Retro Puppet Master starts in Kolewige during 1944 where puppet master Andre Toulon (Guy Rolfe) & his living puppets plan to escape Germany, hold up in an Inn puppet master Toulon reminisces about his early life & the point at which he learned the secret of giving life to dead objects way back in 1902 in Paris when his younger self (Greg Sestero) ran the Theate Magique. He describes the fateful night when he met a 3000 year old Egyptian sorcerer named Afzel (Jack Donner) & the eventual love of hi life the young & beautiful Ilsa (Brigitta Dau). He tells the story of how Afzel passed the gift of life to himself & gave life to his own wooden puppets that were part of the Theatre Magique show. However the gift of life was also a curse as the ancient God Sutek whom the secret was stolen from in the first place by Afzel wants it back & everyone who has learnt it dead...

As of late I have been on a bit of a Puppet Master bender as being a big fan of the first three I decided to watch the rest of the franchise & as such I have seen Puppet Master 4 (1993), Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter (1994), Curse of the Puppet Master (1998) & now Retro Puppet Master in the space of a couple of weeks & boy was it tough to get through them all, especially this one as it's the worse of the series so far. Retro Puppet Master feels like a cross between Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991) with it's period setting & Puppet Master 4 & Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter with Sutek trying to kill everyone associated with his stolen life giving secret. There's not much continuity here either, again there's none of the green serum featured in the earlier films & despite Andre Toulon committing suicide in 1939 at the start of the original Puppetmaster (1989) he is seen alive & well during 1944 in this. The majority of the story is told as a flashback & concentrates on Andre Toulon himself rather than the puppets, the film focuses on his relationship with Ilsa & him learning the secret of life & it's all rather dull & tedious stuff to be honest. Even at only 80 odd minutes Retro Puppet Master feels long & padded with no real pace & the no central concept as the plot never really settles down & generally hops around a lot. Then of course there's the baffling decision to totally redesign the puppets which I found incredible, I mean why would the makers take the one basic thing that made the Puppet Master films so memorable & completely do away with it? The puppets are seen briefly at the start & the end but otherwise we get these rubbishy looking wooden caricatures that are nowhere near as cool as their modern re-workings. It's never even explained why these puppets were used rather than the ones all Puppet Master fans have come to love although one suspects that Full Moon was hoping to make yet another sequel which dealt with that very question.

If a poor story & a complete lack of our favourite puppets wasn't bad enough Full Moon decided to go with a PG-13 rating for this making Retro Puppet Master the only Puppet Master film not rated 'R' in the US (obviously other countries have their own film ratings systems) & therefore there's not a single drop of blood in the entire film, the puppets don't kill anyone, there's no swearing & no nudity either. This is tamer than tame kids stuff all the way. Besides the puppets themselves being rubbish the special effect are the wost of the series too, there's no stop motion animation at all in this one, no CGI computer effects (surely in 1999 CGI was cheap enough?) & all the effects are of the stiff rod puppet type effects. I mean whenever you see a puppet 'walk' the camera is always positioned above it's wait so it's legs don't have to be shown & there's obviously some production assistant just pushing the thing along, that's as complex & state of the art as the special effects get.

The one positive thing that Retro Puppet Master does have going for it is that it looks rather nice, the period production design, costumes & props are actually quite impressive & it's a fairly handsome film to watch at times. Apparently filmed in Bucharest in Romania which doubles up quite nicely for turn of the last century Paris. The acting here is awful & maybe the worst of the series.

Retro Puppet Master is more or less the final Puppet Master film as the next one Puppet Master: The Legacy (2004) basically edits together footage from the previous seven films & it's a pretty crappy way to round the series off which started so well with three excellent & distinctive little killer puppet flicks. Don't bother with this, just watch one of the first three again & just remember the good times... The killer puppets would return in the terrible spin-off flick Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (2004).

Sentiment: negative