Blade: The Iron Cross was made as part of Charles Band’s “Deadly 10”, a series of crowdsourced movies, most of which were sequels and/or spin-offs to films from Band’s Full Moon Features. This one is a spin-off from Band’s durable Puppet Master franchise, focusing on Blade, the pint-sized, white-faced, hook-handed psycho puppet.
During the final days of WWII, the Nazis begin experimenting with a serum that turns soldiers into zombies. (The stuff in the syringe looks an awful lot like Herbert West’s green juice from Re-Animator.) Meanwhile, a psychic reporter (Tania Fox), who can see a story before it happens, is on the trail of the dead bodies the Nazis leave in their wake. Thanks to her psychic link to the killer puppet Blade, she just might be able to bring the Nazis down once and for all.
The stuff with the psychic reporter isn’t bad. It just feels out of place in a Puppet Master movie. I know they were probably trying to give this one a different flavor than the other films in the series, but it doesn’t quite click.
Likewise, the stuff with the zombies feels like it came out of another movie entirely, and the subplot with our heroine having a psychic connection to Blade every time he kills is half-baked at best. It often feels like a mishmash of ideas strung together to achieve a seventy-minute running time. Some of these moments work better than others (the make-up on the zombies is decent), although nothing really gels. Thanks to the everything but the kitchen sink approach, it leaves little time for Blade to do his thing, which will probably come as a disappointment to many Puppet Master fans.
The German accents on the Nazis are awful and the acting is pretty poor for the most part. Fox isn’t a bad leading lady for this sort of thing, but she has a lot more chemistry with a wooden puppet than with her flesh and blood co-stars. She also gets a completely gratuitous topless scene, in which she bathes in front of Blade as well as a nude torture scene. Overall, Blade: The Iron Cross is a big comedown from Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, but it’s far from the worst Puppet Master flick, that’s for sure.
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