Puppet Master: Axis of Evil

Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: ‘August White’
Producer: Charles Band
Cast: Tom Sandoval, Levi Fiehler, Jenna Gallaher
Country: USA/China
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)
Website: www.fullmoondirect.com

They say that you can’t go home again and that is often the case with films. Once successful series which have been dormant, when revived, often turn out to be a poor reflection of their earlier brilliance. Whether they really are worse than the originals or whether these Johnny-come-lately sequels suffer mainly through a lack of nostalgia, there’s no doubt that the general trend is disappointment.

A fourth Indiana Jones film? That was worth waiting for - not. Star Wars prequels? George, you’ve lost it big time. An American Werewolf in Paris - the dampest of damp squibs. The Lost Boys: The Tribe - ouch.

This is the first Puppet Master movie for six years and, in some ways, the first real Puppet Master movie for 16 years. Let’s take a quick run-down of this perennially popular series.

The first film (which, interestingly, has the title onscreen as one word: Puppetmaster) was directed by David Schmoeller for Charlie Band’s Full Moon way back in 1989. It featured great stop-motion work by David Allen and told of a group of people in an abandoned California hotel, menaced by deadly living puppets. A prologue set in the 1930s, when the Bodega Bay Inn was a fashionable place to be seen, depicted elderly puppeteer Andre Toulon, creator of the deadly figurines, who animated them using an Ancient Egyptian scroll. Toulon was gunned down by Nazi agents but his puppets were hidden away.

Two years later the puppets (well, the most popular ones) returned in Puppet Master 2 and Allen was given the director’s chair on a feature for the only time in his tragically short life. A direct sequel to PM1, David Pabian’s script concentrated on a US government team investigating what happened at the Bodega Bay Inn and encountering a bandaged figure who claims to actually be Andre Toulon (which would make him about 130, but clearly he has not been kept alive by natural means). The secret of the puppets’ animation is revealed to be a chemical manufactured from brain tissue, a process documented in the hieroglyphics on the scroll that Toulon purchased in Egypt. Or something.

I haven’t seen Puppet Master 3: Toulon’s Revenge which was directed by David DeCoteau that same year, but it is reckoned to be one of the best films in the series. In a revisionist move, this prequel is set in 1941, two years after the original. Remember this because it will become significant later in this review. Toulon is puppeteering in Nazi Germany where mad scientists are trying to find a way to reanimate corpses to use as cannon fodder (shades of Revolt of the Zombies). They try to get their hands on his life-giving formula, killing Madame Toulon in the process, so he takes his revenge. Hence the title. This film introduced a new puppet, multi-armed cowboy Six-Shooter and explained the origin of icky femme fatale Leech Woman.

Parts 4 and 5 were shot back to back by Jeff Burr and released in 1993 and 1994, the second being a direct sequel with shared characters and a continuation of the story. These films returned the story to the present day with a new set of people discovering Toulon’s trunk full of puppets in the Bodega Bay Inn and expanded on the whole Egyptian origin idea by introducing Sutekh, Lord of the Underworld, as the main antagonist. Sutekh’s Totem monsters subsequently turned up in Totem; well, there’s something I didn’t know when I reviewed that film. The fifth picture was subtitled The Final Chapter but we all know that final is never final in these sort of franchises.

The DeCoteau-directed Curse of the Puppet Master appeared in 1998 and is the other one of these films which I have seen although I didn’t review it for some reason. It has no real connection with the earlier films, simply taking the puppets and dumping them into a story about a bloke being turned into a puppet. Or something. This was the first film without any stop-motion effects by David Allen; from hereon in the puppets would be manually operated by rods and string in real time (as were, to be fair, many of the shots in the first five films).

The following year’s Retro Puppet Master, again helmed by DeCoteau was another prequel, going right back to Andre Toulon’s youth in Egypt in 1902 (with a framing story set in 1944 immediately after the climax of PM3 which saw Toulon escape from Germany into Switzerland). That was it for a few years until 2004 which brought us two films which are only of interest to real completists. Puppet Master: The Legacy was basically a clips show, revolving around an older version of a child character from PM3. It was at least produced (and directed) by Charles Band. Whereas Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, a SciFi Channel TV-movie, wasn’t produced by Full Moon and so is considered non-canonical to both franchises although it does have a character who is the great grand-nephew of Andre Toulon.

And now, eventually, we have Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, a film (or at least a title) much bandied about in earlier years. It’s technically the tenth film in the series but Charlie Band calls it the ninth, dismissing the Sci-Fi Channel picture in the same way that Bond fans dismiss Never Say Never Again. It sees the return to the PM director’s chair of the ever-reliable DeCoteau and a script from ‘August White’, the pseudonym who has written most of Band’s 21st century movies.

The first thing you notice, if you have seen PM1, is that the first ten minutes of PM:Axis is essentially the same as the prologue of that first film. Editor Danny Draven has skilfully intercut footage of the Nazi agents arriving at the Bodega Bay Inn, Blade running to Toulon’s room, Toulon hiding the puppet chest and then shooting himself - with newly shot footage of Levi Fiehler (Wolf Town) as Danny Coogan, a young man working in the hotel basement repairing furniture under the eye of his Uncle Len (Jerry Hoffman - who was in The First Nudie Musical back in 1976!).

