Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich * (2018, Thomas Lennon, Jenny Pellicer, Nelson Franklin, Udo Kier) – Movie Review

Directors Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund’s Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018) is a lively, unpleasant and brilliantly tacky Z-grade reboot of the Eighties Puppet Master franchise. With its gleeful black comedy tone and lack of any kind of sense, rhyme or reason, you could call it a loving homage to a vanished era of horror movies.

It has zero quality and a huge amount of gore, slashing, bad taste and chutzpah, some really bad performances, a blink and you’ll miss it Udo Kier appearance (as the Puppet Master Andre Toulon), and some big breasted women, not to mention several puppets. What else does a movie need?

Not much, of course, but what it does also get are two decent, successfully underplayed star performances by Thomas Lennon and Jenny Pellicer as the hero and heroine Edgar Easton and Ashley Summers, who head off to a convention at a hotel where puppets are up for auction, but some evil force sets them off on a bloody killing spree (that’s the puppets, not Edgar and Ashley).

Thomas Lennon stars in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018).

Just a bit more plot? The sad-looking divorced comic book store guy Edgar returns to his parents’ childhood home and finds a evil puppet in his dead brother’s old bedroom. Edgar, Ashley and his Jewish comic book pal Markowitz (Nelson Franklin) take a road trip to the convention celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Toulon Murders to sell the puppet.

If the plot and screenplay have any credibility at all, it is entirely due to S Craig Zahler, reanimating the characters created by Charles Band and Kenneth J Hall. Zahler is the genius behind Bone Tomahawk (2015), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) and Dragged Across Concrete (2018).

Barbara Crampton (who also acted in the original 1989 Puppet Master movie) plays Officer Carol Doreski and it is also nice to have Michael Paré aboard too as Detective Brown.

I’d love to tell you that this is the last of Puppet Master, but there is a strong impression that more is to come. I used to love puppets when I was a kid. I had my own puppet theatre. They were cute, sweet and lovely. They never hacked anyone to death, not ever, never. Now puppets have gone over to the dark side. Don’t try this at home, kids.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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