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Retro Puppet Master
Hoping to create demand for even more toys, the brains at Full Moon came up with Retro Puppet Master, a time-turned-back story of the Puppet Master himself and how he came by his ability to infuse mere puppets with life. As with many such franchises (including Godzilla), when the villain becomes the central figure of a film series, there's a tendency on the part of the producers to turn him into the hero. By the time RPM was made, the evil (or perhaps just misunderstood?) Puppet Master Andre Toulon is not only the hero of our story, he's also young, blonde, and good-looking.
The plot (400 words in and we're just getting to the plot!) concerns Toulon's early days as a puppeteer in Paris, which looks a lot like Romania. Come to think of it, a lot of Full Moon locations look a lot like Romania, perhaps because that's where they make a lot of their movies. Toulon is played by Greg Sisero, whose heavy (Romanian?) accent impedes his ability to play a Frenchman. His attempts to speak French-accented English sound like he is impersonating a drunk, French Elmer Fudd. The theater at which Toulon plies his craft is the Theatre Magique, which posts all of its signs regarding performances and cancellations in English. Naturellement. There, our puppeteer protagonist entertains the Paris elite with his "amazing" puppet shows, performed with his troupe of eccentric artists:
Drill Sargeant: There is no escape from Fate! Blade: We are all puppets, dancing on a string. Cyclops: Free will is an illusion! Dr. Death: We can only act at the whim of the puppeteer! Six Shooter: Then your path is clear! Into the fire with all of you, and with me as well, and thus the comedy ends.
It should be noted that all of this heavy dialogue is shouted in those same Elmer Fudd voices. At any moment we expected the members of Monty Python to leap out from behind a pillar and act out scenes from Life of Brian. Toulon does, after all, command cwack wegions -- of puppets.
Hmmm. An off-beat theater in Paris with an allegedly profound, arty show, entertaining the rich, and soon to have supernatural roots. Is anyone else reminded of the Vampire Theater in Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat? No? It's just us? OK, back to the flick.
Origin stories told after the fact are never big on shocking twists. After all, we already know where the story is going, so how many surprising twists can there be? From previous installments, we know that Toulon will end up with five particular animated puppets, and we know his wife will be named Ilsa. But even though we acknowledge that the script was written under these constraints, Retro Puppet Master is disappointingly straightforward. The plot offers not a single twist on what we already know about the Puppet Master mythology, and the villainous minions of Sutekh are rather too obviously inspired by the bad guys in Dark City. Sutekh himself stays off-screen for the entire movie (just because he's an evil god doesn't mean he isn't cost-conscious), but his voice sounds suspiciously like that of the Doctor Who villain of the same name.
Ilsa: (after being apprehended by Diplomatic Toadie) You will pay for this!
Diplomatic Toadie: Oh Mademoiselle, I have already been paid.
What does that mean?
Compounding the bad script is the low budget nature of the production. In the first couple of Puppet Master movies the puppets were fairly active, and they were brought to life by stop-motion animation more than a couple of times a movie. In Retro Puppet Master the puppets are usually shown in extreme close-up, like muppets, so the special effects crew won't have to worry about making the puppets stand or about hiding the control mechanisms. There are only a couple of scenes in which the puppets walk, and the two fight scenes are limited to shots of people wrestling, Ed Wood style, with inanimate props. Drill Sergeant never even uses his drill!
Full Moon is continuing its bad habits when it comes to film franchises. Rather than approaching an existing story line with something creative and new, the filmmakers take the same old device (puppets that are infused with life, energy-sucking vampires, or whatever) and make as cheap and stupid a rehash as they can, all the while planning exactly what line of merchandise they're going to push while doing so. (And yet, we still haven't seen a Jack Deth action figure!) Full Moon does its best work when taking its first crack at exploiting a concept, but they inevitably follow up their successes with disappointing sequels. The Puppet Master franchise is simply the most heinous example.
 Review date: 3/2/2000 
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