This gives the opening a touch of class and an expensive sheen that the film could not otherwise afford: look at that location, look at those extras, look at those props and costumes, look at that 1930s car. But it also creates a problem, a huge, instant problem which then bedevils the whole film yet could so easily have been avoided. That first, establishing shot of the hotel has a caption, carried over from the 1989 film, reading ‘Bodega Bay Inn, 1939’. So this film’s action is established as taking place in 1939, yet Danny and his Uncle discuss the war and how Danny, who has been classified unfit for service because of a gammy leg, would really love to be in the army, sticking it to “the Krauts” or “the Japs”.

In 1939.

A full two years before America finally got round to entering the war.

Even if this was the last quarter of 1939, after Britain had declared war on Germany, that still wouldn’t cut it. Yes, a few Americans came over to the UK to sign up in the British forces but Danny’s not talking about that, he’s talking about the US Army. Which was sitting on its hands, looking the other way in 1939. Good grief, the tripartite pact that established the alliance between Germany and Japan (and Italy), which actually united the so-called ‘Axis Powers’ from which this film ultimately derives its name (via modern re-usage) didn’t happen until 1940.

Towards the end of the film, characters discuss things like Auschwitz and kamikaze attacks but Auschwitz was not public knowledge until June 1944 and the first kamikaze attack didn’t happen until October of that year.

It’s not like the film is beholden to established continuity. The sequels, as described above, show Toulon escaping from Germany, via Switzerland, in the early 1940s. So there was no reason why these events, which take place immediately after his suicide, could not be set in early 1945, thus rendering all the dialogue references relevant and realistic.

Of course, there’s the slight dichotomy that 1939, unlike 1945, was a time when it was still possible for Nazi agents to wander around the USA dressed like Herr Flick, talking in German and carrying Lugers, without unduly attracting attention. That’s kind of the point of the opening scene and the caption in the original film. But making allowances for the calm ease with which the German agents operate in the prologue is less of a demand on the audience than making allowances for a caption which explicitly contradicts not just much of the dialogue but in fact the whole story. Because this turns out to be a film about a young man, frustrated at being unable to serve his country, who finds he can do his bit by preventing Axis spies from sabotaging a munitions factory.

That opening caption is one of those head-scratching moments which spoils the cinematic ship for a hap’orth of tar. There are one or two other anachronisms, most notably and obviously a post-1960 US flag on Danny’s bedroom wall. I don’t know how familiar the target audience would be with US history during the 20th century and whether they would even notice this, nor have I any idea how easy or difficult it is to obtain a US flag with 48 stars, but it’s just annoying because it lowers the apparent quality of the film among nitpicking nerds.

So anyway, in this version of events, Danny goes upstairs in the hotel to see his friend Monsieur Toulon and the Nazi agents actually bump into him as they run out of the room. Discovering Toulon dead, Danny goes straight to the secret compartment in the wall and removes the puppet chest which he then takes home with him. (Of course, this completely contradicts the first film when the puppets are still there, but who’s counting?) An exact recreation of the original corridor and Toulon’s room enables new and old footage to blend together seamlessly.

Danny lives with his mother (the very hot Erica Shaffer who does lots of TV, theatre and anime voices) and his brother Don (Taylor M Graham: Blood Effects) in Chinatown for no other reason than, well, the film was shot in China. Not Hong Kong but mainland China. Specifically ACE Studios in Nanhai, Foshan, owned by Hong Kong-born Wall-Street-trader-turned-travel-entrepreneur-turned-film-executive Henry Luk.

Luk’s father Bong Luk directed many HK films from the 1950s to the 1980s including some for the Shaw Brothers. His most notable (translated) titles include Beauty’s Head is Misplaced, Swallow the Poison with a Smile, Ali Baba and the 40 Robbers, Lady Lightning Among Swordsmen, The Killing Sword, Bravest Fist and - get this - Carry On Bangkok. Now his son runs a film studio offering full production and post-production facilities to American film-makers at a rate that is clearly very competitive, even with air fares thrown in.

Luk, credited as executive producer, was able to offer Band facilities that he could never have afforded in LA including make-up, costumes, props. visual effects and four whole sound stages. They also collaborated on Killjoy 3 while Luk’s other films include Michael Morris’ backwoods psychodrama Dark Forest, Antony Szezto’s sci-fi chop-sockey Vela 734, Donald Jarman’s Black Sunday-style The Witch and The Blood Bond, an action flick directed by Michael Biehn of all people. The ACE Studios team also includes hardworking 1st AD Fred Sun and Michael Dinetz who gets an extraordinary four-part credit here starting with Make-up Department Head, then puppeteer, then ‘supplementary special make-up effects’ and finally - catering! His previous credits include The Asylum’s I am Omega and Jeff Brookshire’s Awaken the Dead.

So anyway, Danny’s brother Don will be off to Europe very soon to sock it to the Hun but Danny has been classified 4F because of his bad leg. Although evidently his disability doesn’t prevent him from lugging not only his own stuff but also a huge great puppet case all the way from the hotel to his mum’s front door. Only occasionally does Levi Fiehler remember about the bad leg and affect a limp; most of the time he seems fine.

Odder than the intermittent limping is the transformation between the prologue. Working on some chairs in the hotel basement Danny seems, to be honest, very simple, almost retarded. I don’t know why: maybe it’s a combination of the dungarees, the haircut and the slightly pathetic air he has about him. Reviewing this scene, it’s clear that my initial interpretation was wrong - but it’s our introduction to the character and that’s how he comes across. For the rest of the film he seems to be an ordinary, bright young man and the transformation between the hotel scenes and his scenes at home actually left me wondering how long had passed since the prologue but I think it’s meant to be only a few days.

