Sunday 18 August 2019

Puppet Master: Blitzkrieg Massacre (2018)




We here at the ISCFC have spent a lot of time laying into Charles Band and Full Moon, and rightfully so. Back in the 1980s, Band was flush with cash after a few cheap movies became relatively big hits, bought a castle and a studio in Italy, had a distribution deal with a major studio to supply them with VHS store fodder, all that sort of thing. But, they over-extended themselves with debt, the distribution deal ended, and Band moved back to the USA with much smaller ambitions.

If you’re something of a cynic, you could say they’ve been circling the drain since the early 1990s, with the occasional cable deal and VHS sales keeping them just above water. They also, presumably, have hardcore fans who snap up everything as soon as it’s released, but I can’t even imagine what a hardcore Full Moon fan would be like. Budgets are microscopic these days, but they’re still making movies, with the “Evil Bong” and “Gingerdead Man” series two of the more prominent examples.

I lost any last shred of respect I had for them when I watched 1998’s “Puppet Master: The Legacy”, which is a clip movie that has maybe five minutes of new footage in it. This sort of scumbag tactic just reduces goodwill (I bet he ended up losing money on it, in the long run, as people who bought it, even though it cost almost nothing to make, would never spend a dime on Full Moon product ever again).

Last year saw “Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich”, an example of what someone with money and good ideas can do with the basic concept. So what did Charles Band do with the increased number of eyeballs on his product among horror fans? He started the “Bunker of Blood” series.

If you thought five minutes of new footage was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This series of DVDs, a little over an hour each, have a series of crudely drawn still panels with voiceover as their sole new footage, with a story…actually, I’ll just reprint the blurb from Full Moon’s own website.


Drawing from nearly three decades of cinematic splatter and freakish filmmaking, PUPPET MASTER: BLITZKRIEG MASSACRE is the first chapter in FULL MOON'S BUNKER OF BLOOD, a gory "Greatest Hits" of the legendary studio's strangest and sickest sequences framed by an all new, all outrageous narrative that drives the viewer deep into the darkest, dankest of a madman's macabre lair.


In an unknown dystopian future, a drifter with an unusually high-tolerance to pain is held captive in a horrific hospital by The Circle of Psycho Surgeons, a clandestine crew of M.D.'s (that's medical deviants) who are experimenting with human suffering. Suddenly, our shackled hero hears the call of "The Gore Collector", a sadistic curator of carnage who is well past his prime and now seeks an heir to take over his evil operation. Escaping from the lurid lab, the drifter enters the underground lair of The Gore Collector and there, the perverse programmer pops in a vile videotape and begins the process of trying to warp the man's minds with the goriest and gruesomest moments from some of Full Moon's most iconic film franchises in an all-out assault to the senses!


Using lavishly illustrated comic book panels to bookend the twisted tale, PUPPET MASTER: BLITZKRIEG MASSACRE culls the sickest moments from the 11-film deep PUPPET MASTER series, mashing them together with macabre music and brand new moments of body-breaking mayhem.


Can our hero survive the BLITZKRIEG MASSACRE? Can YOU?!?!


I can’t write worth a damn, but if I was doing this professionally I’d at least check my own work. It’s “M.D.s”, no apostrophe, and it’s “man’s mind”, if there’s only one of him. Come on! But worst of all, they seem unaware of how many movies they’ve made. Even if you ignore the Demonic Toys cross-over as “non-canon” and “The Littlest Reich” as not made by them, they’ve made 12 Puppet Master movies, not 11.

So, it’s a clip show…that they expect you to pay $10 for (or watch via a streaming service, I guess). The footage is arranged seemingly at random, with no attempt to tell a story or provide any sort of context to what’s going on. Just puppets killing people, mostly.

The “Bunker of Blood” series is now at seven instalments, with every part of Full Moon’s back catalogue thoroughly plundered. So, my question is, who is this for? If you’re a fan of theirs, you’ll have already seen the movies, if you’re not, a selection of random clips with some crappy comic art framing it won’t turn you into one. I’m stumped, dear reader, so let’s not watch any more of these, and I’d only suggest you spend time with them if you’re an eccentric immortal who’s seen every other filmed piece of entertainment in human history.

Rating: thumbs down