Puppet Master: The Legacy (2003)

Plot Outline: The killer puppets are now in the hands of Peter Hertz who, as a young boy, toured the world with Andre Toulon. However someone breaks into his house and holds him hostage so that he will tell him the secret of the formula used to bring the puppets to life. He then explains the story of how the puppets came to be in his possession.

The Review: I only just found out that there is a lot of problems going on between Full Moon and Paramount, with the big studio pulling the plug on it's low budget brother (which explains why Full Moon pictures have been getting progressively worse for the last few years) and Full Moon have sold the rights to the Puppet Master series. So in an attempt to bring about some closure for one of the series' that made the studio in the first place, this eighth sequel is supposedly the end of the puppets. However about three quarters of this film is stock footage from the previous seven flicks! It plays like a "Best of Puppet Master" with most of the best kills from the other films showed once again and it does actually set about re-arranging the films so that the sequence of events that turn Andre Toulon from a mild-mannered young man into the desperate man struggling to find eternal life are all chronological. Seeing the films in this manner is extremely welcome and does shed some new light on the poor sequels such as Retro Puppet Master. Of course anyone looking for something original isn't going to like this - the puppets are here again but because there's zero budget, the puppets are all just sat down on the table or hung up from hooks. There's little to no movement from any of them and they don't actually do anything. And obviously if you hated the rest of the series, this highlight reel isn't going to be your cup of tea is it.

Final Verdict: Puppet Master: The Legacy is a nostalgic view at the low budget series which somehow managed to spawn just about as many films as Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers did in their big budget careers. If you've already got the others on video or DVD, just slap them in and watch the films in their entirety.

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