So anyway, Danny is a dab-hand at carpentry and figures he can keep the puppets in good nick. In a nice nod to continuity, he finds Six-Shooter, who wasn’t in the original film, partly assembled inside one of the other compartments in the trunk. Now Danny has a girlfriend Beth (model-turned-actress Jenna Gallaher, also in DeCoteau’s Nightfall) who works in a munitions factory (represented by a nice effects shot). Her boss (Mike Brooks) doesn’t like Danny because he’s not in the forces and Danny is worried about the attention Beth is receiving from a colleague named Ben.

This ‘Ben’ turns out to be Max (Tom Sandoval, a DeCoteau regular who was also in Playing with Fire, Alien Presence and The Pit and the Pendulum), one of the German agents from the prologue, speaking perfect English with a perfect American accent. Danny recognises him and is sure the Teutonic swine is up to no good. It’s all a bit of a coincidence but on the other hand there probably weren’t too many Nazi spies operating in California during the war. (I don’t know how good the Yanks were at identifying and using German spies. Over on this side of the Atlantic the nascent MI6 knew the identity of every single Nazi spy in Britain, all of whom were being used to feed misinformation back to Berlin, either willingly as a double agent or unwittingly as a dupe. Anyway...)

Ben/Max and his largely silent colleague Klaus (Aaron Riber) are in uneasy cahoots with Japanese femme fatale Ozu (Ada Zhou Fang, listed on the IMDB and elsewhere as Ada Chao) who hides from the authorities in a Chinese opera house in the middle of Chinatown. “Where better for a Japanese person to hide than Chinatown?” she asks, neatly side-stepping the historical fact that America locked up every one of its Japanese citizens in prison camps for the duration of the war.

Maybe white Americans couldn’t tell Chinese from Japanese, but you would think that Chinese Americans would spot her and hand her in. China was on the side of the Allies in WW2 and in fact the Sino-Japanese conflict that became part of the war had started as early as 1936 when Japanese forces invaded China. So even if this is 1939, every one of those extras wandering past outside has a very good reason to call in the authorities.

Also, Ozu is in the habit of wandering around in a kimono, which would give the game away to anyone strolling in off the street or peeking through the window. (You see, there was a time when I could have made a joke out of peeking/Peking but it’s been Beijing for many years now and that doesn’t offer the same opportunities for weak wordplay.) Ozu has two black-dressed karate goons, Nozoki-ya (Gu Yingfeng) and Buta (Zhang Xiangfu).

There is of course a massive irony in the fact that all three Japanese characters, hiding out in Chinatown on the assumption that whitey can’t tell them from Chinese, are played by Chinese actors. Who look, you know, Chinese - although Ozu’s white geisha make-up disguises her features somewhat.

Ozu wants Ben/Max to put a bomb in the munitions factory which very conveniently stores the fuel in a room next to the tea-room. Danny discovers this plan when he sneaks into the opera house with Blade and Pinhead, then sets out to stop the evil Axis fiends with the help of his little wooden pals who can move on their own.

However, while Danny is secretly photographing two of the Axis agents in the opera house, the third is at his house because they have discovered that, very conveniently, the guy who took the magic puppets they were after is living just a few blocks away in the white part of Chinatown. In a surprisingly brutal (though not graphic) plot development, his mother and brother are gunned down and his girlfriend kidnapped. Although it’s not entirely clear why this happens. Frankly you have to question precisely why, instead of dragging Beth back to the opera house, the Nazi didn’t take the puppets or at least the puppet chest.

When Danny discovers his mum dead and his bro’ dying, he transfers some of Don’s life essence into a new puppet he has carved, Ninja, a black-garbed little fellow with some deadly throwing stars. You know about life essence, don’t you? It’s the glowing green liquid that we all have inside us which can be easily extracted using a large-diameter syringe. You should have covered that in anatomy class.

So Danny, who could easily have called in the police at any time, heads back to the opera house with a sack full of puppets and the mild-manned moderate mayhem begins. Leech Woman vomits one of her creations into a plate of sushi and it kills the eater from the inside, somehow. Another bad guy falls prey to Ninja’s throwing stars while Pinhead trips up a wrong’un so that Tunneller can drill into the top of his skull.

Meanwhile Max is busy doing what any self-respecting Nazi spy would have done under the situation: putting on a smartly pressed, clean dress uniform for no apparent reason. He’s not really going to be able to step outside dressed like that, is he? What, is he expecting a Fiesler Storch light aircraft to land in the street and whisk him off back to Berlin? Why would he even carry a uniform around with him? Mind you, he’s carrying a Luger and hanging around with a woman dressed like a geisha so he doesn’t have much to lose. It’s like some competition between the German and Japanese teams to see who can be the most obvious enemy agent without actually getting arrested or shot, a sort of WW2-espionage version of who-can-lean-out-of-the-window-the-farthest.

Actually, two points. One is that, if arrested in uniform, even in the middle of San Francisco, Max would count as an enemy combatant and would have rights under the Geneva Convention. But if arrested in plain clothes he can be considered a spy and the US military authorities would be able to do pretty much anything with him, up to and including execution. The other point to note is that this very obviously isn’t a Nazi uniform. For one thing, it’s brown (not just the shirt), a colour which was only worn by senior officials of the National Socialist Party. Also the cut is all wrong, the lapels are the wrong shape etc. We don’t get a close-up look at the various badges but none of them look like eagles to me.

