A hired gun named Maclain (Kate Orsini) tracks down the latest puppet master Eric Weiss (Jacob Witkin) to the Bodega Bay Inn, where he presents her with audio tapes of Andre Toulon narrating the history of his life and his puppets.
I sat through this tonight, so I thought 'Why not get a review out of it?' This one is hard to rate fairly, because probably 90% of it is a clip movie consisting of scenes from the previous installments. The only new footage you'll see are sequences that bookend the film, and bits and pieces that string together the archived segments. The only good thing about that really for die hard fans of this series, is that you get to find out the fates of two of the surviving characters from the previous films: Peter Hertz (Puppet Master III) and Rick Myers (Puppet Master 4 and 5). I like little touches like that, so it got a point there.
In these portions, you'll only find the two characters mentioned in the synopsis. I guess Witkin and Orsini are passable in their roles, given that they're essentially only very thin plot devices for a very thin plot. Don't expect any new action from the puppets here; because the only carnage you'll see from them in this is canned. They appear in it briefly, and that's about all you can say for them other than a head turn or two.
The Puppet Master films had kind of been all over the place with Prequels and Sequels released, so one of the things they could do here was to put the events more or less in chronological order; beginning with the films which focus on Toulon during his life, and working into the events that occured closer to the present.
Though, there are story elements from Retro Puppet Master and Puppet Master III that were not included that I think should have been if they were trying to compact the entire story into these segments. Not to mention, they skip over any direct mention of the events from Puppet Master 5 and very surprisingly do not even cover the modern day events from the original Puppet Master. So, perhaps they had good intentions but I think they dropped the ball a bit on covering the entire "legacy".
Clearly this film had a budget of about a day's worth of shooting, which is why we got mostly archived material. It also came at a time when Full Moon was doing a few of these type of films that used past clips to make a new feature they could promote. I hear Charles Band also made this to supposedly make sense of a few holes in the stories, yet he includes both the original and retconned versions of how Toulon was first given the method to animate his puppets. I also think the final scene of this film raised just as many questions as some of the previous ones, and had a lot of people scratching their heads.
I think maybe the only good thing about this film is that it is a sample of what the series has to offer, as it shows many of the key sequences from the other films. I think it could serve as a good glimpse into the franchise for someone who has maybe heard of this series for years, and is perhaps thinking of making a purchase of a few or all the films, but aren't sure if it's for them. To those fans, I think I would recommend Puppet Master: The Legacy. But for fans who have maybe saw all the films but this one? No way. There is nothing here worth renting or buying.
Directed by: Robert Talbot (aka Charles Band)
Starring: Kate Orsini, Jacob Witkin
Released by: Shadow Entertainment
No Special Features pertaining to the film, despite the cover boasting 2 hours of behind the scenes footage from the series!
FuckEm's Rating:
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