An old man passes away in a nursing home. In his personal effects, the orderlies find a puppet called Doktor Death. Before long, the pint-sized psychotic physician is running around the home offing patients, nurses, and staff. The new nurse on duty, April (Jenny Boswell) just may be the only one capable of stopping the deadly doll’s reign of terror.
I’ve seen most of the Puppet Master movies. None of them are what you would call scary, but there are a few that offer up some silly fun. If I’m being completely honest, seeing a little doll kill infirmed and defenseless old people isn’t exactly my idea of fun.
I guess they could’ve approached this with a bit of social commentary. Have the doll act as sort of a Dr. Kevorkian to the terminal patients or something. That wouldn’t have been fun either, but at least the filmmakers could’ve made a statement about… something. I guess that’s probably asking too much from a Puppet Master spin-off.
About halfway through, the doll takes to climbing inside his victims and makes them walk around like puppets so he can kill more people. I have a suspicion this was done not because it was a neat idea (it isn’t) or an interesting visual (it’s not), but because it saved money on puppeteers. The appeal of these movies has always been little dolls killing people. Take that away and you’re not left with a whole lot, I’m afraid.
Puppet Master: Doktor Death is less than an hour long (like many of Full Moon’s recent films), but it still feels slow in places. Even with the scant running time, there’s still a lot of padding. (In addition to flashbacks from previous installments, we also have flashbacks to scenes that happened five minutes ago.) Some of the death scenes are gory, but not enough to be memorable. It also loses points for introducing a potentially interesting psychic character played by former Scream Queen Melissa Moore, and then doing absolutely nothing with her.
The complete non-ending sucks too. Imagine if they took one of those post-credit scenes in a Marvel movie and tried to pass it off as the climax. Emily Sue Bengston is the only bright spot as the sexy nurse with an alluring bedside manner, but other than her engaging presence, this Puppet Master is not what the Doktor ordered.
I actually thought that was a cool idea and did enjoy this film
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