Most obvious of all is the hat which Max briefly dons before leaving it to one side. The flat top of the cap is much, much wider than a WW2 German cap, indicating that this is very clearly either Russian or Chinese. And the peak is too narrow and high; Nazi peaks were low so that soldiers could only see clearly when standing rigidly upright. But it does at least have a swastika armband - which I at first thought had switched arms between shots until I rewound and realised he had been standing in front of a mirror.

The irony of all this is that Tunneller does actually wear a miniature version of a field grey German WW2 uniform, which we never see in close-up and which no-one ever comments on. Although Danny does at least observe the irony of creating a ninja puppet, telling his dead brother, “I hope you don’t mind being a Jap.”

So how to explain this inaccurate uniform without just scoffing at budgetary and logistical limitations? (I mean, where would you hire an authentic Nazi uniform in China? Would you be allowed to import one?) It is of course possible to read the film as all taking place in a parallel world. A world where, by 1939, the USA had already been at war with the Axis powers for several years, Auschwitz was known about, kamikaze attacks were happening, Nazi uniforms were subtly different and two other states had already joined the Union (wouldn’t have to be Alaska and Hawaii - could be Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal Zone, could be Guadalcanal and Guam).

But that’s a cop-out. You can use that deliberate misreading to cover almost any problem with any film. Well, not any problem. It doesn’t really explain where the horses came from in the Planet of the Apes remake. It doesn’t explain what killed the boat’s crew in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. It doesn’t explain the contraventions of basic physics in The League of Explain to Me Again Why I’m Watching This Shit. And it certainly doesn’t explain the complete absence of jokes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It could explain the anachronisms in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, but I’m not going to go down that road. I’ve got another idea which we’ll come to in a moment.

In the meantime, the film dribbles to a frankly unsatisfying halt after a bizarre speech from Max about how the Germans love to torture Allied soldiers in their POW camps. Except in rare cases, Germany abided by the Geneva Convention under the eye of Swiss ‘Protecting Power’ investigators. Japan, on the other hand, paid no heed to the Convention and did torture Allied troops so this short speech sounds very much like something written for Ozu and transferred to Max in a last-minute rewrite.

Ninja, whose eyes glow red to show he’s alive with Don’s spirit, has been killed but he struggles manfully (puppetfully?) back to life in order to stab Max with Ozu’s sword at about the same time that Ozu grabs a sack of puppets and slips away without so much as a by-your-leave or a close-up. Danny points out to Beth (and the audience) that he’s only got Blade, Ninja and Pinhead left so presumably this means that Ozu has Leech Woman, Tunneller and Jester. And at that point it all sort of ends, like somebody lost the last few pages of script. We have to assume that it’s setting everything up for an immediate sequel but they didn’t film one back-to-back with this so goodness knows when, if ever, we’ll find out what happens. The next Puppet Master film might simply reboot the story again, like this one did.

All things considered, of the four Puppet Master films I have seen, this is the third best. It’s not as good as PM1 and PM2 - of course it isn’t, they’re both great - but it’s better than the silly and ephemeral Curse. David DeCoteau, who directed this under his own name, has 28 films on his IMDB page between Retro Puppet Master and this one including Voodoo Academy, Beastly Boyz, three Poe adaptations and all six Brotherhoods. This is August White’s 11th screenplay for Charles Band in the past five years although he wrote plenty of others before 2005 under another name that the IMDB surprisingly doesn’t know about.

The cast mostly acquit themselves well. I know some critics have poured scorn on Ada Chao. Who has the. Most amazing. Pauses like Will. Iam Shatner. But she actually sounds like somebody mastering a foreign language and the only thing that really stops me believing she’s Japanese is her Chinese accent. Fiehler is strong in the lead role, Sandoval glowers well and looks good in uniform while Graham brings a remarkable depth to Don, a likeable jock with simplistic values but a good heart.

Solid cinematography is provided by Terrance Ryker (Reicher on the IMDB) who also photographed the return of those other little wooden Band-pals in Demonic Toys: Personal Demons, released the same year as this film as well as Skull Heads, Dead Man’s Hand and Evil Bong 2. His previous collaborations with Dave DeCoteau were Alien Presence, Stem Cell and Nightfall. Production designer Joe Walser designed Evil Bong 3-D: The Wrath of Bong (good grief!) after a series of minor jobs on titles ranging from The Exorcist III to George of the Jungle.

Gage Munster was the main puppet guy, named in the opening titles as ‘Ninja Puppet, special makeup and mechanical effects designed by’ with an additional ‘special effects make-up artist’ credit at the end. This film adds yet another title to a CV that includes Halloween Night, Flight of the Living Dead, Penny Dreadful, Demonic Toys: Personal Demons and The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror. EDee Biddlecome (Dr Chopper, Doll Graveyard, Gingerdead Man, Dead Man’s Hand) designed the costumes which were all made in-house (including the dodgy Nazi uniform); she’s credited as ‘Edee Biddlecombe’ on screen and I’ve seen her as ‘E Dee Biddlecome’ elsewhere but according to her Facebook page she uses ‘EDee’ (so you can see why people get confused).

Most of the rest of the credits are Chinese names although a few obvious pseudonyms slip in towards the end: post-production co-ordinator ‘Bobby Booberman’, media manager ‘Chuck L Head’ and colourist ‘Lethbridge Stewart’ - a Doctor Who gag possibly inspired by RED workflow technician Tom Baker (or is that also a pseudonym?). There’s an incidental ‘Puppet FX’ credited for Liu Xiang, presumably not the former world hurdles champion of that name.

