Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich  ★★

LIKE Child’s Play and Leprechaun, the B-grade Puppet Master franchise just keeps going.

No mater how average the instalment is, there always seems to be enough of a rusted-on fan base to ensure it doesn’t die.

The original 1989 film has now spawned 10 sequels, a cross-over film, a re-boot, an up-coming spin-off, two comic book mini-series and a comic series.

Each film features a demonic puppet(s) brought to life through some kind of incantation. The puppets started off being evil but have also been anti-heroes in some of the films.

In many of the films the bad guy that re-animates them has been a character named Andre Toulon who is an evil former Nazi.

Apparently he died in a previous film but that doesn’t seem to bother S. Craig Zahler and Charles Band, the writers of 2019 re-boot Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich.

I’m a little behind in my reviews (courtesy of a heavy day job work load at the moment) and seriously can’t even recall a lot of the motivations in this film.

The victims are a bunch of people gathered for a convention celebrating the 30th year of a series of murders and Toulon’s death.

The convention geeks all have collector puppets and a re-aminated Toulon does the same to the puppets and sends them on a killing spree.

There is way too much plot exposition in this film to the point where it begins to seriously derail what could have been a fun piece of schlock horror.

The effects are awful but then again they’re supposed to be; the acting is not as bad as you would expect (not sure if that’s a compliment).

The first half is way too slow leaving the second half to make up for lost time with a constant series of stabbings, burnings, decapitations and nudity.

If the film was better made it would get away with also being so distasteful – the puppets target mainly black, gay and Jewish people and gypsies. It’s meant to be funny but really isn’t, in particular the Fuhrer baby puppet that ends up crawling into an oven.