A quartet of investigators from the US Office of Paranormal Claims head up to Scarab Mountain to the abandoned Bodega Bay Hotel to investigate the events of PUPPET MASTER (we learn that the only surviving psychic went insane and the hotel's previous owner was mummified). The team consists of serious Carolyn (Elizabeth Maclellan, CRASH AND BURN), her jerky brother Patrick (Greg Webb, THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE), slinky Wanda (Charlie Spradling, MERIDIAN), hunky Lance (Jeff Weston, AMERICAN NINJA 2), and tabloid psychic Camille (Nita Talbot, DAY OF THE LOCUST). While investigating the property, Patrick comes across the open grave of puppet master Andre Toulon (who killed himself to avoid capture by the Nazis who were after his secret of giving life to inanimate objects) and Camille immediately senses an evil presence. The first murder leads to the team's discovery of Tunneler, a drill-headed puppet that dissection reveals to be made up of a series of gears but no motors or any other indication of how it moves on its own. Camille's disappearance of another member of the team coincides with the arrival of the MAD LOVE-garbed Errique Chanee (Steve Welles, HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS) who claims to have inherited the hotel but allows the investigators to stay as his guests (so long as they never enter his private quarters). It should come as no surprise that Chanee (pronounced "Chaney", get it) is actually Andre Toulon (resurrected when his puppets dig him up and give him a dose of the life-giving Egyptian formula) and he has plans for the remaining investigators including Carolyn who resembles his late wife Elsa (MacClellan plays her in a 1912 Egypt flashback in which Toulon is offered the secret formula by a merchant [Ivan J. Rado, SUBSPECIES] with Lugosi/Karloff hypnotic eye spot lighting). Of course, his plans are complicated when Camille's son Michael (Collin Bernsen, DOUBLE TROUBLE) arrives to find his missing mother (and become Carolyn's love interest).

After a dull set-up, PUPPET MASTER II parcels out its stalk and kill set-pieces well enough between a less predictable story that allows director David Allen (an accomplished stop motion artist whose work appeared in THE THING, THE HOWLING, and THE HUNGER as well as a handful of producer Charles Band's pre-Full Moon offerings) and Band can indulge in references to Universal classic horrors as well as Band's own producer filmography with nods to Stuart Gordon's DOLLS and PUPPET MASTER director David Schmoeller's TOURIST TRAP. In addition to Richard Band's title theme from the original, some matte paintings and miniatures of the hotel are also recycled (although the interiors seem to be from a much smaller although not uninteresting location from the original's Bodega Bay hotel), and the photography of Thomas Denove (THE LAST HORROR FILM) often looks cheaper. Less forgivable is the transformation of Toulon from William Hickey's paternal puppeteer in the first film's prologue to a villain no better than the last guy that earned his comeuppance by exploiting and then mistreating the puppets to his own end (although we can be thankful that the sequel idea set up in the film's epilogue was abandoned in favor of a prequel). Sage Allen (SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT) and exploitation mainstay George "Buck" Flower (THEY LIVE) play hillbilly farmers whose livestock are victimized by the puppets before they themselves become victims. Two of Band's children appear as extras in the Egypt flashback, and David DeCoteau (who would helm four entries in the PUPPET MASTER series including the third installment) serves as producer here.

Disc Size: 21,282,025,388 bytes

Disc Size: 21,282,025,388 bytes