Full Moon fanboys expecting this movie to feature stop-motion like the early ones in the series were remarkably naive, but then such is the nature of fanboys, unfettered by notions of how time-consuming or expensive (or difficult) stop-motion effects are and eager to hang on any hint or suggestion as proof that a great white hope is coming. No, these are rod puppets, just like you would expect. And not very animated ones either.

The occasional head swivels, the odd hand moves but really they’re not depicted as ‘living dolls’ the way that they should be. In fact, when Beth sees the puppets come alive and squeals “They’re moving!” you honestly have to look quite closely to see that any of them are actually moving at all - and when you do, you see that Tunneller is slightly raising his arm. Wow, it’s uncanny.

More problematic is that the puppets don’t really do very much in the story. They’re neither protagonists nor antagonists, just the tools used by Danny on his first and third (brief) visits to the opera house. The actual story, about foiling a plan by Axis agents to blow up the munitions factory where a guy’s girlfriend works, could pretty much happen without the puppets.

And this set me thinking.

There is another way to read this film. Not one that any of the film-makers intended, but an interesting angle that might actually repay a repeat viewing. What if, what if ... the puppets aren’t alive? What if Danny is mentally ill? What if he has psychiatric problems, as his behaviour in that prologue in the hotel basement suggests? Maybe he was tipped over the edge by discovering the suicidal corpse of his friend Monsieur Toulon and after that he wandered through a fantasy world, unable to distinguish reality from imagination?

Think about it: the puppets never do anything except when Danny is there with them. No-one else sees them except Beth and the enemy agents. The Nazis and Japanese - and his girlfriend - could be twisted versions of real people, which would certainly make more sense than a German officer and a Japanese geisha-girl living incognito in the middle of Chinatown. (Don’t any of the local Chinese ever take a look in that opera house?)

I honestly think the most satisfying way to view Puppet Master: Axis of Evil is as the twisted reality of a disturbed young man. Passed over by the military - he says it’s his leg but he usually forgets to limp so maybe he failed the psychiatric tests - this young man creates a fantasy world around himself. A world where Kraut and Jap spies plot their deadly work only a couple of blocks away. A world where the cute girl he has seen going to work in the munitions plant is actually his girlfriend, a damsel in distress he can rescue from evildoers. A world where he can have secret friends, where his toys come to life and help him to strike a great victory for the American war effort right here on his doorstep.

This is a young man who’s not sure exactly what German uniforms look like, a young man who’s not sure himself of the difference between Chinese and Japanese people, a young man who’s not even entirely certain how many stars there are on the US flag. A young man whose confusion extends to not knowing what year it is or how long the war has been going on. Perhaps something happened to him in 1939 and he has been reliving that year ever since.

It all fits. It all works. It all makes sense.

Mind, it’s all baloney of course.

That’s not what ‘August White’ or David DeCoteau or Charlie Band intended when they made this film. Of course it isn’t. But that’s what they have made, by accident. In creating a cheesy B-movie horror sequel, they have accidentally brought forth a powerful and moving study of the psychiatric troubles of an innocent young man whose world is shaken up at a personal level - by the death of a friend - at the same time as the whole world is shaken up by global conflict. Deep within his own mind, he pieces together stories that make sense.

That guy at the factory talking to ‘his’ girl, he looks like he could be a Nazi spy. That deserted Chinese opera house, that could be where the spies hang out. These puppets, they could be magical avatars that do his bidding. When Danny stabs someone, he imagines that it was really Blade or Tunneller.

I’m on a roll now. How about this? When the news comes through that his brother has been killed in conflict, it destroys his mother and, unable to cope with her breakdown, he instead imagines her dead on the floor while thinking that his dying brother is in his arms. In the film, Don is lying on the living room floor then in the next scene he’s laid out on Danny’s bed. In Danny’s fantasy world, he can use the secret of his living puppets to give his brother new life.

I’m telling ya, the more I think about this, the better it fits. Holy cow.

Mind, it is definitely baloney.

But what if, what if - for the next film, it wasn’t baloney. Here’s where I would like to see the Puppet Master franchise go next: a story about a psychiatrist trying to understand a retarded young man who is sure that his puppets come to life, and obviously they don’t - but maybe they do. Instead of aiming for cheap shocks - and let’s be honest, frequently missing them - why not reinvent the franchise next time as a character drama with ambiguous supernatural undertones? Why not go for atmosphere? Why not play on doubt and uncertainty?

If the ‘natural’ movements of the puppets are limited and look artificial, why not take advantage of that to question whether those movements are natural or even real? If the budget won’t stretch to lots of effects-based set pieces, why not save them all up for one powerful scene at the end that makes the audience re-evaluate everything they’ve been fed prior to that point?

If the Full Moon fanboys are going to get excited anyway (it’s what fanboys do) and buy the film whatever it’s like (again, it’s what they do) and then moan and whinge on the IMDB that it’s actually rubbish (they do that too, all the time)... then why not stop trying to please the fanboys and instead reinvent the property to reach and impress a new audience? It can be done. This is my dream. This is the Puppet Master script I would write. Charlie, give me a call.

