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First sonic the hedgehog 3 promo teases shadow's battle with tails, knuckles & sonic, donnie yen made his only old school kung fu movie 40 years ago.

Both the Puppet Master franchise and the people who make it, Full Moon Pictures, have frequently come under fire for putting out terrible movies. But that doesn't mean the films weren't scary when we were kids . There's one measure of objectivity when it comes to art, and that's IMDb, which accumulates critic and audience reviews to rank movies, making a handy reference for when someone doesn't wanna sift through whatever looks halfway interesting on the streaming services they're subscribed to.

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For those not familiar with the Puppet Master franchise, it can be summarized as a series in which puppets that have an Egyptian curse on them are forced to do the bidding of a diabolical Nazi (usually). It's as fun and campy as it sounds.

Puppet Master: The Legacy (2003) - 3.0

There are a lot of issues with Puppet Master: The Legacy , but that doesn't necessarily mean it's completely worthless. If you don't feel like watching all of the Puppet Master movies, you can jump in here without watching anything that came before it.

The Legacy is not a reboot but a big highlight reel of all of the previous movies, showing a little bit of story and most of the "best" kills from the preceding movies. The framing device is Toulon's grandson telling an assassin a short history of the puppets, making this a feature length flashback clip episode.

Retro Puppet Master (1999) - 4.0

Despite the pretty terrible reviews, this one least has something original to offer instead of just being a glorified clip show like The Legacy . This movie goes back in time, to Egypt in the early 20th century to show how the puppets were made, the curse that was placed on them, and then viewers meet Toulon when he first encountered the puppets at a puppet show.

All in all not great by a long shot, but also not the worst. Something worth noting is that Greg Sestero, best known for being Johnny's best friend Mark from The Room, portrays the younger André Toulon here.

Puppet Master Vs. Demonic Toys (2004) - 4.0

This movie is pretty much the worst low-budget Freddy Vs. Jason style horror movie team-up crossover you can imagine. We see the puppets taking on the Demonic Toys, who are characters from a similar 1992 film.

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The hijinks that ensues when they meet is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a crossover of this caliber, which means there's not much worth writing home about. The conflict arises when a man wants to use Toulon's formula to give birth to a race of murderous toys for release on Christmas into the homes of millions.

Puppet Master X: Axis Rising (2012) - 4.0

For some reason, this series loves to use the Nazi aesthetic, which isn't the best look. Here, Nazi scientist Dr. Moebius gets his hands on one of the puppets and decides to synthesize an entire Nazi army of the newly created puppets.

This one is pretty standard Puppet Master fare but not in a particularly rewarding way -- especially not for the tenth film in a horror franchise.

Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017) - 4.0

This one is Dr. Mengele's murderous experimental compound meets The Men Who Stare At Goats . Yes, really.

The puppets in this one aren't Nazis and are more anti-heroes more than anything else, because the United States military is using them to go into a German lab to stop the development of more Nazi puppets. They also plan to put an end to the diabolical experiments that are happening there.

Curse Of The Puppet Master (1998) - 4.1

Curse Of The Puppet Master at least has an interesting plot, even though that doesn't necessarily mean that it's good when it comes to the Puppet Master franchise.

Here, a man is researching how one could put souls into puppets because of course he does. This movie reuses a ton of scenes of the puppets doing stuff, making this one a weird case of cinematic déjà vu. Whether that comes from budget constraints or this is just a hallmark of the series at this point is unknown.

Puppet Master: Axis Of Evil (2010) - 4.3

This is another one where the puppets aren't the villains at all, but friends to the protagonist as he (Danny Coogan) does his best to stop a group of Nazis who assassinated Andre Toulon from destroying an American manufacturing plant.

Why exactly the Nazis want to destroy a manufacturing plant? That's a mystery, but the film is set in World War II for once, so it checks out.

Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter (1994) - 5.1

A hallmark of bad horror franchises, any entry titled The Final Chapter that's nowhere near close to being the final movie is a must. Puppet Master upholds this tradition with a movie that was shot back-to-back with Puppet Master 4 , and it lack in time and quality shows.

In this one, an evil man has trapped himself inside one of the puppets a long time ago, and it's up to our protagonist to put an end to his rampage with the help of the puppets.

Puppet Master 4 (1993) - 5.3

Finally, a little more past the halfway point between perfect and awful comes Puppet Master 4 , a film more confusing than the already convoluted chronology of the entire series. For some reason, there are demons and they're attacking the protagonists.

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Once again, the puppets (for some reason) save the day rather than doing their best to murder everyone in sight in the most ridiculous and crude ways the writers could think up.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018) - 5.4

This one finally has someone you may recognize in it, and his performance might have been one of the only things that helped this movie get more than a 5.

Thomas Lennon (Lieutenant Jim Dangle from the hit Comedy Central show Reno 911! ) s tars as Edgar Easton, a man who attends a puppet convention to sell a family heirloom with his friend. Little did he know, puppets are indeed pretty creepy and a few at the auction are Toulon's!

Puppet Master II (1990) - 5.5

Here's another entry where Toulon f appears as often as you expect, since this entire franchise is more about him than anything else.

For whatever reason, the puppets are on the tail of some real-life Ghostbusters and they're hungry for brain-fluid because why not? Toulon needs it for some sort of new thing he's working on, but it might as well just be motivation for the puppets to commit murder.

Puppet Master (1989) - 5.7

The one that started it all, Puppet Master , is surprisingly not at the top of the list despite fans unanimously hailing it as the franchise's best.

This one is about a group of old psychics, who is also dead. The plan was set in motion before he committed suicide after discovering Toulon's puppets, who go after the psychics to get rid of them. Puppet Master was not even released in theaters since Charles Band, the creator of the series, decided it would make more money going direct-to-video. By all accounts, he was right.

Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991) - 6.0

The best one on the list is Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge . Since the Puppet Master series has always been a cult classic, it makes sense that it would have such a low score but that being said, this one does raise the bar considerably.

The third entry shows Toulon's motivations for making the puppets kill people (although there's nothing else they'd be suited to) when he's outed as maybe not being so cool with what the Nazis are doing. They raid his house and kill his wife, and he swears his revenge.

NEXT: Every Horror Movie Script Written By Stephen King, Ranked (According To IMDb)

Puppet Master (1989)

'Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich' Review - Absolutely Bonkers Nazi Puppet Grand Guignol

Come for the puppet carnage, stay for... the puppet carnage.

You want to watch puppets kill people? And I mean a lot of puppets killing a lot of people. If the answer is yes, your time has finally come. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is very much for you. Designed to shock and offend with prolonged passages of slaughter and mayhem so gore-soaked you can practically hear the midnight crowds cheering, The Littlest Reich reboots the long-running franchise with a thin but handsomely produced little splatter film that demands nothing from its audience but a strong stomach.

The Littlest Reich leaves behind the quaint, micro-micro-budget of the Full Moon Features tradition and boasts some star power, both behind and in front of the camera. Directed by Sonny laguna and Tommy Wiklund , the film features a rousing score from Lucio Fulci regular Fabio Frizzi and a cast of actors you’ll recognize. But perhaps the biggest surprise of the bunch is the involvement of Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99 filmmaker S. Craig Zahler , who wrote the script. You’ll be able to feel Zahler’s presence in the kill scenes, which maintain his flourish for extreme moments of unforgettable bloodshed, though there’s unfortunately little evidence of his knack for stoic, straightforward dialogue (admittedly, there are a few quality zingers), his deft hand at navigating challenging themes, or his talent for creating unforgettable characters.

Zahler’s distinctly cynical strain of dark humor, however, is present throughout and ultimately defines the rebooted approach to the material. Fanchise fans will note a key shift in the mythology from the outset, when a 1980s-set prequel introduces the titular puppet master himself, Andre Toulon (played by Udo Kier with a delicious menace), who is now a Nazi. So are his puppets, brought to life by the power of an ancient magic, who hunt and kill at his command. The creepy creator has a run-in with a pair of Lesbian bartenders, and sicks his little Reich on them for a brutal, bloody execution, before getting gunned down by the local police in a short, not-so-sweet opening segment that immediately sets the tone.

Flash forward to the present day, where we meet Edgar ( Thomas Lennon ), a comic book artist visiting his family home, where he discovers his late brother owned one of Toulon’s terrifying little dolls — an upgraded version of the fan-favorite Blade — and heads off to a Toulon convention in the hopes of selling it. With Edgar’s clever new girlfriend ( Jenny Pellicer ) and smart-mouthed, proudly Jewish boss Markowitz ( Nelson Franklin ) in tow, the trio journeys to the Toulon estate, where they get a somewhat painfully expository tour from local cop who shot Toulon dead (played by genre staple Barbara Crampton , who also cameoed in the original film). The first act isn’t the film’s finest (half) hour and the minutes tick by as one cardboard character after the next takes the stage just in time for the Grand Guignol slaughter.

Once the bloodshed begins, The Littlest Reich becomes an unstoppable freight train of outrageous violence. There are dozens of puppets on the scene for the convention, which means the moment Toulon’s spell brings them to life, there’s a literal tiny little Nazi army running around dispensing death wholesale. The characters are mercifully quick to realize the trend in the victims -- Jewish, homosexual, black... yep, they're Nazis -- though those smarts do little to save lives. Toulon's puppets are an unstoppable force of dismemberment and death, leaving behind a bloody mass of corpses and body parts after a malicious miniature slaughter. Two kills in particular — one involving a pregnant woman and one involving a poor soul who ends up peeing on his own decapitated head — are so beyond the pale, they’re bound to get a reaction out of even the most hardened horror enthusiasts. Whether that reaction is a guffaw, a grimace, or full-on gagging depends on your sensibilities.

The chaotic carnage is a hoot and it looks damn good; the effects are practical and they look sticky , and the puppets are equally impressive. But it’s also relentless, and the constant kill-kill-kill starts to feel like more of a highlight reel than a movie at times, leaving behind all remnants of story in favor of a bare-bones plot that does little more than get you from Corpse A to Corpse B. No doubt, viewers who are unfamiliar with the 11-film Puppet Master franchise will be wowed by the onslaught of little puppet predators, but Blade, Torch and all the familiar favorites are essentially stripped of their personality in favor of a quantity over quality approach. Thanks to the convention setting, there are multiple copies of each puppet set loose, and while it’s fun to see slightly variant versions of the franchise icons let loose on a murder spree, you miss the flourishes of character that made them memorable in the first place. It's a strange balance and The Littlest Reich is easily one of the best films in the franchise, but it's also not quite as charming as what came before.

Unfortunately, the film does little to engage with its themes, an especially disappointing decision considering Nazism has become a disturbingly timely topic of late. It does even less to engage with its characters, who are all but charming meat for the butcher. But If you come to Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich for marionette massacre, you will leave satisfied. From top to tail, the film is an impressive production of practical effects and stomach-testing gore that toes the line between winking and self-serious with nimble balance.

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While it has a couple of appreciably goofy flourishes, the proudly crass horror-comedy "Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich" is sadly more boring than offensive despite its superficially controversial high-concept premise: what if sentient Nazi puppets started killing everybody they deemed to be inferior? It's not even a novel affront since the Puppet Master film franchise—which has inspired a dozen follow-ups since it began in 1989—has been exploiting Nazi imagery since "Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge" back in 1991. Lately, the series has gone all in on such low-hanging humor, including Nazi-themed sequels in 2010, 2012, and 2017.

The most interesting aspect of "The Littlest Reich"—which is a series reboot of sorts—is that it's scripted by S. Craig Zahler, the writer/director/songwriter behind bloody, but soulful genre hybrids " Bone Tomahawk " and " Brawl in Cell Block 99 ." "The Littlest Reich" features brief flashes of Zahler's flinty wit and machismo, but it also often feels like a bizarrely misconceived side project. One by one, disposable supporting characters—several of whom are attacked simply because they are gay, Jewish, or black—die ostensibly comical deaths. The only people who can stop their pint-sized murderers—who descend on a hotel full of unsuspecting guests in Pottsville, Texas—are sad sack comic book artist Edgar ( Thomas Lennon ), his obnoxious BFF Markowitz ( Nelson Franklin ), and his literal girl next door love interest Ashley ( Jenny Pellicer ). Unfortunately, none of these characters are well-developed beyond an isolated scene or two, like when Edgar is confronted by his uptight/suspicious dad Tom (James Easton) after he moves in with his parents following a messy divorce.

The rest of the film's non-puppet-related scenes are dominated by Markowitz, whose persistent need to mock Edgar and his girlfriend is pretty monotonous and predictable. Markowitz is what you'd get if you half-heartedly tried to make "South Park" brat Eric Cartman simultaneously repellent and likable. First he jokingly asks Ashley to take her top off, then he tries to banter with bartender Cuddly Bear (Skeeta Jenkins), a stereotypically sassy black supporting character who talks in the third-person and understandably looks askance at Markowitz after he tries to hit on and then (again, jokingly) asks Cuddly Bear to poison a fellow bar patron who he describes as a "bookish blonde" (Alison Viktorin). Markowitz's pseudo-playful banter with Cuddly Bear suggests that he's self-aware enough to know that he's a nuisance, but also ostensibly sympathetic enough to be laughed off as a harmless sex pest.

Still, you might wonder why Markowitz is the most developed character in "Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich" given that Edgar is constantly presented as the film's lead protagonist. You also might find some answers in the scene where Markowitz, upon checking into his hotel, is confronted by a smirking, passive-aggressive comment from the concierge: "You must be Markowitz," the unnamed hotel employee says. Markowitz scoffs and asks if that remark was made because he looks Jewish. The concierge shrugs and says, "Well, are you Markowitz?" Markowitz sheepishly admits that he is, and the concierge moves on, his dickish point seemingly having been proven. Because apparently you're only telling it like it is if you casually point out that a Jewish stranger appears to be Jewish.

This brief encounter says a lot about the unfunny Nazi-related humor that follows, moreso than a later scene where yarmulke-wearing Jewish-American hotel guest Jason ( Stephen Brodie ) explains to his wife Rachel ( Mary Katherine O'Donnell ) that he collects Nazi puppets because he, like many Jews, wants to assert control over these hateful symbols.

Sounds great, but many scenes involving Nazi Puppets in "Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich" are so gutless in their button-pushing humor that one can't help but think that the hotel concierge's insensitivity is telling. Kill scenes, like when a Nazi puppet worms its way into and then out of a pregnant black woman's womb, are proudly juvenile, but never really funny.

There aren't too many of these “hate crime” murders (as one character puts it), but there are enough to make you wish that other, comparatively inoffensive puppet attack scenes were at least appreciably gruesome or silly. One guest is murdered after he lies to his mother about his alcoholism. Another, a lesbian, is beheaded shortly after she briefly talks to her partner about having a child. And some characters die just because they’re trying to run away, as one hotel guest huffily points out. That defensive correction suggests that the film’s creators want to have the right to push viewers' buttons, but are too scared to forcefully mock “social justice warrior” killjoys.

