Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017)

2017

Directed by Charles Band
Starring George Appleby, Tonya Kay, Paul Logan, Kevin Scott Allen, Tania Fox, Alynxia America and Daniele Romer

Full confession time: when I decided to cover the last few Puppet Master flicks, I was expecting the worst.  I mean, I've seen some of the latter Charles Band films to come down the pike, and they're not terribly impressive.  Imagine my surprise when I find out that they're actually a pretty fun little trilogy of movies.  Not great, definitely not spectacular, but fun, and Axis Termination is more of the same, if not just a step below the David Lean-esque quality that we've come to expect from this epic series.  Wait, what?

A decent amount of time would pass between Axis Rising and this one; five years, to be exact, or enough time for Charles Band to save up enough free Big Mac coupons to set aside the $1 million or so budget that these movies require.  Once again, they manage to push that budget to the absolute maximum, as we get a movie that actually looks semi-professional.  I don't know exactly how interesting the story is when it comes to making these movies, because they really are pretty cookie-cutter.  Got a few actors willing to work for scale and a fair special effects guy to animate the puppets?  You're good, bro.  Then again, there are days where I would love to be a fly on the wall for the making of an actual movie about killer puppets who happen to be good guys.  It can't be easy to make these movies watchable.  How watchable?  Let's get to examining the story.

If you can count on one thing with the Axis trilogy of Puppet Master movies, it's that old characters are about to die off.  Like, severely.  The last two movies were the story of Danny Coogan and his girlfriend Beth, perfectly nice World War II-era patriots who became the new masters...of puppets.  Well, they die here within the first two minutes of running time after a clever ruse that a fifth grader could come up with courtesy of those dagblasted, consarnit Nazis.  It really is kind of a buzzkill; they were likable characters, but it doesn't really matter much since I thin they're only mentioned two more times in the movie from this point forward.  What you need to know is that the magical elixir of Andre Toulon that re-animates inanimate objects is now in Nazi hands, and we need a new crop of characters to combat them.

And boy, what a bunch of characters this movie throws at us.  I'm somewhat grateful for this, because it's enough to fill up two whole paragraphs of this eight-stanza review!  First, let's look at the Good Guy side.  Your star is Dr. Ivan (George Appleby), a dwarf who is also a powerful psychic.  Let me tell you something about dwarves in movies (brother), no matter how bland and/or terrible the material around them is, they always play the role to the full hilt.  Just look at anything starring Phil Fondacaro or Warwick Davis for further proof.  Dr. Ivan also has a hot daughter (Tania Fox) and an ungodly beautiful assistant played by Daniele Romer who gives us this amazing sequence where she does some magic topless that would have set off the Skeevy Paragraph if I did that thing.  Oh, and they're rounded out by the movie's requisite military guy (Paul Logan), but he's barely worth mentioning.

The opposition.  Well, this movie definitely has plenty of them.  Tonya Kay is pretty much the star of the show in this go-round as Dr. Gerde Ernst.  Screen time?  Yeah, she has plenty of it, with her bad German accent rolling out at us the entire time.  The guy in charge of the Nazi operation this time is Krabke (Kevin Scott Allen), a dude who is the foil to Dr. Ivan in regards to psychic power.  They also still have the Nazi puppets (and it still makes me all kinds of happy to type those two words together) introduced in the last film to play around with.  Who else?  Well, if I remember correctly, there's also this freaky chick who uses sex as a weapon to go along with needles for fingers, or something.  I don't know, it's been a week since I watched it as I type this, and this sounds like the kind of detail I should remember, but I don't.  Nobody ever said I was good at this job.

And...that's pretty much it, folks.  These three movies all followed a pretty similar formula, and this one is no different.  The Good Guys have their faction in one location, the Nazis have their camp in another, and eventually they meet up for a big climactic battle.  Fortunately, the puppet fight this time around is pretty good, although I'm getting a little tired of seeing the Leech Woman "spit a leech down some unsuspecting sap's throat" kill.  Mostly because it's legit one of the only things I've seen in a movie that grosses me out. 

There really isn't a whole lot else to say about this movie, other than the fact that if you liked the last two flicks, you'll probably like this one as well.  It's got a couple of likable heroes in Dr. Ivan and his daughter and a bunch of truly detestable villains to root against - and this includes Bombshell, Weremacht and Blitzkrieg, a.k.a. the Nazi puppets.  Still happy, dammit.

Having said that, there are also some things that knock this one down a peg from the other Axis films.  Every movie in the Full Moon pantheon has sections that drag; it kind of goes with the territory when you're dealing with budgets this small.  The method this time is to have this weird power struggle between Ernst and Krabke.  This reaches a head in an extended sequence where the latter uses his mystical powers on the former, only for her to reverse it and talk down to him for something like 17 hours.  These parts of the movie in Nazi HQ are frequent, slow, and kinda boring, so don't say I didn't warn you.

Time to dispense that oh-so-holy rating.  ** 1/2 out of ****.  That makes this one not quite a "thumbs up," but if you've seen every PM movie up until this point, why the f**k not?  And with this series down, we now have two more months to go here on the blog.  Next month, I'm going to be looking at...a whole lot of different stuff!  Stay tuned.