Recap of Puppet Master: Blitzkrieg Massacre (2018)!
This going to be a tough one. I know I tried to watch it a few years ago and failed. It’s only 62 minutes. How bad can it be?
Well, it’s the first of Full Moon’s Bunker of Blood series, marked by a framing sequence by notable good writer Brockton McKinney over illustrations by notable good artist Jason Strutz. But then it’s a clip collection. In a series that just had a clip collection, like, four movies ago. But maybe it’s better now that I’ve seen the material more recently…
Framing sequence: Credits open over genuinely lovely drawings of each of the main puppets by Strutz, then we get a series of comic book style panels with radio play voiceover of a man crawling from a post-Apocalyptic wasteland into a bunker. The “Gore Collector” forces him to put a VHS tape in a player and watch…
The opening sequence of the first Puppet Master movie. That's it. Just the opening we saw, Toulon shooting himself when Nazi agents find him at the Bodega Bay hotel, then saw from a different angle in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil. And I think repeated in the clip show Puppet Master Legacy. Then a clip of Drill Sergeant going through a Nazi from the third movie. Then that time Cameron got killed by the evil stick puppet in the fourth movie. Then the Leech Woman killing the farmer and his wife in the second movie. We are ten minutes in, and this makes no sense. Seriously, at least Legacy made an effort to put things in order and try to align continuity into one bigger (albeit boring) story.
Now we get a scene from the end of Axis Termination where Blade cuts up a Nazi, then Drill Sergeant killing a Goth girl in a bath tub in a dream sequence from part five, then a sex scene from part one that ended with Drill Sergeant killing that blonde woman in the face when she checks under the bed. Did they pick these clips by rolling a D20? Yes, all of them have puppets, and most of the footage in these movies is about waiting for the puppets to get here, but... not like this, okay? Not like this.
Maybe the theme is sex scenes, because then we get a sex scene from Axis Termination where that one Nazi woman had hypodermic needles for fingers. But no, then we swing to the fifth movie again, following one of the robbers who broke into the hotel and found only murder puppets. How do you get a really good writer like McKinney and not let him write some kind of connective tissue to say why we're going from one clip to another?
Because now we are at the part of the third movie where the puppets sneak into the Nazi brothel and shoot the guy until he falls out the window. But before he can land, we've cut to a fight at the end of Axis Rising that includes the anti-Japanese racism I refused to recap then and refuse to recap now. And then back to the fifth movie to follow one of the other two robbers to his death. There is no order, there is no story, is this what a stroke feels like?
Boom. Fourth movie, where the mean stick puppet kills the lady scientist in the biology lab that is actually a robotics lab but no one knew the difference in the science words. It's a long clip. Some clips are long. Some clips are short. None of this is unseen footage.
Then we're back in Axis Termination where the good psychics are fighting the bad psychics and the puppets are killing Nazis but with no warning, Blade runs off the screen in movie twelve and then we see Pinhead running in the opposite direction into the first movie where he tries to kill that lady psychic but she throws him down an elevator shaft. And then Blade and Pinhead fighting a mean stick dolly from part five. I really like that last one, it's one of my favorite sequences in this series. But we still haven't seen the guy in his underwear from the sixth one or Greg Sestero from the seventh or Bombshell shooting anyone with her boob guns and I am losing patience and the will to draw breath.
As if they heard me, whoever made this movie sets the next clip to be Bombshell shooting people with her boob guns. And then that part in the third movie where the guy accidentally smears engine grease onto his lip as a Hitler mustache and says to himself, "Have your asshole ready" in a bizarre sequence. Well played, Full Moon.
But we're still going, drilling that guy in the second movie who turned out to be the main girl's brother and she just kept working on their project like the true monster of that movie. And that scene has nothing to do with Pinhead killing a Nazi in the tenth movie but that's what we get next. And then we do go to the gay movie but the part where the puppets kill a couple cops and not the part where they drill into a dude's weiner as he does a bench press this clip show is so weird.
Next up, we're watching the evil version of Toulon in the second movie after he's in that fugly mannequin and trying to force that woman into a lady mannequin but at least her boyfriend can save the day without putting a shirt on. Then the big fight with a Nazi at the end of the third movie. We still haven't seen anything from part seven or eight or the fun Corey Feldman Christmas one. I'm dizzy. It's cold now. And dark.
Oh, thank God. We're done. The comfort of Jason Strutz's rich illustrations, the thoughtful melodrama of Brockton McKinney's script, the fact that one scene follows another: we've escaped to the framing sequence. The desert wanderer has been melted and mutilated by having to watch the same crap I just sat through voluntarily, and the Gore Collector says this has prepared the man to start becoming the next Gore Collector. The next entry of that series is Deadly Dolls: Deepest Cuts but I would have to crawl through a post-Apocalyptic wasteland to get in the mood to do this again.
