'Axis Termination' is Quality Puppet Master!

Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017)
Starring: Paul Logan, Tonya Kay, Kevin Allen Scott, George Appleby, Tania Fox, Alynxia America, and Lilou Vos
Director: Charles Band
Producers: Charles Band and Dale Cooper
Rating Six of Ten Stars

As a pair of Nazi mystics (Kay and Scott) and their band of psychopaths are on the verge of unlocking ancient secrets that will allow them to create unstoppable super-soldiers, an elite force of psychics in the employ of the United States Army (America, Appleby, and Fox), together with their new liaison officer (Logan), launch a desperate attempt to stop them once and for all. Meanwhile, Toulon's puppets sqaure off against their Nazi-animated counterparts.

The first two entries in the three films that have made up the latest reboot of the "Puppet Master" series were disappointments. But, since I remain ever-hopeful that Charles Band will give me another "The Creeps" or "Blood Dolls", I keep coming back for more. (Also, there's usually JUST enough in whatever film I've most recently been regretting to give me hope for the next one.)

 When the film opened with a clumsy and perfunctory elimination of the main characters from the first two movies, I feared I was in for more of the same disjointed story-telling that helped drag those previous films down. Those fears became greater as those were followed by a pair of talkie, over-long scenes that swept aside much of what the two previous films had been about.

But THEN the film got going in earnest, and I realized that the restaging and the introduction of an entirely new set of characters and a new plot direction in this third and final part of what had been described as a "trilogy" was all about picking up some of the plot threads from one of my favorite Puppet Master films--"Retro Puppet Master"! While the film still dragged a little here and there, and the acting left a little to be desired at points, the return of the full-tilt mysticism and expansion upon the Eldritch Horror Roots of the puppets more than made up for this.

The film even featured honest-to-god Puppet Masters, which the previous two didn't really, and the Nazi Mystics vs. Allied Mystics also helped the film a great deal. The puppets were also better animated than they've been for a long, long time, something which made up for the fact that Blade's design didn't match what had been present in the past two movies. (I have seen some comment they were disappointed that some of the puppet "animation" was done using actors in costume against a green screen. It didn't bother me at all, but then I've been watching Band productions for 30 years now so I've seen far worse.)

Another minor plus is they even got the hairstyles on the female characters right for the period in which the film was set. It's not that I'm a fashion expert... I just watch a lot of movies from the period the last few Puppet Master films have been set in, so little things like that stick out to me. Check out my Shades of Gray blog for reviews of black-and-white movies and more!

While the acting was generally not anything to cheer about, George Appleby and Tonya Kay gave nice performances as the lead good and evil mystics respectively. The characters had history, and while it's not fully explained in the film, he was felt in the performance and it made the characters more real. Kevin Allen Scott and Lilou Vos were also scary as the lead Nazi psychopaths... with Scott being particularly impressive, even with his magical powers being expressed through supremely cheesy digital effects.

While "Puppet Master: Axis Termination" is far from a perfect movie, it ended this go-around with the killer puppets and dolls on a high note. I, once again, find myself encouraged by what I perceive as a general upward trend in the overall quality of Band's productions. Maybe we've hit rock bottom, and it will only get better from here.