MJS rating: B

Puppet Master

Director: David Schmoeller
Writer: 'Joseph G Collodi'
Producer: Hope Perello
Cast: Paul Le Mat, Irene Miracle, Robin Frates
Country: USA
Year of release: 1989
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Prism)

Charles Band has a thing about dolls. You can see it in his filmography: Dolls, Blood Dolls, Dollman (not actually a doll but easily mistaken for one), Doll Graveyard, Demonic Toys, Dollman vs Demonic Toys, the toy dinosaurs in the Prehysteria films and of course this movie and its eight (so far) sequels/prequels. Dolls and puppets are so ubiquitous in his films that he has now released a 'greatest hits' package of clips entitled When Puppets and Dolls Attack!.

Did young Charlie Band suffer some sort of toybox trauma when he was growing up in Italy? He seems such a well-balanced, straightforward sort of bloke that it's difficult to believe he was ever savaged by an Action Man or attacked by a GI Joe. So why this theme in his work? I suspect it's because he has spotted that puppets and dolls make terrific monsters for a variety of reasons.

On a technical level, they're great because they can be animated without worry. Whether they're glove puppets, rod puppets, stop-motion macquettes or marionettes, there is no need to try and create completely smooth and fluid animation. Not only does it not matter if they move slightly jerkily, it actually helps to establish their character. Of course they're jerky - they're wood! They are lumps of stiff wood or plastic and all their joints are simple hinges. What better way to disguise the fact that you're using a puppet to create an effect than by having that puppet actually play a puppet. Consider something like the title characters in Ghoulies or Marvin the homunculus in Decadent Evil: we suspend our disbelief but we can clearly see that these are puppets, even if we can't see who is operating them. But that suspension of disbelief becomes irrelevant when they characters are presented to us as puppets.

So that's the technical aspect, though I don't want to take anything away from the skills of regular Band effects men like John Carl Buechler or the late David Allen. There is also a psychological aspect. Dolls and puppets are creepy and that's pretty much all there is to it. They represent living things and they actually move like living things, but they're not living things (or at least, we hope they're not). They are simulacra, they straddle the worlds of the animate and the inanimate, which really ought to remain separate. Above all it's those painted or moulded faces with their unmoving expressions. Just like clowns - and some puppets are clowns, which makes them twice as scary - the smile you see has no bearing on the individual's mood or intentions. One of our principal communication channels has been cut off. And we can't interpret body language either because it's that jerky, unnatural movement. Godammit, they shouldn't be moving at all!

Band isn't the first film-maker to spot and exploit this inherent horror and I'm sure he won't be the last. From the creepy ventriloquist's doll in the 1940s British classic Dead of Night to the Thai puppet theatre in Nonzee Nimibutr's segment of Three, from the little wooden figure in Trilogy of Terror to the CGI mannequins of Malice@Doll, these things are a standard device of film-makers and storytellers seeking to represent 'the other'. This is a subgenre which has close ties to the 'wax museum' school of horror, or at least that part of it where the figures come to life (not so much the dipping-people-in-wax movies). In those films the 'people' are just as artificial but they're life-size and it is probably no coincidence that one of Charles Band's biggest successes of his early years was the brilliant Tourist Trap with its psychically controlled mannequins.

What puts Charlie in a whole field of his own is his realisation that there is a third reason to feature puppets and dolls as his protagonists, beyond the technical and psychological. One word: merchandise. Fans like to collect toys and models of their favourite characters so why not go the whole hog and sell them exact replicas? Life-size, even. The Full Moon range of action figures was a canny move which has paid off handsomely, not just for Band but for those fans canny enough to save up the figures and the flog them years later on eBay.

Which brings us to this movie from the glory days of Full Moon when the time and the money was available to make films like this and there was an insatiable straight-to-video market that lapped them up.

The interesting thing about Puppet Master is that it is not primarily about the puppets, though they are much more than just a McGuffin or an arbitrary threat. We open in the 1930s at a fancy California cliff-top hotel, the Bodega Bay, where puppeteer Andre Toulon (William Hickey: Prizzi's Honour, The Name of the Rose) is finishing the final details on a puppet, delicately painting in the facial features. Two guys in sharp suits are making their way through the hotel - and so is something unseen, represented by a floor level Steadicam. David Allen's effects are terrific right from the off because we see so little of them. Under David Schmoeller's direction we have an occasional shadow or a movement in the corner of the frame, but mostly we know what is happening without anything having to be animated at all.

However, there is no skimping on actually acknowledging that what we have here are living puppets and when the little fellow arrives at Toulon's door we see what he looks like: black coat and hat, evilly grinning white face with deep-set eyes (allegedly modelled on Klaus Kinski) and a hook on one wrist, a mini-machete on the other. Although none of the puppets are given names in the film itself, the (non-dialogue) voices are credited so we know that this tiny chap's name is Blade.

Toulon puts Blade and the other puppets in a large travel case, along with a small scroll covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and hides the lot behind a secret panel in the wall. The guys in suits (credited as 'Assassins') take out their pistols and burst into Toulon's room but the old puppet master puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger before they can reach him.

Jump forward to the present day (well, 1989) and we are introduced to four friends who share some degree of psychic ability. There's Alex Whitaker, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University (Paul Le Mat: American Graffiti, Strange Invaders); white witch Dana Hadley (Irene Miracle: Argento's Inferno, Watchers II) who works as a fortune teller in a carnival; and sex-obsessed psychic researchers Frank Forrester (Matt Roe: Black Scorpion I and II) and Carrisa Stamford (Kathryn O'Reilly: Saturday the 14th Strikes Back). The four of them travel out to the Bodega Bay where they discover that their former associate Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F Skaggs: Solar Crisis, Oblivion I and II) is recently deceased. They haven't seen him in a couple of years and in that time he has married the young lady who inherited the art deco palace from her parents, Megan (Robin Frates: The Arrival, Man's Best Friend).