There are fun supporting performances/cameos by characters actors Michael Paré , Barbara Crampton , and Udo Kier , but even they can't prop up such a lazy provocation. Tasteless jokes are one thing, but if your whole bit amounts to Ricky Gervais /Andrew Dice Clay-style button-pushing, you better be ready to commit to that bit. "Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich" is only sometimes desperate-to-peeve, leaving one to wonder what Zahler saw in the project in the first place.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in The New York Times , Vanity Fair , The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

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Film credits.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich movie poster

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018)

Thomas Lennon as Edgar

Michael Paré as Detective Brown

Barbara Crampton as Carol Doreski

Charlyne Yi as Nerissa

Udo Kier as Andre Toulon

Nelson Franklin as Markowitz

Jenny Pellicer as Ashley

Stephen Brodie as Jason Gottlieb

Mary Katherine O'Donnell as Rachel Gottlieb

John Walpole as Sgt. Harrow

S. Craig Zahler
Tommy Wiklund
Sonny Laguna

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Puppet Master Reviews

With some weird, awesome puppets, a nice finale, and an interesting theme hovering over it all, Puppetmaster's a unique piece of the late '80s.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2019

While the movie has terrific atmosphere and set designs, it's the iconic posse of killer puppets that have cemented Puppet Master in horror history as a campy cult classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2012

The performances are strong and visuals quite eloquent...

Full Review | Jul 15, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 25, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 25, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 15, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 20, 2003

‘Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich’ Review: Living Puppets In a Lifeless Movie

Come for the gory kills, stay for the… gory kills.

No matter what you think of the Puppet Master franchise you can’t really fault its tenacity or longevity. From the first film in 1989 to its 11th feature ( Puppet Master: Axis Termination ) in 2017 — 12th if you count 2004’s Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys , which you shouldn’t, as it’s not canon you heathens — the films have maintained a low budget, lo-fi charm while delivering gleefully ridiculous tales of puppets killing people. They’re not all good movies, far from it at times, but they found a puppet-sized niche and filled it handily.

The newest entry, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich , trades the scrappy personality of its predecessors for a slicker, gorier, more star-filled experience, but unfortunately it’s memorable solely for the kills.

A Nazi walks into a Texas bar in 1989, and after being disgusted at a pair of lesbians he instructs his puppets to kill them both. The police track Andre Toulon ( Udo Kier ) back to his house where he dies in a shootout, and nearly thirty years later his atrocities have become somewhat legendary. Edgar ( Thomas Lennon ) is recently divorced and in need of cash, and an upcoming convention celebrating Toulon’s puppets offers him an opportunity to sell one of the dolls for quick cash. With his new girlfriend ( Jenny Pellicer ) and boss ( Nelson Franklin ) in tow, they head to an old hotel, enjoy a tour through the dead Nazi’s museum, and soon find themselves in the middle of a puppet-fueled slaughter.

Cutting to the chase here, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich succeeds in delivering homicidal puppets, incredibly gory kills, a terrific new score by Fabio Frizzi , and a likable cast which also includes Charlyne Yi , Michael Paré , and the legendary Barbara Crampton as an ex-cop spouting sass and exposition in equal measure. That’s a lot more than most horror films have going for them, and there’s a good chance it’ll be enough for some horror fans.

Those looking for more than that are shit out of luck, though, as the film is remarkably devoid of life or energy. Even its two stellar gore pieces — one featuring a poor sap taking a leak and the other involving an unlucky pregnant woman — are shot so plainly and without concern for style, staging, or execution that they thrill solely based on their audacious gore. (Good gravy do they thrill though!) Directors Sonny Laguna & Tommy Wiklund ( Wither ) fail to work up any momentum, and while the first thirty minutes are the roughest the drag is still evident even after the kills begin. Toss in plenty of poorly written characters, a cast apparently unsure what tone to aim for at any given moment, and an ending that fails to include an actual ending and you have a bloody disappointment.

The film’s script comes courtesy of S. Craig Zahler whose Bone Tomahawk (2015) and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) have found fans through similarly ferocious and exaggerated acts of gruesome violence, and it bears repeating that two of the kills here are deliriously entertaining in their gore and substance and won’t be easily forgotten. Acts of brutality aren’t his only calling card, though, and without making an inference on Zahler’s own politics it’s safe to suggest his films project a distinctly conservative — and anti-“other” — mentality. In Bone Tomahawk his heroes are white settlers fighting against Native savages. In Brawl in Cell Block 99 his white hero is possessive of his wife and portrayed as smarter, stronger, and more honorable than the primarily minority criminals around him who suffer greatly beneath his boots.

It should come as no surprise that a similar mentality arises here, but it’s made more notable in relation to the Puppet Master films that came before. Toulon’s fight — and by extension, his puppets’ fight — has frequently been against the Nazis, but here Toulon himself *is* a Nazi and his puppets are targeting gays, gypsies, Jews, and other minorities. To be clear, this alone isn’t something worthy of criticism, but the reasoning for it is far from compelling. “Lots of terrible shit happens to people who don’t deserve it,” says someone in reference to the film’s slaughter pattern (captured after the fact in comic book form) to which the writer replies “I try to mirror reality.”

There’s an argument to be made that it’s a topical commentary of sorts, as anyone who lives in the real world could attest to the heaps of terrible shit dumped on the undeserving — especially in our current climate with its ridiculously sad Nazi resurgence — but in an otherwise goofy horror movie it fails to go anywhere. It’s too silly to be horrific and too empty to be satirical. The deaths are brutal but comically so, and it’s to the point that audiences are clearly meant to be cheering the murders which means cheering on the Nazi puppets as they slaughter innocent people. There’s no greater message here either as this isn’t an indictment of the viewer along the lines of Man Bites Dog . You’re not meant to question your enjoyment, you’re just meant to enjoy it.

To be fair, many viewers will do just that as the criticisms above (particularly about Zahler’s script) won’t carry the same weight for everyone, and at the end of the day sometimes you just want dumb, gory fun as a nightcap. I get it — as someone who happily goes to bat for Beyond Re-Animator believe me, I get it — but the film’s desire to offend and shock is insultingly transparent and comes at the detriment to character, story, and purpose. The Littlest Reich is definitely dumb and gory, but it just can’t crack the fun.

The Upside: Terrific gore gags, an appealing cast, new Fabio Frizzi score, a kid bites it

The Downside: Rough script in dialogue and story, complete lack of energy from beginning to end, lazy kill justification, shock value is priority

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich

By Bobby LePire | October 30, 2018

The longest running independently produced movie franchise of all time is the Puppet Master series. The first film, which began life as an Empire Picture production before the company folded, was released direct-to-video in 1989. It was a massive success for the newly formed Full Moon production house and their head honcho, Charles Band. All these years later, there are still movies being released that fall under the same original, and very convoluted, continuity established by the horror classic; with Puppet Master: Axis Termination hitting store shelves and VOD just over a year ago.

When it was announced that a different studio had purchased the rights to a reboot of the first film, I approached it with a high amount of trepidation. That is not because every original film is good; 30 years on, 11 canonical films, and one crossover with a different Full Moon franchise equate to some movies being celebrated, others not so much, and quite a few that are so bad they’re fun. I just couldn’t figure out why a reboot was necessary when the franchise is still going reasonably well within the original continuity.

So imagine my surprise when the newly released reimagining, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich , turned out to be rather excellent. It follows Edgar (Thomas Lennon), a recently divorced comic book creator who is moving back in with his folks. As he unpacks and goes through his childhood belongings, he finds a creepy looking puppet in his deceased brother’s room. Edgar decides to sell the black-clad, knife-wielding puppet at an upcoming convention in nearby Postville, Texas; the convention is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Toulon murders. The massacre ended in the death of Andre Toulon (Udo Kier) after it was discovered he had a hand in the butchering of a lesbian couple.

Edgar’s significant other, Ashley (Jenny Pellicer), and comic shop owner/ best friend Markowitz (Nelson Franklin) decide to attend the convention with him. The convention starts with a tour of Toulon’s mansion, now an occult museum, by former police officer Doreski (Barbara Crampton). Later that night, Edgar discovers that the puppet he brought to sell, which looks uncannily like one of Toulon’s, is missing. He calls the police, as do several other attendees, as all their puppets have disappeared.

“… decides to sell the black-clad, knife-wielding puppet at an upcoming convention…”

A string of dead bodies with no suspects, coincide with the puppets’ disappearance. Serious-minded detective Brown (Michael Paré) thinks that the theory of these puppets coming to life and murdering is absurd until he sees it happen. Now, all mayhem breaks loose at the convention hotel as the guests, staff, and police try to fend off the pint-sized fiends and uncover both the motivations behind their killings and a way to stop them.

While the original Puppet Master is a cult classic that doesn’t mean it is without flaws. In that vein, let’s get the issues out of the way as soon as possible. It is pretty cool to see new iterations of the puppets share the same screen, but a few more new puppets would have been welcome; multiple tunnelers make for repetitive attacks. The more pressing matter is the ending, which is rushed and lackluster. There is not a ton of buildup to explain a particular entity and its connection to everyone else. More importantly, this entity is taken out far too quickly, so Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich ends more on a whimper than a bang.

Written by S. Craig Zahler, most notable for his acclaimed work on Bone Tomahawk, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is a very lean script, with every scene adding to the plot, characterization, or atmosphere. Plus, unlike some of the more recent entries in the original timeline, which have a minor amount of horror and mostly focus on action (which is not inherently an issue unto itself), this mainly harkens back to the first few entries’ definitive horror roots.

The cops gather everyone in the hotel to the lobby to let them know about the killings and the theft of the puppets. Detective Brown also announces that he and his deputies will need to interview everyone there to get to the bottom of what is happening, and then the lights go out. The power is only off for a few seconds Before the backup generators turn on. Those get shut down almost immediately. The crowd starts to panic and runs to the parking lot, wherein those responsible for the killings lie in wait.

Of course, those responsible for all the mayhem are the animated puppets of Toulon come back to life to finish their fiendish goals. Given the subtitle, The Littlest Reich, the puppets’ mission isn’t too hard to discern–kill minorities and perpetuate the Nazis’ terrible plan. While the script fails to properly dive into the ideology of Nazi puppet murder, for a horror comedy with a high body count, it is nice to know it has something on its mind.

The dark humor sprinkled throughout helps give the movie its own identity apart from any other Puppet Master movie. When first deciding if he should attend the convention, Edgar is discussing it with Markowitz and Ashley. She states that a convention “…celebrating a bunch of sick murders that happened 30 years ago… exemplify absolutely everything that’s wrong with our society” and then states that she wants to go to it. It is hilarious. The levity throughout never hinders the horror nor feels out of place.

“They approach the carnage with gleeful zest and ever so much bloodshed…”

Tommy Wiklund and Sonny Laguna co-direct and balance the comedic and horror tones very well throughout. The aforementioned power outage may sound like a cliche, but the way it is handled here, from the editing to the characters’ reactions make it rise above that. Never knowing where the tiny terrors can come from perpetuates an eerie feeling throughout, especially in that crowd scene.

Not to imply that they shy away from the blood and guts; quite the contrary. They approach the carnage with gleeful zest and ever so much bloodshed. One kill in a bathroom is disgusting and is literally bathing in blood. Their approach brings to mind the gorefests that help put Troma on the map; much more so than the gothic stylings of the classic Full Moon titles.

Of course, if the puppets are not convincing. All the witty dialogue and well-mounted horror scenes in the world would not be of any help. Happily, creature effects creator Wayne Anderson and lead puppet designer Tate Steinsiek take great pains to ensure that the puppets are as believable as the humans (which I suppose is a two-edged compliment). A few variations of the iconic Blade character crop up throughout, including one that is a cricket or some such. Superstrong Pinhead and fan favorite Torch are also on hand to bring death and despair. New puppets include a baby who crawls onto your back and controls you like a puppet and a slew of copter-bots that add a dramatic new level to the puppet attacks. The puppets move very well, with small subtle head turns or the rising of an arm adding to the horrific atmosphere at hand.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Playing a beaten down man who attempts to put himself back together, Thomas Lennon has never been better. His chemistry with both love interest Pellicer (who, while funny, is a bit underwritten) and best friend Franklin is excellent, allowing for the audience to readily buy into their friendships. Barbara Crampton, returning to the franchise after appearing in the first one, is outstanding as the officer who wishes she could forget the events of 30 years ago.

Before sitting down to watch Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich , I was expecting the worst. While a few flaws are present, the directors and screenwriter deliver a high energy bloodbath with several creepy scenes, excellent puppetry work, and a cast that shines brightly. It is well worth a watch, and I greatly look forward to a sequel.

Puppet Master: The Littles Reich (2018) Directed by Sonny Laguna, Tommy Wiklund. Written by S. Craig Zahler. Starring Thomas Lennon, Udo Kier, Michael Paré, Jenny Pellicer, Nelson Franklin, Barbara Crampton, Charlyne Yi.

8 Puppet Strings (out of 10)

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Film Review – Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018)

While most people anticipate the next Marvel blockbuster, I anxiously awaited the release of Fangoria’s Puppet Master . This reboot was penned by S. Craig Zahler, and one of the biggest changes is the nefarious puppets are full-blown Nazis! Although to be fair, the Puppet Master sequels previous to this one also had a Nazi theme, so this might be a nod tor Puppet Master aficionados out there.

My excitement for this upcoming installment had little to do with being a Puppet Master fanatic. I was excited for the people involved in the project. The literary presence of Zahler notwithstanding — who I consider one of the most exciting filmmakers working currently — the film boasted a supporting cast of genre darlings. From Barbara Crampton and Michael Paré, to Udo Kier as André Toulon — there is never too much Udo Kier! It also had an unconventional lead in the form of Thomas Lennon, an underrated comic actor who (lucky for us) doesn’t consider himself to be above Nazi puppets.

Best of all, the films features ridiculously inventive, gory kills through the art of practical effects. Birth. Movies. Death called this film ”the craziest goddamn movie of 2018.” But does it live up to the hype?

Directed By : Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund

Written By : S. Craig Zahler (Based on characters created by Charles Band)

Starring : Thomas Lennon, Jenny Pellicer, Skeeta Jenkins, Nelson Franklin, Michael Paré, Barbara Crampton, Charlyne Yi with Stephen Brodie and Udo Kier

The film opens in Postville, Texas in the year 1989. A bartender (Victoria Hande) and her lover (Ashley M. Kalfas) encounter an insidious European stranger named André Toulon (Kier). When Toulon becomes aware of the romantic and sexual relationship between the two women, his disgust prompts him to send two of his (literal) puppet minions, whom he controls through some mysterious dark arts, to murder them. This murder leads the police to his domicile and this encounter leads to his apparent death.

We then jump to Dallas, in the present day with recently divorced comic-book artist Edgar (Thomas Lennon) whose moving back to his parents. After discovering an insidious looking puppet in his departed brother’s room, he realizes that this used to belong to the famed serial-killer Toulon. Edgar decides to sell it in an upcoming convention which morbidly commiserates the crimes of Toulon.

