Puppet
Master: The Littlest Reich is not part
of the original Charles Band films. It’s
not really a remake either. It’s more of
a re-imagining, set in a separate timeline.
Hey, all that doesn’t really matter as long as S. Craig Zahler is on board,
am I right?
Zahler,
who wrote and directed the modern classics Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell
Block 99 (not to mention being an accomplished author in his own right—seriously,
if you haven’t read Wraiths of the Broken Land, go out and grab a copy now),
wrote the script for The Littlest Reich and his participation alone was enough
to get me excited about a Puppet Master reboot.
Yes, for once in my life, I was actually looking forward to a Puppet
Master movie. Having The State’s Thomas
Lennon playing the starring role was just the cherry on top.
Directors
Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund give the film more style than certainly any of
the Full Moon productions had. They also
wisely showcase Zahler’s flair for peculiar dialogue, as well as his penchant
for nasty, unrelenting violence. If this
triumphant trio is pulling the strings for the next Puppet Master movie, I’ll
be there with bells on.
Lennon
stars as a recently divorced forty-something comic book store owner who moves
back home with his folks. While moping
at home, he finds one of his dead brother’s puppets and learns it was one of the
original killer puppets created by Andre Toulon (Udo Kier, who also appears in
Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99). With
nothing better to do, he decides to sell it at a convention celebrating the
“Toulon Murders” at a nearby hotel. Other
likeminded people with similar puppets congregate at the hotel and it doesn’t
take long for the puppets to get loose and start killing the conventiongoers.
Zahler
has taken great liberties with the established continuity of the Puppet Master
lore, and honestly, it’s for the better.
Toulon is no longer a refugee who creates his puppets to fight the
Nazis. Instead, he himself is a Nazi and
his puppets are trained to kill (among others) lesbians, African-Americans, and
Jewish people.
It’s
an interesting change to be sure. We’re
no longer rooting for the puppets, as they’ve become symbols of hate. In these types of movies, we typically cheer
whenever someone is bumped off by a demented puppet. Zahler’s reimagining of the concept makes us
pump the brakes. Then, he does the
unimaginable. He devises some of the
most brilliant ways to off someone in a horror flick in some time. I mean it’s unconscionable to applaud what
essentially comes down to a puppet committing a hate crime, but let’s face
it. You don’t come to a Puppet Master
movie to see “good taste” on display. True
horror fans will undoubtedly be amazed at some of the carnage the puppets
create in The Littlest Reich. I mean how
can you not be impressed when a guy taking a piss is decapitated, and his head
lands in the bowl so that he winds up pissing in his own face? Sure, some of the effects are a bit uneven,
but for every phony looking bit, there’s a truly showstopping, genuinely
unsettling moment (like the scene involving a pregnant woman).
I’m
sure there will be folks out there who will have a knee-jerk reaction to all
this and they’ll probably condemn it on sight.
There’s even a character who comments on the fact that the people who
are dying don’t deserve it. Zahler makes
it abundantly clear he’s only reflecting the times we live in.
Lennon
is excellent in what is essentially a non-comedic role. He reacts to the sight of killer puppets with
a calm detachment and never once lets you know he’s in on the joke, which, if
he did, would’ve been game over. The
supporting cast is equally fine and is full of genre favorites. Michael Pare does wonders with another
thankless detective role, but he still finds ways to tweak his performance and
give it a little bit of life. Then
there’s Matthias Hues as a victim who becomes controlled by the puppets,
although I sort of wished they made him do a little Kung Fu. Barbara Crampton does a bang-up job as a cop,
especially when you consider most of her duties revolve around unfurling a LOT
of exposition. While I wish Kier had
more to do as Toulon, he is still able to make a memorable impression in his
short screen time.
It's
the puppets who steal the show though. Fan
favorites like Pinhead, Torch, and Blade have been given minor facelifts, but
they still retain enough of their classic charm to keep everyone happy. The new additions are a bit of a mixed bag. (There’s one that just looks like a stoner
version of Kermit the Frog.) That said,
the helicopter puppet causes a devastating amount of mayhem and Junior Fuhrer may
be my favorite puppet of the entire series.
Yes,
the seams of the budget start showing more and more as the film wears on, but
this is far and away the best Puppet Master movie ever made. My biggest gripe is that it ends in such an
abrupt manner. If we take that to mean
that we’ll be seeing the puppets again very soon, I’m all for it. If in fact, we don’t get a sequel, it’ll just
seem like the movie’s half finished. Even
then, it’s a minor miracle to have a Puppet Master flick that’s this damned
good.
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