Puppet Master: Axis of Evil - dir. by David DeCoteau (2010)

As a big fan of the Full Moon direct-to-video horror movies of the early nineties, and the Puppet Master films in particular, it's disappointing to say that this newest Puppet Master outing is possibly the worst of the series. And that includes Retro Puppet Master (1999), which is pretty awful (I don't count Puppet Master: the Legacy [2003], and neither should you).

The man behind the camera this time is Full Moon regular David DeCoteau. He's done some decent movies--hell, he directed possibly the best of the Puppet Master films, number III (1991)--but he's also responsible for the aforementioned Retro Puppet Master and . . . well, check out his credits on imdb.com. DeCoteau biography makes no mention of it, but it appears he got his start directing porn under various pseudonyms, before moving into B (and probably C) horror, sci-fi, and comedies.

I haven't seen any of his porn titles, but will go out on a limb here and suggest that the acting in those movies couldn't possibly be worse than what's on display here, in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil. It's hard to say which is worse, the writing or the acting. They complement each other to horrible effect. It's bad, very bad. Even bad for a newer Full Moon movie.

Budget limitations can be blamed for a number of failings littering the Full Moon catalog from the last fifteen years, but there's no excuse for the kind of writing, the kind of dialogue, found in this incredibly boring film. It's shot OK, the anamorphic widescreen is nice, and Richard Band's theme is as awesome as it always is. But the story is ridiculous and unexciting, and there's just about nothing to like about any of the characters.

Our lead villain is a supposed Nazi, though he looks and sounds more like a punk-ass American kid. This, he explains, is his cover. See, he's infiltrating Chinatown in 1939 (which, according to the film, is the year the U.S. got into the war), trying to track down these puppets, you know, the puppets the Nazis were after in Puppet Master III, which, compared to this, looks like it belongs in the National Film Registry. The hero is an intense, righteous bastard, who hates himself for being crippled and thus unable to fight in the war, alongside his courageous (and equally annoying) older brother.

The sets are poorly lit, there are few establishing shots, almost no extras, and no real sense that we're actually in Chinatown. Music plays constantly on the soundtrack--as is often the case with newer Full Moon titles, displaying the director's lack of confidence in his material. There isn't much of note in the way of special fx. No animatronics--unless you count shots pulled from the original Puppet Master (1989). If the writing and acting were better, a decent Puppet Master still probably couldn't be made with the sort of budgets Full Moon works with these days.
Add to that, awful writing and acting, and shoddy direction, and there really isn't much to recommend. The opening credits sequence was kind of cool, I guess.

The movie ends with a cliffhanger--the words "to be continued" don't appear onscreen, but they may as well--and I have zero interest in what comes next.