He travels there with his new love-interest Ashley (Jenny Pellicer) and best friend Markowitz (Nelson Franklin) to the Ambassador Hotel, where the convention is supposed to take place. Soon enough, all the puppets the visitors have taken with them for the auction start to come alive and raise glorious bloody hell.

The Puppet Master Franchise?

Znalezione obrazy dla zapytania puppet master franchise

Image via mymovierack.com

If you’re not a hardcore horror geek, you probably have never heard of the Puppet Master franchise, which currently has, including this installment, thirteen films in its name (if you count the crossover with Demonic Toys ). The original film came out in 1989, directed by Charles Band, who involved himself in most of the film’s consecutive sequels.

The film is about animated puppets coming to life by puppeteer André Toulon through the use of Egyptian black magic. Each of these puppets have their idiosyncratic weapon of choice, which they use against any unsuspecting victim. Though some of the sequels are well-regarded, the later sequels are famous for their incredibly cheapness, such as using a lot of stock-footage from previous films to fill up the screen-time.

The puppets have become anti-heroes in their later films and these puppets even crossed over with the Demonic Toys characters at one point — the original film of which was also produced by Charles Band.

The Puppet Master franchise never managed to reach mainstream popularity in comparison to say A Nightmare on Elm Street or the Child’s Play series, but it has garnered a loyal cult-following — who apparently vehemently complained about the reboots new designs on their favorite puppet characters.

A Wonderful Cast

Udo Kier as André Toulon. Image via ScreenAnarchy

One of S. Craig Zahler’s great literary talent is characterization . Every character in both his directorial debut Bone Tomahawk and his follow-up Brawl in Cell Block 99 , feels like they are part of a larger universe, as if they are living their own story. Every character has a history about them and are well-defined. You get to know everything about them, no matter how short their running time. While Zahler hasn’t directed this one, the quality of his writing can be seen on the screen.

While most of the characters in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich are just present to be gruesomely killed off, every one of them seems intriguing in their own way. The main cast itself does a fantastic job. Thomas Lennon is incredibly likable and it’s nice to see him in a leading role, since he’s usually in a comedic supporting role. Lennon uses his deadpan delivery style for an assortment of laughs but he gets enough of an opportunity to show of his dramatic chops as well. Lennon has nice chemistry with Jenny Pellicer’s character, who also kicks enough ass in the film and never becomes just another damsel-in-distress.

Barbara Crampton, who had a cameo in the original Puppet Master film, gets a nice supporting role as a tough no-nonsense retired cop who shot down Toulon in the past and must now face off against his evil again. While Michael Paré character as a skeptical detective at first seems like the standard douche who is begging to be killed, his character gets a lot more heart during the course of the film.

Udo Kier plays a different André Toulon than in the original version. While the Toulon from the original films was sympathetic, showing care and love for his puppets and being a vehement anti-fascist, this Toulon is a monstrous deformed Nazi who sends out his puppets to murder anyone he considers genetically ‘inferior’. Either case, Kier, despite his limited screen-time, is a joy to watch as usual.

But the real show-stealer is Skeeta Jenkins as the friendly bartender who refers himself as Cuddly Bear. Without spoiling anything, his character simply gets a few of the greatest lines in the film as well as arguably the most touching scene of the film.

There are many more interesting characters who deserve a mention, as each of them get a chance to shine — sometimes merely in gloriously gory fashion.

A Great Score By Fabio Frizzi

image via Twitter

Any gorehound or genre fan should be familiar with the name Fabio Frizzi, who was the original composer for Lucio Fulci ‘s classics such as Zombi 2 (also known as Zombie Flesh-eaters or simply Zombie ), The Beyond (also known as Seven Doors of Death or The Ghost Town of Zombies ) and City of the Living Dead (also known as The Gates of Hell ).

His musical presence in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich really elevates the film. The score could have easily been forgettable, but thanks to Frizzi, the film has added suspense and atmosphere . It especially works wonderful during the murder sequences, as the music builds up to a gruesome crescendo. The fact that he’s involved in this film immediately gives this film a greater legitimacy in the pantheon of genre cinema.

The Great Practical Effects

Znalezione obrazy dla zapytania puppet master littlest reich

The rebooted version of Torch. Image via Rogerebert.com

As a fan of practical effects , Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich was a joy from beginning to end. This film is a labor of love to the Lucio Fulci’s gorefest of yesterday. The effects, which were supervised by Tate Steinseik, are mostly all practical. We don’t get see CGI puppets slashing people’s throats with CGI blood spewing from their veins. Nope. These puppets are as advertised, coming to life through invisible rods and wires (which, granted, was probably done through CG), with camera trickery to hide the ‘puppet master’ with excessive blood pouring through latex prosthetics. It all looks beautifully disgusting.

It also features probably the best decapitation scene in the last decade. It has to be seen to be believed.

The Terrible Things that Happen to People Who Don’t Deserve it

Znalezione obrazy dla zapytania puppet master littlest barbara crampton

The great Barbara Crampton. Image via Bloodydisgusting

The film is undoubtedly going to be an acquired taste. Many modern sensitive viewers will undoubtedly be offended , especially since the murderous puppets are targeting minorities. But there’s a beating heart through the bloodshed too.

Characters mourn the death of their loved ones. One character, who suspects he won’t make it through the night, calls up a loved one, giving his last loving request. Characters who might seem there for comic relief, act heroically, risking their lives to try to save others. While some characters might seem like stereotypes on the surface, we are never encouraged to laugh at their cultural or sexual identity .

Since we have been seeing a disturbing rise of extreme right-wing sentiment of lately, the film does make plenty of references of the horrific evils committed by the Nazis . The film refers to these murders as hate crimes, with the never-ending bigotry being the true villain.

An Underwhelming Finale

Ashley (Jenny Pellicer) and Edgar (Thomas Lennon). Image via scariesthings.com

The only drawback of the film is the film’s finale which ends rather suddenly. Though it opens itself up to a sequel, a prospect I welcome with open arms, I do wish it had a more exciting finale — though it’s hard to top the insanity that preceded it.

But to be honest, I was too satisfied by this point to consider this a serious issue.

Final Thoughts

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is a joyful piece of deranged cinema and everything I wanted it to be. If you’re a fan of grindhouse cinema, practical gore effects or the works of S. Craig Zahler, you owe it to yourself to see this film. Many people might not get it, but for those who do, they know they have an instant classic on their hands.

The rebooted version of Blade. Image via Birth.Movies.Death.

Thank you for reading! What are you thoughts on Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich? Comment down below!

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Chris van Dijk

A thirty-something writer currently living in Poland. One day he dreams about writing, directing, and starring in his own movie. In order to stop it from becoming a snoozefest, he's planning to fill the screen with excessive nudity and gore. And chainsaw duels. Why not? Chris loves high-art cinema and pure unadulterated schlock. He can talk just as much about the brilliance of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries as he can about Miami Connection. When he's not writing for MovieBabble, he's working on his own stories. These stories star a host of dysfunctional characters that in no way resemble his own fractured psyche. He hopes everyone will be good to each other. He rightly believes dogs are superior to humans, and that all dogs will go to heaven.

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We Watched and Ranked Every Single ‘Puppet Master’ Film, Including ‘The Littlest Reich’

The Puppet Master franchise is put under the microscope, with every film in the surprisingly long series, being ranked accordingly.

“We have children to enchant.”

Horror typically lives and dies off of recognition.

Freddy Krueger. Jason Voorhes. Michael Myers. These are all horror icons that are in the ether and whether you’ve seen any of their films or not, you’ve no doubt heard of them. Most horror that ends up turning into a franchise— Hellraiser, Amityville Horror, Saw, Scream , even Leprechaun —are properties that share that same degree of recognition. And yet, maybe you’ve never even heard of the Puppet Master films. Surprisingly, after a staggering twelve films, the Bodega Bay Inn doesn’t conjure up the same terror as Camp Crystal Lake. My association with the movies is certainly from the foregone era of video rental stores where you could aimlessly wander through the horror aisle, looking at cover art and cataloging titles in your brain. I didn’t bite the bullet then, but their distinctly ridiculous covers, paired with the plentiful amount of films in the franchise solidified it as a series that would continue to rattle about my curiosity until I gave in.

Part of the Puppet Master series’ quirky charm is due to it being such an underdog of a franchise. It’s a series that has always strived to be more than it is. Every good horror franchise gives you a great mascot, and Puppet Master gives you five , and yet it’s still largely remained a footnote to the larger beats of horror. For whatever reason, it’s never been able to truly penetrate the mainstream and reach the next level. Now that S. Craig Zahler ( Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, both of which contain some of the most brutal scenes I’ve ever seen in film in recent years), Sonny Laguna, and Tommy Wiklund, have rebooted the series, so to speak, with the impressive Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich , it seems only fitting to rank the lengthy series of films from best to worst. And if you’re new to the world of Andre Toulon and his miraculous, murderous puppets, then this will be the perfect puppet primer to tell you when to jump in!

1. Puppet Master II: His Unholy Creation

Sequels can sometimes crumble under the weight of the first film’s success, but with the original Puppet Master merely being a moderately strong start to things, Puppet Master II gets every opportunity to expand on the ideas, but with none of the baggage of setting things up. This sequel follows the creative idea of the puppets using Toulon’s rebirth formula on his own corpse to bring him back to life. Due to Toulon’s corpse conduit being…you know—a corpse—he’s eager to find a new host, as well as one for his beloved Elsa, too.

This is a solid concept made only stronger by the fact that Toulon’s corpse status has left him looking like some Invisible Man/Dark Man substitute that’s covered in bandages (which no one questions at any point). This alone adds a level of crazy to everything that’s present right from the start. It’s such an absurd visual to take in, and Toulon’s Crazy Scientist Voice adds even more to the package. It’s the perfect film to show someone out of context and they’ll pretty much be WTF at any moment, which I think is part of the mark of a good horror film.

This trend of over the top villains continues in the best possible sense, with the film also introducing some highly disturbing, giant puppet humanoid hybrids into the mix. One of these, Camille, is truly frightening and a great visual that transcends anything from the original picture. Even the living corpse version that we see of Toulon (not to mention the visual of him slitting his throat and having the fluids funnel down someone’s gaping mouth) during the end looks surprisingly well done. It’s these touches that make this the better movie.

With the kills being a major enjoyment factor in these films, each one feels fresh and is put to good use here. The puppet work has also come much further along allowing each kill to function as more of an impressive set piece too, showing off the puppets in motion. This culminates with all of the puppets destroying the giant puppet, which is a great little sequence of teamwork. This film also gives us the introduction of Torch, a flame-based puppet, who is wonderful and ups the stakes and effects department appropriately. He’s straight up setting people on fire and watching them burn to death, which is a pretty considerable “talent.” There’s also one of my favorite scenes from out of any of the Puppet Master films where the movie goes out of its way to needlessly show Torch killing an obnoxious child. That’s the sort of Puppet Master film that I want.

The film also explores the lore of the series in a creative sort of way. The first film establishes these killer puppets and this film digs into the mythos and embraces it all. There’s a greater confidence with all of this material this time across and scenes that wouldn’t dare be attempted in the first film—like puppet autopsy—are plentiful here. Puppet Master II is a film that feels like it’s constantly on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own insanity, yet it maintains its composure through it all. The reason the movie works so well is because it tows that line as closely as possible without crossing it.

If nothing else, the film concludes on such a crazy note that’s as big an exclamation point as possible. It’ll stay with you long after the credits roll and it’s truly some upsetting stuff.

2. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is unmistakably a “better” film than Puppet Master II, but there’s something about the kitschy, homemade look to the 1990 film that just adds an extra level of creepiness to it. The Littlest Reich without question features more gruesome, impressive death scenes, but there’s arguably nothing in the entire franchise that’s more disturbing than Puppet Master II’s life-size puppet version of Camille and what that visual represents.

The film wisely restarts the franchise in a modern setting rather than returning to Nazi Germany for the umpteenth time. It also employs a simple, yet reliable structure where a bunch of individuals get held inside of a hotel/convention center as the evil puppets run amok. It takes on a somewhat Dawn of the Dead approach for its final act, which isn’t a bad thing. This also allows the film’s final half hour to really go off the rails and just let the puppets reign carnage down on these victims. Furthermore, the people under attack are grown adults, police, and other officials, not reckless teens, which also adds a certain validity to the film.

The best thing about The Littlest Reich is that it doesn’t give one single fuck and it goes for broke, which is exactly what a new Puppet Master film needs. The Littlest Reich even insults the previous films’ tendency to get lost in Nazi iconography, as it takes a critical eye to the past trilogy of films that promised a lot, but ultimately sputtered out. This is also is by far the funniest of any of the Puppet Master films, with arguably the sharpest, most proficient script of the lot, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering S. Craig Zahler’s past efforts. Furthermore, strong comedic actors like Thomas Lennon, Nelson Franklin, and Charlene Yi actually have the ability to elevate this script to something decent, rather than these actors being bargain bin direct-to-DVD performers. Beyond these strong comedic talents, actors like Barbara Crampton and Udo Kier (as Andre Toulon, no less!) also lend their skills to this picture.

None of these actors need to do a film like this, so it’s clear that this is a passion project for the high caliber of talent that’s involved. That speaks volumes for the quality of this film. This isn’t some cash grab that’s supposed to milk an already-dead franchise even drier, but it genuinely wants to make a bonkers, extreme killer puppet film and that’s why this works so well. Yes, it’s intended as a reboot of sorts (and another entry is more than deserved here), but more than that this is just some people having fun with an audacious concept. Strangely enough, that’s not something that can be said for the majority of the Puppet Master films.

All of the deaths in The Littlest Reich are truly masterful and go above and beyond what the franchise is used to giving its audience. Perhaps in the most gruesome murder from the entire series, a puppet bursts through a pregnant woman’s chest, only to then make off with her unborn fetus, complete with the umbilical cord dragging behind them. Later on, Pinhead casually rips off a character’s arms and basically, each puppet’s trope gets pushed to new extremes in this offering. Furthermore, the puppets all have a sort of vindictive nature this time around where after they get a kill they stick around and add insult to injury. They know that they’re the stars here and the film lovingly films these tiny murderers as epic heroes in this encounter. It’s also kind of fascinating to see the Nazi’s prejudiced point of views being carried out by the various puppets as they commit hate crimes for their dead leader. That may sound kind of stupid, but it’s actually a smart incorporation of the series’ lore. It also results in ridiculous scenes like a moment where a Jewish character has to head out and hold a menorah as he poses as bait for the puppets to attack.

