So many puppet master movies and most of them not all that good. Part III was good, so I guess they thought people wanted more stuff set in the past, thus we have Retro Puppet Master which is set even earlier than the third film! Once again Toulon is a good guy, making his homicidal rage and wanting a new body in the first or second film a very distant memory. This one was not as good as part three and whoever thought villains repeating the same line over and over again should be taken out by the puppets!

The story, Toulon is three miles from the Switzerland border, so he decides to tell a story of his first set of puppets when he was apparently living in France with a horrible french accent. Back in those days Cairo and France were tinted blue and a man considered a sorcerer would still the secret to making puppets and an evil deity would send three mummies to get him, though they hire thugs who beat the snot out of the old man, but later he is shown to have no injuries and he passes on his knowledge to Toulon who sort of likes a girl who leads her father's thugs in on them, mummies kill his friends and he must fight the mummies who then capture the girl he has met like two times...

The only thing this film has going for it, you get to see some rather uninspired puppet play and the story is not too bad, just takes too long for things to play out. Seriously, was it necessary to show Toulon injecting each puppet? Usually a Full Moon has no trouble just having a short film, but here it seems like they padded the film out a bit. The new puppets which are the old puppets are a bit uninspired too as they just look like variations of the ones he created later. When he was naming them, I jokingly called the doctor one Dr. Death and by golly that is what he called it!

So it is a bit of a bore this time around with no blood to be found. This puppet master films got a bit too tame in the later stages. The mummies kill people by holding their hands up and saying die, which leaves no mess to worry about anyway. The fights at the end make no sense as Toulon just punches one mummy and the other is mildly stabbed and sliced. Just no bite to this puppet master and the act Toulon and his friends put on was not entertaining in the least as each of their voices had a variation of a french accent going on!

If you've seen the Puppet Master movies and enjoy them, then yes, watch this one too. But if you are an average person who has never seen any Puppet Master movies, then I will warn you. This movie as a stand alone is terrible. Nothing about it is scary in any way. There's no gore, no blood, no heart pounding moments. You can tell it's all staged and the acting is very B rated. All in all it feels more like a play that was acted out in the theatre, then a well acted film. The story is super cheesy and cliche. But as a fan of the Puppet Master movies, it was nice to see where it all started. I was happy for an origin story.

Rather uneventful (in terms of puppet-action) 7th installment of the "Puppet Master" franchise. It lacks the stop-motion action of Dave Allen (involved with the previous movies). It was nice to see the older (retro-)versions of some of the famous puppets these films are known for and it was interesting to learn something about the origin of Andre Toulon's re-animating skills. Most acting felt a bit below par. Only Brigitta Dau was decent enough. As a 'neo' Full Moon movie, this one would pass the test. As a 'horror' movie in general, I'd have to flunk it. Hence my over-all rating. Being that it's part 7 in the "Puppet Master" series, I actually thought it would be worse. And given that it's directed by David DeCoteau, I expected it to even totally suck. You just never really know anything for sure, do you? Or maybe once in a while miracles do happen after all.