Well, it’s the first of Full Moon’s Bunker of Blood series, marked by a framing sequence by notable good writer Brockton McKinney over illustrations by notable good artist Jason Strutz. But then it’s a clip collection. In a series that just had a clip collection, like, four movies ago. But maybe it’s better now that I’ve seen the material more recently…
Framing sequence: Credits open over genuinely lovely drawings of each of the main puppets by Strutz, then we get a series of comic book style panels with radio play voiceover of a man crawling from a post-Apocalyptic wasteland into a bunker. The “Gore Collector” forces him to put a VHS tape in a player and watch…
The opening sequence of the first Puppet Master movie. That's it. Just the opening we saw, Toulon shooting himself when Nazi agents find him at the Bodega Bay hotel, then saw from a different angle in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil. And I think repeated in the clip show Puppet Master Legacy. Then a clip of Drill Sergeant going through a Nazi from the third movie. Then that time Cameron got killed by the evil stick puppet in the fourth movie. Then the Leech Woman killing the farmer and his wife in the second movie. We are ten minutes in, and this makes no sense. Seriously, at least Legacy made an effort to put things in order and try to align continuity into one bigger (albeit boring) story.
Now we get a scene from the end of Axis Termination where Blade cuts up a Nazi, then Drill Sergeant killing a Goth girl in a bath tub in a dream sequence from part five, then a sex scene from part one that ended with Drill Sergeant killing that blonde woman in the face when she checks under the bed. Did they pick these clips by rolling a D20? Yes, all of them have puppets, and most of the footage in these movies is about waiting for the puppets to get here, but... not like this, okay? Not like this.
Maybe the theme is sex scenes, because then we get a sex scene from Axis Termination where that one Nazi woman had hypodermic needles for fingers. But no, then we swing to the fifth movie again, following one of the robbers who broke into the hotel and found only murder puppets. How do you get a really good writer like McKinney and not let him write some kind of connective tissue to say why we're going from one clip to another?
Because now we are at the part of the third movie where the puppets sneak into the Nazi brothel and shoot the guy until he falls out the window. But before he can land, we've cut to a fight at the end of Axis Rising that includes the anti-Japanese racism I refused to recap then and refuse to recap now. And then back to the fifth movie to follow one of the other two robbers to his death. There is no order, there is no story, is this what a stroke feels like?
Boom. Fourth movie, where the mean stick puppet kills the lady scientist in the biology lab that is actually a robotics lab but no one knew the difference in the science words. It's a long clip. Some clips are long. Some clips are short. None of this is unseen footage.
Then we're back in Axis Termination where the good psychics are fighting the bad psychics and the puppets are killing Nazis but with no warning, Blade runs off the screen in movie twelve and then we see Pinhead running in the opposite direction into the first movie where he tries to kill that lady psychic but she throws him down an elevator shaft. And then Blade and Pinhead fighting a mean stick dolly from part five. I really like that last one, it's one of my favorite sequences in this series. But we still haven't seen the guy in his underwear from the sixth one or Greg Sestero from the seventh or Bombshell shooting anyone with her boob guns and I am losing patience and the will to draw breath.
As if they heard me, whoever made this movie sets the next clip to be Bombshell shooting people with her boob guns. And then that part in the third movie where the guy accidentally smears engine grease onto his lip as a Hitler mustache and says to himself, "Have your asshole ready" in a bizarre sequence. Well played, Full Moon.
But we're still going, drilling that guy in the second movie who turned out to be the main girl's brother and she just kept working on their project like the true monster of that movie. And that scene has nothing to do with Pinhead killing a Nazi in the tenth movie but that's what we get next. And then we do go to the gay movie but the part where the puppets kill a couple cops and not the part where they drill into a dude's weiner as he does a bench press this clip show is so weird.
Next up, we're watching the evil version of Toulon in the second movie after he's in that fugly mannequin and trying to force that woman into a lady mannequin but at least her boyfriend can save the day without putting a shirt on. Then the big fight with a Nazi at the end of the third movie. We still haven't seen anything from part seven or eight or the fun Corey Feldman Christmas one. I'm dizzy. It's cold now. And dark.
Oh, thank God. We're done. The comfort of Jason Strutz's rich illustrations, the thoughtful melodrama of Brockton McKinney's script, the fact that one scene follows another: we've escaped to the framing sequence. The desert wanderer has been melted and mutilated by having to watch the same crap I just sat through voluntarily, and the Gore Collector says this has prepared the man to start becoming the next Gore Collector. The next entry of that series is Deadly Dolls: Deepest Cuts but I would have to crawl through a post-Apocalyptic wasteland to get in the mood to do this again.