The film does decide to cut back on the glutton of puppets that have accumulated through the series (Leech Woman is sadly absent, in what’s really the film’s only downfall), but it also adds some new ones that go a long ways here. For starters, there’s a helicopter-esque robot puppet that not only makes an incredibly strong first impression, but his initial kill turns into one of the most extreme, ridiculous deaths from out of the entire franchise. The same can be said for the new jack-in-the-box type puppet, Mr. Pumper. All of the new puppets, like Happy Amphibian, Grasshupfer, or Mr. Pumper stand out while not stealing focus from the series’ original puppets. However, new puppets that are extra-Nazi-centric like Junior Fuhrer and Money Lender are just offensive enough to push buttons but not cross lines.

3. Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge

After the balls-out crazy ending of Puppet Master II , having part three be a step backward into Toulon’s past feels like a bit of a cheat. This, however, turns out to be far from a wasted detour, with it actually getting a ton of mileage out of this flashback story. All while still managing to be one of the crazier, satisfying installments in the series.

This very much works as Toulon’s origin story so to speak, where you see his relationship with his puppets blossoming in the first place and him needing to put his skills to use during World War II. The film also hinges upon the love between Toulon and Elsa, as well as his affection for his creations, where all of this feels very genuine and connects on a surprising emotional level. It leaves you really wanting to see Toulon succeed through all of this.

This is also the film in the series that introduces Six Shooter—the six-armed trigger-happy cowboy—into the mix, which is absolutely good news. He’s one of the better puppets in the series and throws a nice heap of creativity into the fray. Most importantly, there are a lot of murders up in this Puppet Master film! I want to say that it contains the most murders out of any film in the series. The deaths start out surprisingly early and don’t hold back in the brutality department. Tunneler gets everyone in pretty much the worst spots imaginable. The fact that these are all Nazis that are being killed makes it feel like the film takes license to be a little more ruthless and go harsher with the violence and group deaths. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but they’re definitely the focus of the puppet-filled mayhem here.

Oh, and there are Nazi zombies in this, too! Before that was an overdone cliché in pop culture! It still plays as a cliché and largely gives an excuse to knock up the body count. The idea here though is that these Nazi zombies are the results of failed reanimation tests, which isn’t the worst idea out there. It makes sense that there’d be some trial and error to perfecting Toulon’s secret, but at the end of the day, this is still Nazi zombies.

The film goes out with a pretty fitting revenge set piece. This final death is an over the top culmination of Toulon and his puppets taking the man who killed his wife, stringing him up like a flag, no less, only to then impale him in the most inhumane way possible. It’s a crazy ending that’s literally dripping in symbolism. If you only watch one Puppet Master film set during Andre Toulon’s younger years, make it this one.

4. Curse of the Puppet Master

Curse of the Puppet Master is a soft reboot in the best possible sense after the series gets bloated with all of the demon and Sutekh material that would dominate the fourth and fifth “final” entries in the series. The demons are ditched here in favor of just focusing on the puppets, which is exactly what you want here. The simple repositioning of the films’ premise sees a new puppet master in charge of the scamps. The film doesn’t feel the need to provide an ornate origin story here, with the montage of puppet footage that occurs under the opening credits acting as a strong primer on what these puppets are and what they’re capable of. This is the perfect sort of economical way of reintroducing this world after the (long) four years between films

The puppets end up finding themselves in Dr. Magrew’s house of curiosities, where they’re discovered by the film’s new puppet master, a mechanic who the film lovingly nicknames “Tank.” One of Curse of the Puppet Master’s assets is that it actually spends time on characters and their development rather than simply puppet fatalities. The film even juxtaposes Tank’s talented hands and inner beauty with his love interest’s actual wisdom and beauty in a really touching way. Their romance blooms from all of this in a super sweet way, as crazy as that sounds.

Magrew is also too much fun as a stereotypical bowtie wearing, pipe smoking dad. This is a guy that is just dripping in character who says things like, “Well, I’m going to take advantage of a luxury and read the Sunday paper.” In a similar sense, Tank and his boss are also satisfying stereotypes that feel right out of the painting crew in Leprechaun . The bullies here are also the very best sort who are dangerously committed to their trade.

I understand that this might be a controversial choice to have so high, especially above the original film. But I daresay it does as good a job as Puppet Master at throwing this concept at the audience and living up the expectation of what a campy horror film under the title “Puppet Master” should look like. This is a clear case of ridiculous camp and implausible filmmaking raising a film’s popularity and cache. Curse of the Puppet Master isn’t high art (but nor is the original), but it’ a damn good time. Them calling Jane a bitch and Dr. Magrew freaking out over it is the perfect sort of dated, cliché situations you want in a film like this. It’s hardly great cinema, but it’s a hell of a lot more fun than the dour detour into 1930s Germany that the later films in the franchise decide to make their home. There are plenty of puppet murders, but where is the campy horror charm with stupid teenagers?

It’s kind of nuts how far the film takes Joey and his bullies. They’re about to borderline gang rape Jane in one scene until Tank steps in. It’s really uncomfortable, out of control stuff. Then, they later try to break into her bedroom that night to finish the job! It’s nuts. There’s a scene later on where Joey furiously works out while fantasizing about Jane giving him oral sex while he says things like, “That’s right! Do it, bitch!”. He just doesn’t stop getting worse. He’s the perfect villain, to a fault, even. He can’t die soon enough.

The film still gets some great scares out, too, like in the case of Tank’s nightmare of being a hobbled puppet or having a stomach full of clockwork guts, both of which work well and are practically done to great effect. There’s a failed puppet/human hybrid buried underground that is also great, scary stuff as well.

Curse of the Puppet Master gets the most points with me though because it has the most ludicrous ending of any of the films. Magrew has managed to transfer Tank’s consciousness into a robot puppet. This monstrosity then proceeds to electrocute Magrew in the head while Jane screams in horror as her father dies. Roll credits.

It’s so absurd and doesn’t even allow itself a chance to explain things. It’s not really even the end of the story, but this ridiculous ending again gives the film a little more lasting power than it would usually have. I suppose these films also do have a history with WTF abrupt endings but this is just madness in the best possible sense.

5. Puppet Master

The original film that started it all, with Charles Band surely having no idea how much of an impression these creepy characters would leave on their audience. The film is grabbing right from its opening frames as Andre Toulon, puppet master, suddenly blows his brains out as the G Men come for him and his secret. That’s an engaging intro that gets you on board, has you wanting more right from the start, and that’s before the film has even gotten to the topic of killer puppets.

There’s a fantastically ‘80s vibe to this film where a team of psychics are sent to the Bodega Bay Inn, as if psychic teams are the most natural thing in the world. The way these characters “experience the past” is wonderful and feels very era-appropriate. This leads to some welcome recurring dreams that have such a hyperbolized tone and are really bonkers. In fact, all of this psychic material is deliciously weird and off-kilter. It feels like something from out of a different film, like one of the later Silent Night ventures or some manic Carpenter entry. Even the sterile white rooms from the dreams aren’t a look typically associated with Puppet Master . There’s also a particularly over the top performance by Neil Gallagher, the guy pulling the strings on all of this, with everyone being the trope-y sort of characters that you want in something pulpy like this.

It would have been interesting if this psychic angle was what was doubled down on in subsequent sequels, rather than the Nazi material because who knows what fruit that could bear. Imagine people getting into the heads of these puppets and seeing what they’ve been through or even temporarily possessing these puppets and acting as them? That feels a whole lot more interesting than just throwing in pint-sized demons and turning the puppets into de facto heroes.

A crucial factor here is that all of the puppets get in a good, frightening kill in this establishing venture, with their specific gimmicks all feeling fun rather than derivative like in later films where it’s like they’re not even trying. These deaths are all well executed and high in the gore department. Jester is still a bit of an anomaly since his “talent” essentially just sees his expression changing as a gag, never as a means of actually hurting anyone. I don’t think he ever gets a solo kill in during the entire franchise. There’s a weird side story to explore there, I’m sure, digging into Jester’s puppet psyche…

Band’s excitement with this universe is also very clear, with creative touches being in play to show off the film’s puppet subject matter. Low angle POV shots from the puppets’ perspective are such a great idea and establish a voice very early on in this quirky horror series. That voice is further accentuated in truly shocking deaths like the initial Leech Woman leech expulsion. This kill is a pretty big deal and put together in a very impressive fashion. It’s kind of ridiculous that the victim mistakes a puppet’s kisses for a woman’s, but that just adds to the absurdity of it all. It’s commendable that they could pull something like this off, even in the first picture. The series’ ambition certainly didn’t stop there though.

6. Puppet Master 4: The Demon

I think that ultimately Puppet Master 4 gets a worse reputation than it deserves. It is still very much a fun piece of horror with some wonderfully campy ‘90s moments and characters, but it also introduces demons into the series and pivots Toulon’s puppets into good guys, which holds this title back from being a classic. That’s the direction that 4 and 5 take, which is a bit of a bummer, but the puppet mayhem is still in wide supply. Rick Myers is also a worthy addition to take on the mantle of puppet master, too.

“The magic that gives my puppets life was stolen from a tribe of ancient, Egyptian sorcerers, who pledged their allegiance to the demon lord, Sutekh.” This pretty succinctly sums up the series’ new direction and current focus. The craziest thing about this is the series acts as if this was always a part of the story when there’s never been a trace of it prior, That’s like going ahead and claiming that Jason Voorhes was abducted by aliens or Michael Myers is also a werewolf and saying it’s always been canon, It almost feels like Brand and DeCoteau just came into some demon puppets and wanted to turn demons into demonade.

This whole demon mythos dominates a lot of these pictures though and basically, these tiny totem demons are there to act as puppet-sized foes for the puppets to annihilate rather than humans. This was never an aspect that felt missed in the series though, and it comes off as being pretty cheesy. The giant demon, Sutekh, rings more silly than menacing, which is kind of a crucial detail. He looks like a rejected Beetleborgs villain, which is simultaneously awful and wonderful. They’ve done such a good job with miniatures in this series that it’s laughable that they struggle with bigger man-in-suit fare so badly

There is also the treat of getting a new puppet added to the roster in the form of Decapitron, a little more avant-garde of a puppet who contains Toulon’s soul and wield electricity powers. In fact, this marks a point in the series where electricity becomes a fun, flashy toy that they can’t get enough of. Lasers and lightning are all over the place here. There’s even a glorious, lengthy laser tag sequence that’s meant to function as efficient puppet training but is just a screaming reminder of the time period it’s taking place in. There’s even a reintroduction of psychic characters—for no reason at all other than to move things back to this sillier direction for the series. Puppet Master 4 takes a lot of bold swings, not all of which work, but it’s still a satisfying time with these creations.

7. Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter

Puppet Master 5 very much feels like the second-half of Puppet Master 4 , with this one picking up right after the events of the previous film with Rick in a police station getting grilled over the murders from the past film. Flashbacks are used to fill in much of the previous film in a very clunky way. Plenty of stuff that doesn’t need to be shown is detailed, including copious laser tag footage.

There’s a bit of a different structure to this one with much of the film working as a rescue mission to get Rick and Blade reunited with the rest of the puppets. They’re in the danger of a corporate shill who wants them as well as Toulon’s secret formula, which will bring him in a nice cash reward from his “sponsors.” Meanwhile, frequent scenes in Sutekh’s dimension show him trying to invade the real world and gain increasing power.

It’s a little disappointing that there’s no real violence until 45 minutes into this one, and even then it’s usually just the totem demons scratching people’s faces. There are a lot of puppet versus demon scenes, with every totem that dies somewhat reducing Sutekh’s power. They do manage to fit in a scene where Torch sets someone on fire and they then proceed to fall down an elevator shaft, so it’s not all losses. While feeling like average Puppet Master in many respects, it’s still an interesting entry in the series, if only to see how it decides to wrap things up.

8. Retro Puppet Master

Here’s where the massive drop off in the series begins, with the final five titles here being much worse than the seven that precede them. Retro Puppet Master feels like the “Jack’s tattoo” episode of LOST of these sequels. The film is based around the idea of exploring how a young Andre Toulon learned Egyptian to do the spells necessary to achieve his puppet work. At this point, the franchise is really scraping the barrel in the series’ lore with this unexplored chapter really not needing to be dug into. They’d be better off to just do a one-off with a new puppet master rather than being burdened with this intricate backstory. These are killer puppets! No one cares about the rest!

Early on a young Toulon meets a dying sorcerer (yup) who doesn’t want his craft to die with him, so he passes it onto Toulon. A nonplussed Toulon responds with, “I get it, you’re a 300-year-old sorcerer from Egypt and you want to teach me the secret to life?” This leads to them stumbling upon a corpse and using magic upon it (which is the first of many sequences of cheesy special effects), which is a solid enough sequence that’s different from the rest of the series, as this film chooses to unpack the resurrection aspect of the films a little more.

This stems into mummies being conjured back to life with preliminary puppet master magic—something that’s simultaneously both stupid and brilliant. I guess I like the idea of mummies being the proto-puppets, but this same sort of concept is played within Puppet Master III with the experimental Nazi zombies that are created, ultimately making this feel like more of the same.

There is a certain charm to seeing a young Toulon in 1902 France making rudimentary versions of the puppets that we’ve grown to love, as well as ones that obviously fell to the wayside through his revisions, like Cyclops (whose design is great, in my opinion) and Dr. Death. Even getting some sort of scene that explains what happened to these reject puppets would have been appreciated, and wouldn’t have been hard to pull off. I also love this version of Toulon where he’s treated like some Liberace-esque, Dawson Leary-looking misunderstood artist. He’s shown as a beautiful soul who can’t express himself properly.

His puppet shows are genuinely interesting to watch as well, and I can’t help but imagine what someone like Tim Burton would have done with this material, if this prequel story were its own self-contained film. There’s a lot to mine from the backdrop that’s established here.

Retro Puppet Master takes its time to dig into young Toulon while fleshing him and his relationships out. “Make some girl puppets—some naked ones,” is a glimpse of this version of Toulon caught in a puppet sex comedy while on this bizarre journey. The film almost tries to play itself off as a humble romantic comedy between Toulon and an impassioned fan, weirdly enough. It’s 35 minutes before any puppet resurrection begins, and then not 45 until any murders are happening (and even then, it’s really just like three set pieces). But as far as backstory goes, it’s a gold mine. We even see Toulon and Elsa (you know, the woman who would become Leech Woman) meet for the first time. It just repeatedly feels like this is a movie that wants to be anything other than a horror film. It’s very much The Wizard and Glass of the series, if you know what I mean.

The film also chooses to frame itself as some sort of bedtime story that Toulon is telling his puppets in the present, which is so ridiculous, it kind of works. It’s yet another element that certainly isn’t needed though. The same can be said for the tired Dark City/The Adjustment Bureau rejects using magic to attempt to take down puppet science. It doesn’t help that there’s some truly atrocious acting going on from all of the supporting characters and extras; like extremely stilted work.

Unfortunately Retro Puppet Master contributes to a wide feeling that nothing really happens—and in the boring way, not the mockingly fun way—with there being very little pay-off behind it all. The real interest of this film is in adding to the series’ mythology, while even introducing new puppets into the fold, too. It’s just a shame that something with the same backdrop couldn’t have moved at a much faster, bloodier pace. You barely remember that there are deaths in this.