It must be off-season because the hotel is deserted apart from Megan, one maid (Mews Small: Zapped!, Woody Allen's Sleeper and Frenchie in the original Broadway production of Grease) and the body, lying in an open coffin. The psychic quartet are uncertain why they have been summoned and puzzled as to how Gallagher could have died without at least one of them sensing it empathically in some way. Dana pokes him with a bodkin, just to be certain.

As the team settle in to their rooms, we start to get hints of something scurrying around the hotel. Carissa picks up memories from furniture of some of the wild sexual shenanigans which happened in the place in its heyday; Alex has disturbing dreams which are premonitions of something; and Dana gets drunk, talking to the stuffed lapdog that she keeps in her luggage and explaining to Megan what a shit her late husband actually was. Things take a turn for the bizarre when Gallagher is discovered out of his coffin, sitting on a chair.

What the plot boils down to is that Andre Toulon was the last possessor of an Ancient Egyptian magic which can animate the inanimate. Gallagher sought to locate that secret and, it seems, may have found it. And boiling that down further, we get a gang of tiny wooden terrors setting out to kill everyone in the building. But who is their master? Who is controlling them? Who, ultimately, will they obey?

As well as the previously mentioned Blade, there is: Tunneler, who wears a Nazi uniform and has a drill on top of his head; Pinhead, who has a tiny head but human-sized hands which he uses to punch or strangle people; Leech Woman, a glamorous white-skinned doll who regurgitates huge black leeches (really disturbing idea, that one); and Jester, the brains behind the team. It was Jester whom we saw being painted in the prologue although oddly the only time we see him with his jester's hat on is as a shadow behind a curtain. Pinhead is a particularly neat idea as the hands in some shots are actually real hands (or at least, real hands inside stubby latex gloves). Much of the puppet work is done by rods and hands, with just a few superb stop-motion shots that really remind us what an amazing animator David Allen was.

And this is all real. There was no CGI in 1989, no computers to digitally remove wires and rods and puppeteers. Anything that wasn't going to be in shot had to be kept out of shot, and it is. Above all, it's the sparsity of the effects work that impresses. The budget is kept low by only showing the puppets when needed and then often only as glimpses. It's the stop-motion scenes which eat up time and money and there are just enough of those to convince us that these puppets do have completely independent movement.

The cast work well together and the acting is good, just keeping to the straight side of oddness in scenes such as Dana talking to her stuffed dog. Stuart Gordon regular Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, Castle Freak) turns up briefly as a woman having her fortune told in Dana's first scene. The puppet 'voices' are provided by actors who specialise in ADR work.

The script credit to 'Joseph G Collodi' is of course a nod to the author of Pinocchio and disguises a screenplay by director Schmoeller from a story by Band and Kenneth J Hall (writer/director of Evil Spawn and The Halfway House). Schmoeller has directed six other pictures for Band: Tourist Trap, Crawlspace, Curse IV, Netherworld and kidflicks The Secret Kingdom and Mysterious Museum. The 35mm cinematography, making full use of the terrific location, is courtesy of regular Fulci collaborator Sergio Salvati whose impressive CV includes The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Ghoulies II and Spellcaster. Production designer John Myhre made the leap, in eleven years, from this to X-Men.

Puppet Master was a big hit and ultimately has proved to be Full Moon's most enduring success. It was followed in 1991 by Puppet Master II, with David Allen taking on full directorial duties, and David DeCoteau's Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge with Guy Rolfe (And Now the Screaming Starts, Mr Sardonicus) in the William Hickey role. Jeff Burr directed Parts IV and V, back to back in 1994, also with Rolfe. DeCoteau returned (under his 'Victoria Sloane' pseudonym) for 1998's Curse of the Puppet Master and then became 'Joseph Tennent' for the following year's prequel Retro Puppet Master in which Rolfe briefly reprised his role; this had apparently started life as a possible Part IV with a script by Matthew Jason Walsh although the finished screenplay was credited to "Benjamin Carr" (The Creeps, Totem, Frankenstein Reborn!), a Full Moon pseudonym for Neal Marshall Stevens (Hellraiser: Deader, Thir13en Ghosts).

2003's Puppet Master: The Legacy is an unashamed greatest hits package with footage from all the previous films (bar this one) presented as flashbacks in a new framing story, directed by Band, about a character from Part III. That was supposedly the end of the story but in 2004 the Sci-Fi Channel produced the long-awaited franchise clash Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, directed by Ted Nicolaou and starring Corey Feldman (The Lost Boys) as Andre Toulon's great-nephew. Charles Band received a courtesy credit on that but otherwise had no connection whatsoever with it.

It's a heck of a legacy, but as always there is the law of diminishing returns and the original film is still regarded as the best. It doesn't have a heck of a lot of story in its 85 minutes (the sleeve claims 'approx. 90') but it has style and tension to spare. The whole thing is played pretty much straight, the deaths are suitably bloody though there is little gratuitous gore. It's what happens to the characters after they die which is where the real horror lies.

Currently unavailable on R1, it seems, this budget price R2 disc from cheapie label Prism has a nice transfer of a good print and includes, as is typical for Charles Band movies, a 'making of' featurette. This is a seven-minute promo piece which concentrates on the effects, with some neat behind-the-scenes footage and comments from Schmoeller, Band, Le Mat, David Allen, animatronics engineer Mark Rappaport (Child's Play 3, Demonic Toys, Army of Darkness), make-up man Jason Simmons (who now sculpts licensed Disney figurines!) and uncredited dwarf actor Cindy Sorensen (Beanstalk, The Dark Backward) who provided Pinhead's live-action hands.

