boasts a literate, intelligent script by C. Courtney Joyner (that actually finds room for some legitimate philosophical arguments about the subject matter) as well as surehanded direction by David DeCoteau that keeps the pace crisp and the action flowing. As for the puppets themselves, as well as learning their true origins, they continue to act as the playful yet murderous mascots of not only the series, but the Full Moon company itself, and they are joined here by a new cowboy puppet with six arms (each containing a tiny gun with lethal ammo) appropriately named Six Shooter, and overall continue to be a lot of fun to watch with a good appropriate measure of screen time, all the way up to the climax that shows that the goodhearted Toulon has quite a twisted sense of vengeance. In the end, after the monotony of Part 1 and the so-bad-it’s-good vibe of Part 2, an entertaining little b-movie with a classy lineup of actors…
8/10