9. Puppet Master: Axis Termination

Puppet Master: Axis Termination is arguably the strongest film of the “Axis Trilogy” (and notably directed by the series’ creator, Charles Band, at that), but that’s truly not saying much. This effort is still a pale shadow of what the original films were all about. Axis Termination tries to make some bold decisions and catch the audience off guard, like how Danny and Beth, the two leads that survive from the previous Axis films are unceremoniously killed off in the film’s opening minutes, almost as if to say “fuck you” to everything that they and the audience endured through the previous two entries. The puppets then team up with a group of Allied Operatives with superpowers as they vow to end this Nazi threat once and for all. That’s not a terrible premise for a film and Axis Termination at least fully understands how stupid it is and mostly acts like it just wants to get out of this party before it’s too late.

What’s also interesting here is that Axis Termination feels like the offspring of both extremes of this franchise. It heavily leans into both the Nazi angle, as well as the supernatural magic power direction that Puppet Master 4-6 play around with. However, Axis Termination really embraces the camp here and basically creates a supernatural Avengers of sorts, each with their own psychic powers like telekinesis or a voodoo priestess, none of which exactly makes sense, but it at least has fun with all of this instead of wading through dour Nazi imagery. While Axis Termination remains the bloodiest of Band’s sequels, it’s also arguably the most colorful and the director finally starts to make some ambitious decisions when it comes to the film’s lighting and style. There are seriously moments in this movie where it feels like you’ve maybe stumbled into a Mario Bava picture.

While this is far from a “good” film, what is admirable about it is just how absurd it’s willing to take things. The film self-describes itself as the final film in this trilogy and it’s clear that it plans to go out with as bloody and wild of a finish as possible. It’s worth noting that the following reboot in the series, The Littlest Reich, takes the same approach, but it brings a level of skill to the project whereas all of this Axis fodder is impossibly lost in the territory of camp. That being said, this film deserves some credit for its insane choices like its syringe glove that would likely even give Freddy Krueger nightmares.

10. Puppet Master: Axis of Evil

Axis of Evil does some interesting things right away by taking place immediately before Toulon’s infamous suicide that kicks off the original Puppet Master . The film then shows us that there was actually more to this sequence, involving a war-hungry, crippled cobbler, Danny Coogan, in the Bodega Bay Inn’s basement that was on his way to meet Toulon before his suicide. The cobbler ends up taking some of Toulon’s puppets and secrets, and heads back to war country accordingly.

While the time period and climate very much hang over the film’s head, it’s still comforting to see the movie returning to the fun, low-angle puppet POV shots that the original films played with so well—even if they are just largely cribbing on the same sequence from out of the first film. It marks an appreciated respect for the franchise’s history.

A lot of the story here has to deal with Danny and his brother, eager to enlist and fight in the war for their country. Like many of the later entries in the Puppet Master series, this one takes its time with it not being 45 minutes until Danny and his brother’s malaise leads to any considerable puppet action. And after that point, there’s really only two major death pieces to speak of. Thankfully the film does throw some new puppets at us (and it’s about time), it’s just a shame that they have to be so steeped in the xenophobic times that these films are set. The “Ninja”-looking puppet is simply named Ninja, and is introduced extremely late in the game and feels more like an afterthought. There’s some particularly embarrassing material involving a geisha that also cranks up the cringe meter.

Really the best part of the movie is seeing the film integrate Leech Woman with the film’s inherent Asian flavor. A ridiculous scene—which is also maybe the only piece of the film that you really need to watch—sees her spewing leeches into someone’s sushi, them being eaten obliviously, and it killing them from the inside out. It’s a sequence better than anything out of the past two films and actually one of the better kills to come out of the series in some time.

In spite of any missteps taken here, Axis of Evil opens the larger question as to whether Band always intended for Puppet Master to be such a companion piece to Nazism, or if he just found a niche from the series’ chronology that made sense to explore further. It’s a shame that the other Puppet Master trilogy that was supposed to happen post-part 5 that was a big love letter to the classic Universal monster movies and Hammer films never ended up coming together, with this instead being the trilogy that the franchise would ultimately be known for. Each film in this proposed trilogy would have taken on a different classic monster, from Dracula, to Frankenstein’s Monster, to the Mummy. Arguably still a contentious direction for the series to take, it’s one that’s still undeniably more fun than this rabbit hole into the Reich.

11. Puppet Master X: Axis Rising

Axis Rising picks up right where the previous film left off, but manages to up the stakes considerably. Now Danny is looking to use Toulon’s formula to bring to life an army of immortal soldiers to battle the Nazis. On the other side of things, the Nazis are trying to build a Resurrection Device using the same science in order to make sure their army is unstoppable. Take a second to process those sentences because that almost doesn’t even feel like a Puppet Master movie, but rather the premise to some grindhouse venture where science fiction is the key to winning some “What If?” version of WWII. Unfortunately, it’s not as bonkers of a ride as it should be.

A lot of the film spends time on Danny, his Peggy Carter-esque girlfriend, and her crotchety drill sergeant father as they all struggle to live together in this weird dynamic. Again, this isn’t a premise that you exactly need in a Puppet Master film, but it continues the ongoing “persevering for love theme” present, I suppose.

There’s graciously some murder present right out of the gate in the film’s cold open, but honestly, a lot of this film is just the bad guys posturing their evil plan while very little actually goes on.

Some goodwill is earned on the film’s behalf by the Nazi zombie warrior rejects having legitimately horrifying make-up and looking like something reminiscent of The Fly . I’d be much more entertained if the film took the direction of looking at failed puppet master experiments and the ensuing body horror that accompanies it. Axis Rising , alas, merely broaches the topic.

On the plus side, the film does contain the Nazis creating their own brand of puppets, Blitzkrieg, Bombshell, Weremacht (who arguably does nothing), and Kamikaze (a tremendous Asian stereotype). It is nice to get some new puppets (and it’s this introduction of new puppets that alone elevates this from a 2.5 to a 3 out of 10), as well as the inevitable puppets versus puppets showdown that it leads to. There is even a stupid puppet “catfight” scene where Leech Woman and Bombshell slap each other and have at it.

The film is also just a bombardment of gratuitous busty Nazi dames (complete with riding crop) that are meant to be eye candy. The film also gets pretty “Master Race-y” for a while as you just watch Aryans macking on each other. The film has you spend a lot of time with Nazis, and while admittedly a lot of them are stereotypes, you do acclimate to them some. This is a weird headspace to find yourself in, especially when so much of Puppet Master’s theme is about the underdog overcoming odds.

As disappointing as these “ Axis ” entries are, they found enough of an audience to greenlight Puppet Master: Axis Termination , the final part of this “Axis Trilogy” that brings this saga of tiny historically-based terror to a close. These later films are just slower than the original ones and are arguably more about the war than puppets, and debatably resembling bizarro historical dramas more than horror films. Hopefully, this balance will be reconciled some in the final piece of this story.

12. Puppet Master: The Legacy

This is it, guys. Nadir city. Right off the bat, let me say that this might be the worst movie that I’ve ever seen . The thing barely even earns the right to be called a movie. I used to think Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 was the laziest, most insulting sequel that I’d ever seen with how egregiously it reuses footage. The Legacy not only goes even further in the recycling department, but it’s got a shorter runtime to boot, and is lacking anything like SNDN2’s bewildering “Garbage Day” sequence. At least SNDN2 is fun in how it insults you…

This spectacle is a mere seventy minutes long and only seven minutes feature new footage! How can they get away with that! The credits (which steal their idea from the superior Curse of the Puppet Master ) even state, “Additional Material Written by Gabriel Yarbrough” so as to make an actual distinction between how much of the script is recycled material. This entire “movie” should just be a DVD extra or special that airs on TV that primes you for the next film, catching up the initiated, not a film unto itself. It’s just such an insult, especially when it kills so many beloved characters off screen and reveals it all through clunky exposition.

The basic structure of this begins with a forced, “Okay Puppet Master, tell me everything…” and then the film immediately going into recycled footage. So much of the initial flashbacks that are shown are only from the previous film too, making their inclusion even less necessary. Basically, The Legacy gives you approximately fifteen or thirty seconds in the present as Toulon’s tape recorder is being listened to, before then shifting back into footage from previous films. It’s all just wraparound material.

When a story does manage to reveal itself through all of this, it focuses on the idea of Toulon’s puppets wanting to have their magic reversed and be turned back into humans—an ending that would actually be pretty fitting to everything and connecting back to these restless spirits receiving autonomy. The concept of puppets wanting revenge on their puppet master and hating their “life” is an interesting one, but immediately wasted. I also actually kind of like the idea of an assassin being hired to take out the current puppet masters so someone new can inherit them. That being said, the execution of all of this is done in the worst possible way and hits every cliché in the lady spy handbook.

Almost half of this movie’s flashbacks are devoted to young Toulon and events that happen pre- Puppet Master , which I guess makes sense for a film that’s interested in the formula to life. These aren’t the fun clips from the series that the fans want to re-visit! Show us stuff from the good films. Show us crazy giant puppet lady, Camille! Granted, the flashbacks do eventually get into the events of Puppet Master 4 and 5 (they even get Baker from Puppet Master 4 to record a fancy new voiceover to fill in gaps rather than actually having him appear), but the film still shows so much of useless content that is only relevant to the actual films in their original context. The supercuts that they assemble don’t even make sense without watching the original films and are left feeling super disjointed. It’s like these people have no idea on how to pull relevant clips in the first place, and yet that’s all that the movie is.

The most insulting thing about all of this is that the movie doesn’t even have an ending! A white flash goes off, meant to signify some unseen assailant firing a weapon. It ends on a question mark of a whodunit, as if some big reveal is waiting in the next chronological film, yet it’s something that’s never followed up and even if it was it wouldn’t mean anything! The creators don’t even know how this wraps up. This film is literally five pages of exposition spread out across seventy minutes that doesn’t even have a resolution to fall back on. Then, to rub salt in the wound, the film decides to use all of this as some sort of celebration of the series as a whole, using this horrible non-ending as some sort of finishing touch to go out on. The following text plasters the screen:

“THE PRODUCERS WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL THE CAST AND CREW WHO HAVE HELPED MAKE THE PUPPET MASTER SERIES SUCH A TREMENDOUS SUCCESS OVER THE YEARS”

Clearly, this is meant to be some sort of conclusion to the franchise since no other film in the series concludes with such a finalizing acknowledgment. It’s like it’s saying, “Here! Let this embarrassing excuse of a film be your final memory of it while it leaves a bad taste in your mouth!” Every decision here is maddening.

Over the course of several decades and a dozen films, the Puppet Master franchise chooses to tackle a lot, whether its Nazis, resurrection, or demons. In spite of this jumbled perspective, there’s still an absolute charm to this horror series that so frequently tows the line of the absurd. With such an uproar being voiced when iconic horror villains like Jason or Freddy get re-cast, it’s surprising to remember that the antagonists here are stop-motion, and yet they still connect. It’s also one of the few franchises where the original creator remains involved in some capacity for every film, maintaining its authenticity and keeping its voice—albeit a wonky one—intact.

Zahler’s “reboot” of the franchise has continued to keep the series’ Nazi angle in the spotlight, but the fact that it’s pushed the series to modern times and even boldly goes out on a “To Be Continued…” title card strongly implies that this isn’t the last that we’ve seen of Blade and friends. Zahler and company’s update might finally be the push that the franchise needs to reach some sort of mainstream acclaim. Furthermore, with the Child’s Play series also going through a reboot of sorts, maybe these two properties that are back on the market will somehow end up crossing over. Crazier things have certainly happened. In the meantime, there are a slew of Puppet Master comics that continue much in the tradition of the “core” five films, with the demon angle being a prominent focus, too. Regardless of which of these directions for the series you prefer, you’re not going to be in short supply of these deadly puppets killing for their Puppet Master any time soon.

Daniel Kurland is a freelance writer, comedian, and critic, whose work can be read on Splitsider, Bloody Disgusting, Den of Geek, ScreenRant, and across the Internet. Daniel knows that "Psycho II" is better than the original and that the last season of "The X-Files" doesn't deserve the bile that it conjures. If you want a drink thrown in your face, talk to him about "Silent Night, Deadly Night Part II," but he'll always happily talk about the "Puppet Master" franchise. The owls are not what they seem.

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Not quite ‘friday the 13th’: six jason voorhees knock-offs in gaming.

The final stage of a great idea has to be when it becomes so ingrained in popular culture that it then belongs to everyone . For example, hardcore horror fans might be aware that the original Frankenstein’s Monster wasn’t green and didn’t have metal bolts sticking out of his neck, but the average person will always associate that imagery with the character even if they haven’t actually consumed any Frankenstein -related media.

In more recent years, you can observe the same phenomenon with Jason Voorhees . The Friday the 13 th film franchise has been on ice for over 15 years, but the iconic killer still lives on in the public consciousness as the definitive vision of what a slasher villain looks like. Sure, the recent “Jason Universe” announcement promises to put Jason back on the map as a force to be reckoned with, but I’d argue that his reputation has never been in question – especially when it comes to video games.

If you need evidence of this, look no further than the developers that have dared to feature the Crystal Lake Slasher’s likeness in their games without seeking proper permission from the character’s owners. And with Jason joining the ranks of WB’s online brawler MultiVersus , I think this is the perfect time to look back on six memorable Jason Voorhees knock-offs in video games.

After all, the rights to the Friday the 13 th franchise may be tangled in a legal web, but the idea of Jason belongs to fans all over the world. And while we won’t be including fan-games on this list, I’d also like to give a shout-out to the two playable Jasons in Huracan’s infamous horror fighter, Terrordrome: Rise of the Boogeymen !

With that out of the way, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite slasher knock-offs in gaming.

Now, onto the list…

6. Chainsaw Maniac – Zombies Ate My Neighbors (1993)

A cartoony example of gateway horror gaming, LucasArts’ Zombies Ate My Neighbors may not be a traditionally scary experience, but the title’s sincere passion for horror cinema makes it a must-play for genre fans. Case in point, the game’s familiar enemies that pay homage to classic horror tropes – with the title even featuring an undead slasher obviously modeled after Jason Voorhees.

Also known as Stanley Decker, the Chainsaw Maniac can chase players through walls as he rampages through the neighborhood, with the game never making it clear if he’s a rogue experiment or a slasher villain who coincidentally decided to go on a rampage during a zombie outbreak.

5. Jason – Dead Island (2011)

Armed with a one-hit-kill machete and a stylish hockey mask (with eyes that continue to follow the player even after death), Dead Island ’s Jason is a pleasant surprise for genre fans that only expected to see zombie movie references in Techland’s first-person zombie-slaying simulator.

