Rather than terrorizing teens in a school for disturbed children, the third installment of Charles Band's PUPPET MASTER series takes us back to Nazi Germany where Dr. Hess (Ian Abercrombie, ARMY OF DARKNESS) has been engaged for the Death Corps Project - under General Mueller (Walter Gotell, the Bond series General Gogol) - which seeks to use reanimated soldiers as human shields, but his experiments have thus far been unsuccessful. When undercover officer/amateur puppeteer Lt. Stein (Kristopher Logan, DEMOLITION MAN) discovers that the puppets of Andre Toulon (Guy Rolfe, MR. SARDONICUS) can move on their own, Gestapo agent Major Kraus (Richard Lynch, BAD DREAMS) is more concerned with wiping out dissidence than the puppeteer's value to the Death Corps Project. When Kraus kills Toulon's wife Elsa (Sarah Douglas, SUPERMAN), Toulon goes on the run and marshals his puppet friends - Tunneler, Strongman, Six Shooter, and Elsa (reborn as The Leech Woman) - to wreak vengeance on the Nazis.

PUPPET MASTER III is a definite improvement over the first sequel. Rolfe's Toulon is once again a sympathetic character ("When I call them my friends, it is no mere affectation" as he reveals to Hess why the latter's attempts with the reanimation formula has been erratic) rather than the sadist of the second film. Rolfe had already served as a puppet master of sorts in Stuart Gordon's DOLLS for Band's Empire Pictures; and, while there are som nods to that film, there are also quite a few RE-ANIMATOR-isms - the prologue's attacking corpse, various shots of Toulon wielding a syringe full of green liquid, and the convulsive re-animation of Toulon's wife (albeit in puppet form) - that do take away from the film. It also fortunately eschews the grim exploitative potential of Nazi atrocities (details of the Death Corps Project remain vague, but David Barton's make-up effects may have been curtailed by the MPAA). Most horror films exploit violence and supply more gore than a cleaning company NYC could handle. The cinematography of Adolfo Bartoli (who had already shot Gordon's THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM for Full Moon) is slicker than in the previous film, but the mix of Universal Studios backlots and stock footage are not particularly convincing. There's less stop-motion animation this time around - and what there is is less ambitious - but the puppets get a bit more screentime, and are more endearing than terrifying (appropriate since their victims are Nazis). Scream queen Michelle Bauer (from director David DeCoteau's SORORITY GIRLS IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA) appears as a prostitute.

Disc Size: 23,759,013,770 bytes

Blu-ray Release Date: October 22nd, 2012
Standard Blu-ray case