Recap of Puppet Master: Doktor Death (2022)
Team, we did it. Sixteen Puppet Master movies, and we have reached the final chapter in this franchise with some good ideas (semi-sentient puppets that can be directed to fight Nazis or kill psychics, depending on their master; a Barbie doll who shoots bullets out of her boobs; Greg Sestero) generally hobbled by wide swaths of empty plot and a story that needs more special effects than the budget can allow. But we’re here to watch a little surgeon dolly in a movie all his own. Is it a bad sign that I was never interested enough to even mention the Doktor Death puppet in the movies he was in, despite having technically passed every one of my med school classes twenty years ago? Eh. No worse a sign than most.
We open on an old guy at Shady Oaks Senior Living having nightmares of being tormented by his memories of World War II and the spooky laughter of Doktor Death until he has a cardiac arrest and becomes a Shady Oaks Senior dying. In the morning, April shows up at the facility for her first day at work as a tech there, almost immediately dodging the my-eyes-are-up-here sleazeball Flynn and meeting Ryan, who fills out a pair of scrubs very well and is nice about the patients and this movie has been on six minutes but already I like these kids. Ryan and April and Flynn clean out dead Max‘s room and find the evil surgeon puppet padlocked in a trunk. Ryan is talking but all I can hear is the fact that he flexes his biceps when he makes sounds and if I looked like that, I would too. Biceps aside, he’s going on the short list of actually really good actors in this series (alongside Sestero, Corey Feldman, and Thomas Lennon).
Next in the agenda, fun new coworker Jennifer tours April through the other seniors at Shady Oaks, including Sid who golfs, Rufus who loves sexual harassment, aphasic oxygen-dependent Dorothy, and psychic Gladys who painted a picture of April before she even showed up oooooo spooky. Why does this place employ four technicians, a medical director, and an office manager for at most five residents? And that ratio gets even worse when Doktor Death sneaks into Dorothy’s room and disconnects her airway support. Ryan is ready to flex some CPR on her, but she has a Do Not Resuscitate. And family? I don’t care what my paperwork says, if a beautiful man in tight scrubs wants to put hands on my body, you let him do it.
Somehow, the puppet has gotten to the Funeral Home and giggles as it slices up the mortician. The laugh is spooky, the blood is delightfully excessive, but why are we in this new setting? This movie is fifty-seven minutes long, please tell me it didn’t need this filler murder scene. We’re just about halfway through, and April has fainted and subjected this weary recapper to a psychic montage summarizing the thirty minutes we’ve covered so far.
Ooo! The payoff is that Doktor Death has somehow reanimated Dorothy and now her corpse is sneaking around the property, prompting Flynn to yell the perfect line, “Stop stealing my STUFF, you crazy dead bitch!” The movie has won me back. And then she kills Flynn with a garden tool I should probably know the name of. A sharp one. Like a fork?
Then upstairs, creepy Rufus has popped a Viagra and paid Jennifer to have sex with him, and when she comes in to make good on the deal, she thinks he has an enormous boner but it’s actually the puppet under the covers, having killed Rufus and now slicing off his weiner. That’s funny! But the puppet kills Jennifer, too, and I liked her, so that’s not as funny.
And then it kills Sid with his own golf club and Gladys with her own paint brushes and the medical director and the office manager. And the wicked little thing is riding inside the body of the medical director and ends up killing that sweet Sean Cody angel Ryan because he didn’t expect a sharp little dude to pop out of the chest of a bigger dead dude. I cannot blame him for not seeing that coming. This movie only has a dozen characters and seems willing to cut all of them. I respect that move.
Oh! Oh! And now April confronts Doktor Death and says she is his great-granddaughter and wants to help him find the other puppets from Retro Puppet Master whaaat but we have flashbacks to that Greg Sestero prequel movie and yes, one of the characters was Greg’s friend who got killed and put in the surgeon puppet so is this dumb yes it so is but I also love it and we got a couple brief shots of Greg as Toulon and he was so beautiful then. And then a montage of all the clues we could have caught about this plot twist. And then it’s OVER. The whole movie. Done.
Did this fifty-seven minute movie need two recap montages AND a montage flashback from a prequel movie? No, but I guess it couldn’t have killed as many people if it was the twenty-minute short it deserved to be. And the kills were pretty fun. And it didn’t get boring like almost every other movie in this franchise, and it did get a legitimate plot surprise, and Ryan is just a gift to the viewer. So it won’t go in my top two, but it’s probably my third favorite. I hope they don’t make a sequel of April and Doktor Death finding the other puppets, but I don’t dread it, either. There may be a tagline in there.