While this version of the character is rather unassuming when compared to the lumbering killer that we all know and love – with “Jason” even boasting some bizarrely out-of-place dialogue during battle – he’s still one of the most intimidating enemies in the game. Brave players can also find a handy chainsaw inside his creepy shed, with his lair housing a collection of disembodied heads in a reference to the Pamela Voorhees shrine seen in the movies.

4. Maniaxe – Kid Chameleon (1992)

I’m a sucker for great puns, and Kid Chameleon ’s take on Jason Voorhees already has a great name going for it. A relic from a time when brutal difficulty was a means of artificially extending playtime, Kid Chameleon is a legendarily difficult platformer about a kid uses iconic masks and helmets to transform into different characters in order to beat the final boss of a child-consuming arcade game.

Naturally, one of Kid’s alter egos is a hockey-mask-wearing axe-murderer designed in the likeness of the iconic Friday the 13 th killer. He may not be very agile, but the “Maniaxe” makes quick work of the game’s enemies, with his familiar getup also serving as an homage to another entry on this very list.

3. Jiei-San – Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020)

Like a Dragon may have been a strange addition to the Yakuza franchise, trading in real-time brawling for a JRPG-inspired turn-based combat system, but the title still managed to keep the series’ trademark brand of wacky humor intact. A great example of this is the Masked Murderer substory that introduces us to “Jiei-San.”

Another great pun, this hockey-mask-wearing enemy initially appears to be a vicious serial killer pulled right out of a slasher flick before the story humorously reveals that Jiei-San was merely a butcher with a speech impediment who wore a mask to keep blood off of his face while working.

2. Jimmy – AVGN Adventures (2013)

It’s no secret that celebrated internet personality James Rolfe (AKA The Angry Videogame Nerd) is a huge horror nut. That’s why it makes sense that, when it came time to develop a game based on his review show, indie developer FreakZone would fill the project with a plethora of homages to both horror gaming and cinema – my favorite of which has to be the double boss battle against “Bimmy and Jimmy.”

A reference to the classic AVGN gag about Double Dragon III , Bimmy (a giant Freddy Krueger hand) and Jimmy (a chainsaw-wielding Jason Voorhees, complete with his purple color palette from the NES game) make up one of the most memorable and legally questionable parts of the game.

1. Rick Taylor – Splatterhouse (1988)

You can’t discuss Jason Voorhees in gaming without bringing up the Splatterhouse franchise. While later entries made a bigger effort to distance themselves from their Friday-the-13 th -inspired roots, the original 1988 arcade game was clearly counting on Jason’s marketability to boost their numbers.

Sure, the game sets up the action by explaining that you’re actually playing as the young Rick Taylor on a quest to save your girlfriend from the evil Dr. West (another homage) with the help of a cursed mask, but it’s rather obvious that this plot was just an excuse to have players step into the shoes of a Jason Voorhees lookalike and murder everything that stands in their way.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Puppet Master’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About A Con Artist’s Victims Across Two Decades

The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman

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The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman

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Of all the true crime shows we’ve seen, we’ve always had an affinity to the ones about con artists and their victims. Why? Because the most elusive con artists are so good at what they do, they can make anyone their mark. So the idea that this can happen to anyone, including us, makes us want to see how they were caught and how they finally went down. A new docuseries on Netflix discusses one of the UK’s most manipulative con artists, and there is a story about how he was caught, but that’s not the end of the story…

THE PUPPET MASTER: HUNTING THE ULTIMATE CONMAN : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A brother and sister talking to a documentary director behind the camera. The date is February 2020. The director asks them to talk to the camera as if it’s their mother, and tell her what they want her to know about them.

The Gist: The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman is a three-part docuseries about how a particularly brazen con artist manipulated his way into people’s lives over a time period stretching from the early 1990s to the present.

The first episode goes between two timelines: 2011-13 and 1993, where we hear from the victims of two very different cons, by who is ultimately the same person. The first people we hear from are Sophie and Jake Clifton, who talk about how a man named “Dave” entered their mother Sandra’s life a few years after her divorce from their father Mark. He claimed he was wealthy and bought Sandra an Audi roadster, the first time she ever owned a new car.

When they went on holiday to Spain, one of the first red flags was how he played “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran repeatedly while in the car with Sandra and her kids. But soon after the trip, he basically moved in and didn’t leave, quickly turning not only Sandra but her kids against Mark. After both Jake and Sophie moved out, not being able to handle Dave’s manipulation anymore, Sandra and Dave disappear.

In 1993, John Atkinson was a student at Harper Adams Agricultural College, during a time when IRA terrorism activity in England was extremely active. After a friend of his committed suicide, a barman named “Rob” let John in on a secret: He was an MI5 agent and he was investigating the friend’s suicide as well as a sleeper IRA cell at his college. After telling John that one of his roommates was a target of their investigation, he says that John, his girlfriend Sarah Smith and their friend Maria had to leave.

They all hit the road, driving all over the UK, playing “Ordinary World” over and over in the car. Sarah’s father Peter realizes their travel pattern has no rhyme or reason. Six months into their “escape,” she calls her father and tells him she’s quitting college for an insurance company fellowship. As he tracks her, though, he finds that it was one of many lies.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Because it relies so heavily on reenactments, The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman comes off as a fairly generic true crime docuseries, along the lines of Sophie: A Murder In West Cork .

Our Take: The Puppet Master tells somewhat of an open-ended story, mainly because Robert Hendy-Freegard, the con artist at the center of the docuseries, is still at large, living with Sandra Clifton in an unknown location. He was caught and sent to prison in the mid-2000s for his MI5 scam, but he was released after only a couple of years.

So directors Sam Benstead and Gareth Johnson needed to build a story with no ending. Their method of going back and forth in time to show Hendy-Freegard’s history of his elaborate scams help build tension in this narrative. And the scams are pretty elaborate. That’s the biggest takeaway from this series, about how Hendy-Freegard manages to ensnare his victims in elaborate scams that take years for his victims to recover from. It’s not some quick-hit job where he absconds with some money; he plays a very long game, convincing his marks to give him money and change their lives, turning away from loved ones if they have to.

Because the stories are heavily dependent on interviews with the victims and their families, Benstead and Johnson rely mostly on reenactments to keep things moving. But the reenactments don’t really do the story justice, as they feel more dramatic than they need to be. The stories these people are telling are dramatic enough; the reenactments are making these stories look over the top.

Where the story became more interesting was when we heard from people like Sophie and Jake Clifton, who were directly victimized by Hendy-Freegard, or the testimony of Atkinson and Smith, who were so convinced that they were on the run from the IRA that they both went into hiding for a decade. Perhaps a bit more creativity was needed in order to make the show more visually interesting, because the stories being told deserved more than the usual true crime docuseries tropes.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Mark Clifton talking about how he had a “brainwave” when he entered “David Hendy Conman” in Google, opening up the info about Hendy-Freegard and his early ’00s conviction. He’s horrified to find out that such a con man was near his family.

Sleeper Star: Peter Smith made for one hell of a detective, even though he was a civilian. His detailed description of his methodical investigative method made us wonder how he had time to do things like go to work and make a living.

Most Pilot-y Line: That being said, the directors depict Smith as having a map with pins and strings on it, tracing the route his daughter is taking based on her credit card statements. Not only is the pin-and-string thing tired as hell, we doubt that’s even close to how Smith tracked his daughter’s movements.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The presentation of The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman is pretty basic, but the story is so compelling — and compellingly told — you’ll look past the production’s cheesiness.

Will you stream or skip the three-part true crime docuseries #ThePuppetMaster : Hunting The Ultimate Conman on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) January 19, 2022

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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The Puppet Masters

The Earth is invaded by stingray-shaped alien "slugs" that ride on people's backs and control their minds. The Earth is invaded by stingray-shaped alien "slugs" that ride on people's backs and control their minds. The Earth is invaded by stingray-shaped alien "slugs" that ride on people's backs and control their minds.

Stuart Orme
Robert A. Heinlein
Ted Elliott
Terry Rossio
Donald Sutherland
Julie Warner
86 User reviews
47 Critic reviews
2 nominations

Andrew Nivens

Mary Sefton

Alex Holland

President Douglas

General Morgan

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia For the seduction scene where Mary tries turn Sam back with one of her alien slugs, Julie Warner had to wear an apparatus that looked similar to her back with the creature's movements guided by a team of puppeteers and make up effects crew.
Goofs When asked for the town's population, the figure is stated as 10,001. The population on the sign shown at the beginning is 10,079. The town sign writer is not doing his job.

Niven : It's the kid from the spaceship. Get him off the car.

Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Another Top 10 Scariest Movie Aliens (2015)

User reviews 86

May 30, 2021
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October 21, 1994 (United States)
United States
Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters
Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Hollywood Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
Oct 23, 1994

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 49 minutes

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20 Short and Suspenseful Docuseries Perfect for Bingeing

All of these short docuseries will have you chasing that “just one more episode” feeling.

If you’ve got a short attention span and need something truly suspenseful to keep you up at night, may we interest you in an elaborate list of docuseries that are simply perfect for bingeing? The format isn’t new; docuseries have long been seizing audiences’ interests with their haunting plots and tense pacing. They condense complex subjects into palatable portions that are designed specifically for rapid consumption.

Streaming services have breathed new energy into the format of documentary series by green lighting projects that leave viewers on the edge of their seats, unable to put down a new shot without learning what happens next.

The brilliant storytelling techniques used to illustrate the unpredictable nature of real life is what creates most suspense. Whether bringing to light social issues or telling stories about perplexing individuals , all of these docuseries will have you chasing that “just one more episode” feeling.

20 The Puppet Master (2022)

The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman is a British docuseries that delves into the life and crimes of a notorious con man who assumed the false identity of a spy for more than two decades to manipulate and prey upon his victims. The three-part series follows him as he leaves a trail of devastation by stealing fortunes from families and destroying the lives of various people. The most unsettling part is watching him charm his way into people’s inner lives.

A Short but Masterful Deception

Despite being told across just three episodes, the documentary series, under the deft direction of Sam Benstead and Gareth Johnson, unveils the elaborate schemes of a man who was nothing like he seemed. Praised by critics as “unbelievable and unforgettable,” The Puppet Master has a suspenseful narrative that keeps viewers guessing Robert Hendy’s next move. In a way, it is as frustrating to watch as it is fascinating. Stream on Netflix

19 Murder on Middle Beach (2020)

In Murder on Middle Beach , first-time director Madison Hamburg plunges himself into the unsolved 2010 murder of his mother, Barbara Hamburg. Residing in the wealthy Connecticut town of Madison, she was close to her sister and to her community. As Andrew searches for answers and fights to gain access to the cold case files, family secrets are revealed, and longtime friends become suspects.

Sends You on an Emotional Rollercoaster

With raw intimacy, Hamburg brings his own family history to the screen to find the truth about what happened to his mother. His personal involvement and grief add deeper emotion, and as the mystery transforms from an investigation of murder to an exploration of family dysfunction, you find yourself on edge. The docuseries unfolds like a crime thriller; its perfect mix of drama, mystery, and heart leading to a shocking finale. Stream on Max

18 American Nightmare (2024)

American nightmare.

An unnerving but extremely compelling documentary series, American Nightmare picks apart a home invasion and kidnapping case from 2015, where Denise Huskins suddenly went missing from the home she shared with her boyfriend Aaron Quinn in Vallejo, California. The police thought the abduction was staged, but their charges are cleared when another similar home invasion occurs in Dublin, California, by Matthew Muller.

A Harrowing Crime Story

Masterfully told and labeled as “the real Gone Girl ” kidnapping by the media, this three-part series directed by Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris ( The Tinder Swindler ), unravels more than meets the eye. Each haunting layer of deception grips the viewers with anxious curiosity. Short and to the point, it offers a rare glimpse into how ordinary people can get entangled in the most harrowing crime stories. Stream on Netflix

Related: Best True Crime Documentaries on Netflix to Watch Right Now

17 The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend (2023)

Set against the backdrop of privilege and opulence , this series delves into the bizarre but shocking scandals that upturned the life of L'Oreal heiress Lilianne Bettencourt. It all started with a feud between her and her daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, before snowballing into a major worldwide scandal involving Lilianne’s young upstart photographer, Francois-Marie Banier and her devoted butler, Pascal Bonnefoy.

High Society Drama

Told via dramatizations alongside interviewers from real-life people, both friends and adversaries, the story of The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend grips audiences with its gradual unfolding of events. The lavish visuals paired with a soapy storyline revolving around money, sex, family, and betrayal, make it impossible for you to hit pause. The French-language miniseries brings a tabloid history to life in a way that’s complex and powerful. Stream on Netflix

16 Last Stop Larrimah (2023)

Nestled deep in Australia's untamed Outback sits a tiny town of Larrimah that hasn't changed for decades. Last Stop Larrimah tells the story of its crew of 11 residents, who become suspects in an elaborate scheme when Paddy Moriarty and his dog mysteriously disappear. The investigation rips the community's fabric and long-simmering tensions surface, revealing an internal conflict that hasn’t been settled in years.

Leaves you Perplexed

If you’re a true-crime aficionado, then you should definitely add Last Stop Larrimah to your watchlist. Told in two parts and spanning almost two hours, this television documentary series is warm and wry, absorbing and infuriating. All the characters – remaining 10 residents of town – have a novel perspective to share, each offering a deep portrayal of humanity. Despite its tone, the series is quite suspenseful and dizzying. Stream on Max

15 Fear City: New York vs The Mafia (2023)

Fear city: new york vs the mafia.

Directed by Sam Hobkinson, Fear City: New York vs The Mafia is a true crime docuseries that takes you back in time to the 1970s and 1980s, when all five New York crime families – Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese – held a tight grip over the entire city through fear and violence. But a group of federal agents decided to dismantle their decades-long stronghold by wiretapping them.

High-Stakes Chase Into Criminal Underworld

The series is told from the point of view of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By diving deep into the method of audio surveillance used to unearth an intricate web of crime, double-crosses, and threats, it makes viewers feel like they’re right there. The cat-and-mouse pursuit of the mob that eventually led to the Mafia Commission Trial is told with equal parts seriousness and suspense. Stream on Netflix

14 The Staircase (2022)

The staircase.

Inspired by the 2004 true crime docuseries of the same name created by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, The Staircase centers around famed crime novelist Michael Peterson, who calls 911 and reports that his wife Kathleen fell down their staircase and has died. Upon investigating, the police grow suspicious of Michael and charge him with murder . As the case builds, Michael’s personal and financial life is torn apart. Turns out, he’s a complex man with many secrets.

A Riveting Reexamination of Events

In order to unfold what really happened that fateful night, the series cracks open a case with mountains of evidence, utilizes archival footage and examines the intricacies of the trail. Each one of the eight episodes polarizes fans, with some taking the novelist’s side and others advocating his second wife’s innocence. Colin Firth and Toni Collette are terrific in their roles and the supporting cast delivers performances that are just as intimate. Stream on Max

13 Wormwood (2017)

A true masterpiece, Wormwood explores themes of misinformation and manipulation. Its premise goes something like this – when biochemist Frank Olson died mysteriously in 1953 after an LSD experiment for the CIA, the incident was ruled out as suicide. But his son, Eric, refuses to accept this, and checks into the same hotel his father was staying at to find answers. Meanwhile, forensic experts unearth Frank’s body for new clues.

Unravels Decades-Long Cover-Ups

Wormwood is a hybrid docuseries/drama directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris. The intrigue of this decades-spanning story radiates from both the Cold War era to present day as the story of one man’s search for truth ends up uncovering a potential cover-up by the highest government offices of power. To quote Morris’ own words, “What Wormwood tries to do is tell a story about how we know what we know and how reliable is that knowledge.” Stream on Netflix

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12 Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story (2022)

Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story takes a different approach towards true-crime documentaries by capturing a case that shattered not just the lives of those involved, but an entire country, who then became more cautious about the “stranger danger” warnings. The series is about seven-year-old Steven Stayner, who was kidnapped from his California home, and tortured and abused by an evil predator for 8 years before he managed to escape.

A Chilling True Story

Stayner’s story was first dramatized in 1989 through a two-part miniseries titled I Know My First Name is Steven . Harrowing as they are, both the series examine the psychological effects on the family during and after the incident, with Steven’s older brother, Cary, later turning into a criminal himself and was sentenced to death for the murder of four women. The series is quite discomforting to watch , but it also provides a sobering lesson about the world. Stream on Hulu

11 Mind Over Murder (2022)

In 2009, the “Beatrice Six” – a group of six individuals who were convicted for the 1985 murder of beloved 68-year-old grandmother Helen Wilson – walked out of prison as free men after new DNA evidence implicated other suspects in the case that wrongly put them away. Despite having confessed, it isn’t until decades after the incident that more shocking truths about the small Nebraska town are revealed and the real culprits are caught.

Delivers Twists After Twists

Mind Over Murder is a tense legal thriller that chronicles a battle that cleared the name of the Beatrice Six. Through present-day investigative work and archival footage of the original crime and trial, we watch as the filmmakers navigate every layer of misdirection and dodging of justice. Nanfu Wang, who felt inspired by the story after reading an article about it, makes sure no stone is left unturned in this six-episode miniseries. Stream on Max

10 The Dropout (2022)

Another short and suspenseful docuseries that you can binge is The Dropout . It investigates the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the now-disgraced biotechnology company Theranos. Her ambition got her labeled as the next Steve Jobs, and Holmes charmed her way into getting venture capitalists invest billions into her supposed breakthrough healthcare technology. But her claims were false and put millions of patients at risk.

Fraud Carried Out on a Massive Scale

Chronicling the biggest fraud case the medical industry has ever seen, The Dropout pulled viewers into Holmes’ magnetic orbit, starting from her fascination with medicine as a preteens to her exposure as a swindler. Amanda Seyfried plays Holmes with flawless charm opposite industry auteurs like Naveen Andrews, Elizabeth Marvel, William H. Macy, Stephen Fry, and more. A cautionary tale for our tech-obsessed era, the series is “simply too jaw-dropping to pass up.” Stream on Hulu

9 Lorena (2019)

A shocking four-part docuseries about the 1993 court case involving John and Lorena Bobbitt, Lorena recounts the titular character famously cutting off her husband John’s penis with an eight-inch carving knife. The incident became a sensation; headlines dominating the 24-hour news cycle and viewers making jokes about the act. But Lorena’s actions lay bare a deeper story of domestic violence and marital abuse.

One Woman’s Cry for Help

Through intimate interviews with the Bobbitts and those who knew the real truth of Lorena’s marriage, the sensitive series tries to understand the woman beyond someone who committed a salacious act.

Told with extreme care, the series cuts through decades of speculation and offers the protagonist to take control of her narrative and reform battles for women who are abused and traumatized. While maintaining the suspense, Lorena sparks a much-needed national discussion. Stream on Prime Video

8 The Pharmacist (2020)

In The Pharmacist , small-town drug store owner Dan Schneider is grieving the loss of his beloved son, who died due to a drug overdose. After finding the police unhelpful in taking down the dealers responsible, he takes matters into his own hands. But the mission quickly snowballs into a decades-long crusade and he ends up exposing corruption within the healthcare system, which profits from the opioid crisis.

A Father’s Passionate Quest for Justice

Genuinely heartbreaking but also eye-opening, this series follows one man’s courageous endeavor to not only heal his own community but also enact change from the ground up. Directed with immense care, it allows us to walk in Dan’s shoes as frustration with lack of answers makes him stand up against systematic barriers and Big Pharma itself. The Pharmacist is not an easy watch , but it reminds you that there are still good people in the world. Stream on Netflix

Related: 15 Disturbing Documentaries That Aren't True Crime

7 Wild Wild Country (2018)

With just six episodes making up the series, Wild Wild Country is a series you’d want to binge-watch. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, it followed the story of controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who purchased a massive Oregon ranch for his followers, who named themselves “Rajneeshees,” to build a utopian city.

However, the rural locals and ranchers grew suspicious of the strange commune and their agenda, which led to hostility and conflict between the two cultures.

A Toxic Clash of Cultures and Beliefs

Wild Wild Country documents the first-ever bioterrorist attack on US soil through extreme realism. Vibrant in its display and fueled by unease, the series not only encapsulates the truth about two clashing worlds but also lends insight into how toxic leadership can corrode communities from within. Unforgettable, frightening in hindsight, and riveting to watch, the series “opens its heart to a very complicated idea of good and evil.” Stream on Netflix

6 No One Saw a Thing (2019)

Created by award-winning Israeli filmmaker Avi Belkin, No One Saw a Thing is set against the backdrop of a small town in Missouri called Skidmore. It follows Ken McElroy, a “town bully” who had terrorized locals for years with crimes like burglary, cattle theft and vigilantism, but the police were either too intimidated or complicit to bring him in for the same.

In the 1980s, McElroy was shot dead on the town’s main street in broad daylight, but when investigations ensued, no one claimed to have seen a thing.

A Tight-Knit Community's Code of Silence

When the eye witnesses refuse to have witnessed a crime, how does one enact justice? No One Saw a Thing examines an unusual case of self-styled frontier justice through real interviews that reveal unknown facts about the controversial death of McElroy.

Each suspected resident’s clouded understanding as to who pulled the trigger makes the episodes compelling, and because they’ve held their silence to this day, the town of Skidmore is plagued by violent incidents even now. Stream on AMC+

5 The Innocent Man (2018)

The innocent man.

Based on the best-selling author John Grisham’s 2006 non-fiction book of the same name, The Innocent Man brings to life the true murder cases that shook the entire nation between 1982 and 1984. The two deaths in the small town of Ada, Oklahoma, led to investigations, all of which zeroed in on one man – Ron Williamson. His false confessions made him sit on the death row for 11 years before cracks began to emerge in the case against him.

Plays With the Idea of Innocence

Much like Grisham’s novel, this docuseries, directed by Clay Tweel, uses a number of interviews from the residents of Ada, attorneys, journalists, the victim’s family members, and everyone else involved to unpack the tunnel vision and a rushed investigation and shed light on clues that were left overlooked back then. While it does not have an impact as powerful as many others on the list, The Innocent Man is a thriller filled with suspense. Stream on Netflix

4 The Keepers (2017)

In 1969, a Baltimore nun and Catholic high school teacher, Cathy Cesnik, disappeared without a trace, with only her body surfacing two months later. The Keepers dissects the cold case that remained untouched for nearly five decades. When one of Cesnik’s former students begins speculating about her murder being tied to a priest who had been abusing the girls, the forensic drama advances in various directions, proving that truth can be more sinister than one would imagine.

Handles a Sensitive Subject With Care

Heart-wrenching because of the subject matter, The Keepers is also complex, with each of the seven episodes ending on an astounding note. Without ever sensationalizing the individual experiences, traumas and injustices, it tries to resolve and reform a long-standing issue by empowering those who seek closure .

Critics praise the documentary series for “striking a fine balance between narrative structure” while also maintaining an aura of mystery from start to finish. Stream on Netflix

3 Hostage Rescue (2024)

Hostage Rescue , a currently ongoing docuseries that premiered on The CW, is fairly new to the landscape. Its episodic stories center around real-life rescue missions conducted by the brave heroes of the United States and elsewhere to find hostages and bring them back to safety. In the process of protecting themselves and those they love, the people held captive risk everything.

Edge-of-Your-Seat Survival Thriller

So far, only the first episode of Hostage Rescue has aired. Titled ‘Danger at the Door,’ it centers around a quick-thinking mother trying to keep her family alive after an armed stranger invades her home.

Told from limited perspectives, the series thrusts viewers into a real-life nightmare where the victims have no way out but to outwit their captors. The tense environment and anxious moves make for a riveting drama as ordinary people rise to the occasion and display extraordinary skills of courage. Stream on The CW

Related: 10 Survival Movies Based on Thrilling True Stories

2 Sins of Our Mother (2022)

Directed by Skye Borgman, Sins of Our Mother is also based on a harrowing true crime, as well as how and why it happened. Set in the 90s, it follows Lori Vallow and her increasingly unhinged beliefs that she was on a mission from God to save the world. She isolated her two children, 16-year-old Tylee and 9-year-old Joshua, in a web of doomsday rhetoric and paranoia, until one day, she enacted a sinister plan that would destroy families and demand national attention.

Genuinely Heartbreaking

The three-part documentary series , Sins of Our Mother , plays out primarily through the point of view of Lori’s only surviving son, Colby Ryan, and secondarily through interviews from family members (including Lori’s mother), news reports and courtroom recordings, all of which contribute towards stating the facts of the case. Additionally, the series also offers an intimate look at the cracks that form within “perfect” American lives when delusion seeps in. Stream on Netflix

1 I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2020)

I'll be gone in the dark.

For decades, the sadistic and infamous Golden State Killer lived freely. He committed at least 10 murders, 40 sexual assaults, and over a hundred burglaries throughout California in the 1970s and 1980s. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is true crime author Michelle McNamara’s relentless quest for identifying and understanding the still unknown perpetrator through her bestselling book. But she passed away before she could complete her book.

When Perpetrators Slip Through the Cracks

Gripping from the first haunting archival itself, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is HBO’s attempt at picking up McNamara’s dogged pursuit of justice from where she left off. The tone of the series is that of a psychological thriller, with each new episode peeling back layers on a killer who kept slipping through every crack for a really long time. Smartly told, it underscores how crime fighting is evolving with time and how certain individuals have an enduring impact on history. Stream on Max

Jim Henson Idea Man Review: Ron Howard's Doc About The Muppet Master Is Charming But Lacking

T here's a delightful moment early in Ron Howard's documentary "Jim Henson Idea Man," where Henson, creator of the Muppets, appears on "The Orson Welles Show." Recounting his youth, Henson admits that when he was a child he had absolutely no interest in puppets, nor did he use puppets. Welles is overdramatically shocked. "You never saw a puppet? " the auteur turned talk-show host asks, incredulous. Henson didn't say those exact words, but he nods in agreement. It's a wonderful little anecdote: the man who is perhaps the most famous puppeteer to ever live didn't really care about puppets when he was younger. As "Idea Man" makes clear in its early moments, puppetry just sort of happened to Jim Henson. As a young guy obsessed with TV and filmmaking, Henson answered an ad for puppetry on a local TV station — and the rest is history. Henson was a natural, and his career (and puppets) would go on to greater things.

It was a whirlwind life of creativity. And then, in 1990, at the age of 53, Henson died. His sudden death was a seismic moment; I was 7 when Henson died and yet the event of his passing is burned into my subconscious — it felt like the world had been knocked off its axis. How could such a person just up and die like that? Howard handles Henson's death awkwardly and with no real background info. Perhaps that's intentional — perhaps the filmmaker is trying to recreate the unexpected suddenness of Henson's death by dropping it in our laps. But it feels rushed, and "rushed" is a good way to describe "Idea Man." This is a frequently charming documentary, but it sprints through Henson's life like we're speed-reading his Wikipedia page. I wanted more.

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Jim Henson Idea Man Gallops Through Henson's Life

Who was Jim Henson? In his own words, he was an idea man. While Henson will forever be associated with the Muppets and puppetry, he wanted to go beyond that. He wanted to make art, and had an almost insatiable hunger for creativity. After his early days climbing to small fame on local TV, "Idea Man" shows how Henson really hit it big when he joined forces with the Children's Television Workshop to help bring "Sesame Street" to life. This moment made Henson's career, but it also left him uneasy. He was suddenly thought of as a "children's entertainer," and he wanted to be so much more.

From here, "Idea Man" gallops through Henson's life, hitting all the big moments you'd expect: the creation of Kermit (made, we're, told, from an old coat and a ping-pong ball cut in half); the marriage between Henson and his wife Jane; the meeting of Henson's right-hand man and partner in puppetry, Frank Oz; the growth of Henson's studio; the making of "The Muppet Show"; the transition from TV to movies (including movies like "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth," that were only really embraced after Henson's death); and so on. These beats will be overly familiar to anyone who knows anything about Henson, and while Howard presents them in fun, affable ways — mixing media like archival footage and new animation created for the documentary — it all feels too light. The doc clocks in at 1 hour and 43 minutes, and I couldn't help but think a topic like Henson deserved more time. Then again, Henson's life was cut so tragically short that perhaps it's sensible that a documentary about his life should feel like it concludes too abruptly.

An Average Documentary

It's probably fair to say that Jim Henson changed the world for the better, but to Howard's credit, he hasn't made a hagiography. While there are no scandals to be found here, the doc doesn't shy away from Henson's flaws; he was constantly working, he was hard to pin-down as a person, his marriage crumbled. Still, the likability and the talent of Henson shine through nearly every moment of the documentary, reminding us what a massive loss Henson's death created.

All of this is presented in a perfectly acceptable manner. But for a subject so innovative and groundbreaking, "Idea Man" feels rather standard. This is primarily a by-the-numbers doc that's geared to audiences who have almost no real knowledge of Henson, or merely want to see Howard play the hits. Jim Henson was a force of great creativity, and maybe someone will eventually get around to making something that attempts to match his magnetism. For now, we'll have to settle for a perfectly average doc about an un-average man.

/ Film Rating: 6 out of 10

"Jim Henson Idea Man" will premiere May 31, 2024 on Disney+.

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Dabney Coleman: Where to Stream His Best Movies and TV Shows

Coleman’s characters frequently displayed the kind of antagonistic demeanor familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a bad boss or a disgruntled customer.

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By Noel Murray

The veteran character actor Dabney Coleman died Thursday at 92. Coleman began appearing in movies and TV series in the 1960s, when he was in his early 30s, and from the beginning, he had the look and the attitude of a grumpy middle-aged man.

For most of his career — except on those rare occasions when he got to play a lead role — Coleman’s job was to pop in for a scene or two to growl and grumble in a manner that was generally both humorous and more than a little scary. He reliably brought the kind of antagonistic energy familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a bad boss or a disgruntled customer.

Much of Coleman’s best TV work — like the short-lived sitcoms “Buffalo Bill” and “The Slap Maxwell Story,” and the soap opera parody “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” — isn’t available to stream. And while he had roles in dozens of very good films and TV shows, he was often low in the billing. The seven Coleman performances below, though, are both outstanding and substantial, showcasing his imposing screen presence and ace comic timing.

‘9 to 5’ (1980)

After nearly 20 years in the business, Coleman’s career really took off in the 1980s, when producers started casting him in parts that let him hang around onscreen a little longer. He had his breakout performance in this hit comedy, which stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as secretaries who try to overcome corporate sexism by imprisoning their boss. Coleman plays that piggish executive, whose disrespect for women in general (and these three employees in particular) is so infuriating to watch that audiences couldn’t wait to see him get his comeuppance.

Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV or YouTube .

‘On Golden Pond’ (1981)

Coleman teamed again with Jane Fonda a year later for an Oscar-winning big-screen adaptation of Ernest Thompson’s play “On Golden Pond,” a passion project for the actress, who wanted to work with her aging father, Henry Fonda. Coleman only has a small part in the film, playing Bill, the fiancé of Jane Fonda’s character Chelsea, the estranged daughter of Henry Fonda’s prickly Norman. Coleman gets to hit some of his usual sour notes when Bill stands up to Norman’s passive-aggressive bullying, but he’s not the villain of the story this time. He’s a decent man who just won’t be pushed too far, a Coleman character shown in a somewhat more flattering light.

Stream it on Peacock or Tubi ; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV , Google Play or YouTube .

‘Tootsie’ (1982)

Like “9 to 5,” this is a zeitgeist-grabbing comedy about endemic sexism in an American cultural institution. But for once, Coleman’s character isn’t the biggest chauvinist in the room. He plays Ron, a soap opera director trying to get the best from his new star, Dorothy Michaels (Dustin Hoffman) — who is actually a struggling New York theater actor named Michael Dorsey posing as a woman and dealing with the handsiness of his blustery co-star John Van Horn (George Gaynes). Ron’s no-nonsense attitude and wry asides amount to only one piece of the film’s fast-paced, intricate comic rhythms. But it is an important piece, and Coleman is as much of a pro as the character he’s playing, hitting his beats with precision.

Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV , Google Play or YouTube .

‘WarGames’ (1983)

Whenever Coleman wasn’t playing an out-and-out jerk (or a misunderstood jerk, as was the case with “Buffalo Bill” and “Slap Maxwell”), he often took on the role of a snappish authority figure. The richest of those performances came in this Cold War thriller. Coleman played Dr. John McKittrick, an engineer keeping an eye out for Soviet missile attacks at NORAD. When a curious teenage hacker (Matthew Broderick) accidentally triggers a simulated thermonuclear war that threatens to go global, McKittrick’s distrust of this kid runs the risk of making the situation worse. The surly Coleman perfectly embodies the kind of well-meaning bureaucracy that may not be able to adapt in time to stave off an apocalypse.

Stream it on Max ; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV , Google Play or YouTube .

‘Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star’ (1991)

Coleman first appeared in “Columbo” in the 1973 episode “Double Shock,” in which he played a Los Angeles detective who appears in just a few scenes. By 1991, though, he had become a big enough name to be one of the show’s guest villains: a shady attorney who murders his duplicitous girlfriend and frames her lover. Coleman’s character is one of those “Columbo” killers who gets easily irritated by the relentlessness of the rumpled lieutenant (Peter Falk), making it all the more entertaining as his clever alibi gets gradually peeled away.

Stream it on Peacock or Tubi .

‘The Guardian’ (2001-4)

Later in his career, Coleman landed a plum role in this CBS drama, playing a respected lawyer trying to reestablish a relationship with his wayward son, Nick (Simon Baker), a lawyer who has been sentenced to work with children as part of his community service for a drug offense. It is a complicated character, allowing Coleman to show a softer side while still having plenty of opportunities to bark orders and deliver withering wisecracks.

Stream it on Paramount+ ; buy it on Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV .

‘Boardwalk Empire’ (2010-11)

Coleman had another late-career highlight with this HBO period crime drama, which he guest starred on throughout its first two seasons. He played Commodore Louis Kaestner, an early 20th-century Atlantic City politician and business mogul who remains a puppet-master well into the Prohibition era, even as his protégés battle each other for power. Coleman plays the character as a frail but formidable man who relies on the city’s collective memory of all that he built — and everyone he hurt — to maintain control. “Boardwalk Empire” viewers didn’t need to see the Commodore in his heyday in order to understand why so many of the show’s antiheroes were still scared of him. To the end, Coleman could command attention and make people nervous.

Stream it on Max ; buy it on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV or Google Play .

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Benedict Cumberbatch is a troubled puppet master in new Netflix series Eric

Everything changes when Vincent's son goes missing.

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Sometimes, a man needs to make a puppet in order to learn something about himself. And in Eric , that man is Benedict Cumberbatch .

The new Netflix series (launching May 30) follows Cumberbatch’s Vincent Anderson — the creator of a Sesame Street -esque children’s show called Good Day Sunshine — in 1980s New York when his young son goes missing. “I love thrillers, but I knew I wanted something emotional and psychological,” Eric creator Abi Morgan tells EW. “I grew up with my dad running a theater, so I was always seeing the magic behind the scenes. I was drawn to the idea of Vincent in the world of Good Day Sunshine .”

Ludovic Robert/Netflix

Morgan then paired pieces of her upbringing with her time spent in NYC in the ’80s. “As you walk around any great city, you start to see the upper class, the lower class, the underclass,” says Morgan, who won an Emmy in 2013 for writing BBC America’s The Hour . “That became a very intriguing world for me. Suddenly I looked at New York like a forest — so it’s the idea of a boy who goes missing in this forest and a quest of a father to go and find him.”

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That father is Vincent, a “narcissistic artist,” as Morgan explains, who struggles with addiction and convinces himself that his son will be found if he puts a puppet that his son designed, named Eric, on television. "Vincent's a very complicated, talented, but troubled man," star Benedict Cumberbatch says in the exclusive video above. "We meet him at a time where his world's been shaken up by his son's disappearance. He's a man struggling to come to terms with his mental state."

In the process of bringing his son's puppet creation to life, Vincent starts hallucinating a life-size version of Eric. “We’ve always tried to see Eric as a manifestation of the inner workings of Vincent’s psychosis,” Morgan says. “When I pitched it, I said it’s kind of a buddy movie of an obsessive puppeteer and his puppet who go looking for his son.”

Cumberbatch adds, "He's utterly real for him."

The drama also follows Detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), the man trying to uncover the mystery of what happened to Vincent's son. "The show is not only interested in him as an officer and a detective, but as a Black gay man on the NYPD in the '80s in New York and all of the things that he's wrestling with," Belcher says of his character.

“It's really about two men who are struggling to understand their identity and having to confront their own demons from their past and their present,” Morgan says of Michael and Vincent. “The piece is also playing with male toxicity and the things we inherit from our fathers.”

It’s not often that one show tackles trauma, addiction, racism, homophobia, male toxicity, and… puppets. As Morgan puts it, “It felt like an opportunity to do something that would be playful but ultimately would have a dark, emotional, psychological heart and play with the idea of childhood and where we believe the monsters really lie and where we come to realize they really are.”

Eric premieres May 30 on Netflix.

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Supreme Court Puppet Master’s Consulting Firm Clients Exposed in Leak

The consulting firm led by Leonard Leo , the architect of the Supreme Court ’s conservative supermajority, has worked for billionaire Charles Koch’s political advocacy network and a dark-money group that is currently arguing a Supreme Court case designed to preempt a wealth tax, according to documents obtained by Rolling Stone . The firm even worked to promote a book by Donald Trump cronies Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

Leo has played a central role in shifting the high court and its decisions far to the right. As former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped select three of the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices. He also leads a dark-money network that boosted their confirmations and helps determine what cases the justices hear and shape their rulings.

Leo co-chairs the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network. He is also the chairman of CRC. Like many consulting firms, CRC does not publicly disclose its clients. However, several of the firm’s clients were named in resumes that applicants submitted to an online jobs bank hosted by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which accidentally left the files exposed online .

One CRC employee’s 2024 resume says his clients include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a dark-money group arguing a case before the Supreme Court this term that is designed to slam the door shut on a federal wealth tax. Experts say the case could upend the nation’s tax code.

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According to the CRC employee’s 2024 resume, Leo’s firm has also worked for the Koch network’s political advocacy arm, Americans for Prosperity. AFP’s super PAC spent more than $40 million supporting former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s failed Republican primary campaign against Trump this election cycle. AFP’s charitable arm has supported a case at the Supreme Court this term pushing justices to block the government from influencing content moderation by social media platforms.

The CRC employee’s resume also notes the firm has worked with Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager. The employee writes that he “helped generate extensive, positive news coverage” for Trump: America First , a book that Lewandowski co-wrote with Bossie.

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Leo has played a key role in the ethics scandals. Leo reportedly arranged Alito’s seat on a private jet flight — paid for by a billionaire hedge-fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska. He also allegedly steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife.

Senate Democrats subpoenaed Leo after he refused to detail the gifts and payments he has directed to Supreme Court justices and their spouses. The District of Columbia’s attorney general is also reportedly investigating whether Leo has misused nonprofit laws for personal enrichment.

Documents show CRC has worked with major corporate clients as well as ideologically conservative startups.

In 2020, E&E News named one of the firm’s corporate clients: Chevron. The outlet reported that CRC had sought to get journalists to write about how green groups had wrongfully “claimed solidarity” with black protesters while “backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring harm to minority communities. The message’s tagline suggested it was sent by Chevron.

The CRC employee’s 2020 resume file lists another corporate client: pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Like its competitors, the drugmaker has faced scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers for jacking up the price of insulin products that diabetics need to live. While Lilly announced a price cut last year, The Los Angeles Times noted that the new price was “still higher by two-thirds than it should be,” and the company could actually end up collecting higher profits.

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Along those lines, CRC worked with GloriFi, a failed “anti-woke” banking startup that promised customers they would be “free to celebrate your love of God and country without fear of cancellation.” GloriFi’s bankruptcy documents list CRC as a creditor.

CRC has also worked with the right-wing social video platform Rumble, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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John Krasinski Attacking Ryan Reynolds With A Puppet Cracked IF Star Cailey Fleming Up, And I Need Those Deleted Scenes: ‘There's No Way That Made It In The Movie’

John Krasinski fully committed to the bit.

John Krasinski ’s movie IF stars quite the ensemble of A-list actors, however, you don’t see most of them on screen, because they are voicing the imaginary friends Cailey Fleming and Ryan Reynolds' characters are trying to help. However, the director didn’t leave it all up to his stars’ imaginations when they were filming with the IFs, he had puppets that he used to mimic how the animated characters would act. This led to a hilarious moment Fleming told me about that involved Krasinski getting up in Rynolds’ face with one of the IFs, and now I need the deleted scenes.

The moment Fleming is talking about can be seen in part in the IF trailer as well as the movie. Her character, Cal and Lewis (a bear voiced by Louis Gossett Jr.) are interviewing the IFs to start the process of matching them with humans. One of the friends is a shadowy investigator named Cosmo, and when he sees Cal at the table he attacks him.

On set, that meant that while Kraskinski was puppeteering Cosmo, he got to shove Reynolds’ around, get all up in his face and mimic the attack. The actress who sits next to the Deadpool star in the scene recalled what it was like witnessing this silly moment, saying:

Yeah, so there were a few, when we did IF interviews and Cosmo gets on Ryan, and he like leaned over that was John. He did that in real life and was like shoving the Cosmo puppet on Ryan. It was so funny. I definitely broke character. There's no way that made in the movie.

I love this for everyone involved. The scene in the movie is so funny, and it helps show the imagination that makes the movie so fun – as we mentioned in our review of IF . Knowing that they used puppets on set to help the actors have visuals for the imaginary friends is incredible. Finding out that Krasinski had a blast puppeteering them and committing to bits like attacking Ryenolds with the Cosmo puppet makes me love the movie more.

John Krasinski attacking Ryan Reynolds with a puppet on the set of IF.

Critics Have Seen IF, And They Have Mixed Feelings About John Krasinski’s Family Friendly Fantasy Flick

In IF – which Krasinski wrote and directed – Ryan Reynolds ’ character Cal is trying to help Fleming’s Bea work with the IFs to reconnect them with humans. Cosmo is an aggressive detective-like figure who is always jumping on Cal and scaring him, and he’s easily one of my favorite IFs. Meloni’s voice performance is fabulous, plus his Law and Order history adds to the fun of him playing a detective imaginary friend.

Learning about how Krasinski created Cosmo’s mannerisms on set adds to that fun, and I would have cracked up just like Fleming did.

While she said she broke and she’s sure the scene isn’t in the movie, I can confirm it is. However, the moment is part of a montage and it’s quite short. So, hopefully, we get some deleted scenes where we can see more of Cosmo hilariously attacking Ryan Reynolds.

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After explaining the interview scene to me, Fleming also broke down another funny moment between Cal and Cosmo…I mean Reynolds and Krasinski, saying:

But then there was this other part where me and Ryan are walking down the hallway and Cosmo comes out of nowhere. And Ryan like grabs him, and then Cosmo does like backflips. Ryan held him and then threw him; it was so funny and then trips on Keith. Anytime you tripped on Keith, it was just it was over. I tried so hard not to laugh.

How could you not laugh at these moments? Reynolds and Krasinski – who are good friends in real life – are a fantastic duo, and if I were witnessing moments like this I would have broken too. Just watch this BTS video of the two, and I think you’ll get where Fleming is coming from:

Hopefully, after IF ’s premiere on the 2024 movie schedule , we’ll get some behind-the-scenes footage of Krasinski attacking Reynolds and other deleted scenes of Cal and Cosmo’s friendship that involves a whole lot of jump scares.

IF is a total departure from John Krasinski’s other projects , and it’s a family-friendly joy ride full of fun antics like this one between Cosmo and Cal. To see the scene Cailey Fleming told me about, and to imagine what other hilariously wholesome moments Ryan Reynolds and Krasinski had on set with the actress and the IFs, you can catch the film in theaters starting May 17.

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows Ted Lasso and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to Fire Country , and she's enjoyed every second of it.

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Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Hong Chau also star in a return for the Greek director to the subversiveness and ambiguity of his early films.

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Sounds great, but many scenes involving Nazi Puppets in "Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich" are so gutless in their button-pushing humor that one can't help but think that the hotel concierge's insensitivity is telling. Kill scenes, like when a Nazi puppet worms its way into and then out of a pregnant black woman's womb, are proudly juvenile ...
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This movie is really all about reaching the point when it can descend into total mayhem, which it does about one-third of the way into its 90 minute running time. Most fans would probably expect a ...
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