There are also filmographies for the main cast and crew but they are pretty useless. Copied direct from the IMDB (hence the special effects are by someone named 'David Allen (II)'), the films are lumped together by decade rather than giving individual years. Barbara Crampton's page has a photograph of Irene Miracle and Miracle's own page includes a biography which misspells Dario Argento's name. There's a trailer too, which refers to Leech Woman as 'Ms Leech', names Miracle, Le Mat, Crampton and Hickey (in that order); and refers to Charles Band as the producer of Re-Animator which I don't believe is strictly true.

The original Puppet Master is a terrific piece of straight-faced, straight-to-video creepiness which has stood the test of time well.

MJS rating: A-

Man Who Sold the World

Director: Louis Melville
Writer: Louis Melville
Producers: Louis Melville, Stuart Fenegan
Cast: Jonathan Sidgwick, Rita Kvist, Dan van Husen
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: advance screener disc

Even from this unfinished version it's clear that Man Who Sold the World is an authentically spooky fantasy and an undeniably original film. The two central performances are both great, the creepy kid is suitably creepy, the sense of paranoia and nightmare is very well built, the transitions between levels of reality/dream are adroitly handled, the locations are marvellous and well-used, the editing is bang-on, the camerawork is great and the music is terrific.

But I would be lying to you if I said I understood the ending.

Jonathan Sidgwick (The Witches Hammer, Bane) stars as Max Trisch who inherits a rambling, antiques-filled stately home from his grandmother and drives out there to take a look. In an upstairs room he finds Zisna (Dan van Husen: House of Blood, Forest of the Damned, Cold and Dark), an Aleister Crowley lookalike priest, helping himself to some thing that Max’s mother had borrowed. Subsequently exploring the local area, Max finds an empty church with a worried Christian priest, Reverend Carmichael (Andrew Tiernan: 300, The Quatermass Experiment, The Bunker), who is evidently in opposition to Zisna.

But mostly what Max sees is an expressionless, silent boy (Alex McNeill), aged about 12 or so and wearing an old-fashioned school uniform. Appearing and disappearing, this ghost leads Max through the woods until he collapses and finds himself revived in the stately splendour of Zisna’s home, from where the charismatic leader controls, via internet sermons, a worldwide cult of ‘Koslantians’. This seems to be a standard end-of-the-world cult: armageddon is a-coming and the Koslantians will be saved and transported to humanity’s true home, a place called Koslantis. Evidently, acolytes can progress through levels as a ‘tapoge’. It’s all a sort of Branch Davidians meets Scientology set up with a heavy dose of Crowleyism. Max, understandably, is polite to his gracious host but remains thoroughly cynical.

Max’s Scandinavian girlfriend Lidija (the lovely Rita Kvist - The Weight of Water, Lime - about whose brief, gratuitous nude scenes you won’t find me complaining) arrives to keep him company. Together they investigate the old house and find evidence that Max’s grandmother was inadvertently responsible for allowing the Nazis to get their hands on the Holy Grail. This ties in with visions of Nazi pomp and circumstance which Max is experiencing, all Teutonic knights and busty Rhinemadchen.

This is one of those films where the weirdness builds relentlessly over the full ninety minutes. Max and Lidija attempt to drive away but however far they go, they’re still within walking distance of the house. Red-jacketed Koslantian tapoges hunt for them; Reverend Carmichael bangs on their door, shouting that the apocalypse is here; Max’s pet python Fido escapes and is never found (a shot of Fido slithering past a half-eaten apple must have some sort of Biblical symbolism, I guess). Most significantly, elements of Nazi concentration camps start to appear with first the creepy boy and then Max himself in stripy prison pyjamas with a yellow Jewish star. (This raises the question of whether Max is Jewish, which seems unlikely as what we are told about his paternal grandmother indicates her to be Christian, possibly Catholic. Maybe he’s Jewish on his mother’s side.)

Interspersed with this are interactions between Max and a beardy psychiatrist, sometimes in cutaways, sometimes in voice-overs which sound rather too much like narration. I actually found these quite confusing: at first I thought they were flashbacks to before Max left London, then they seemed to be part of the main story (which left me wondering how Max was able to drive back and see the shrink, then get home so quickly). Eventually I decided that they must be a framing story with everything else as a flashback. The disc I saw wasn’t the final edit so this confusion may be cleared up - or perhaps it’s deliberate.

And that ending? I really don’t know. It’s something to do with stigmata, and Adolf Hitler himself appears briefly in some sort of white limbo. But precisely what is going on, what it means and how it relates to anything else - search me. In some way, Man Who Sold the World reminded me of old European films: plenty of weirdness, middle class protagonists trapped in a nightmarish series of events and no real explanation for the viewer. If this had been made thirty years ago in Spain, Redemption would be all over it. There is also a touch of The Avengers in the dangerous eccentricity hidden away in the English countryside, maybe a dash of The Wicker Man too.

For a first-time director, Louis Melville does a bang-up job. Every time I made a note of something which didn’t seem to make narrative sense, I had to scribble it out two minutes later as the situation was explained in the dialogue. He is greatly assisted by the cinematography of James Friend (Wishbaby, Reverb) and Boyd Skinner (Cargo, Springheel Jack) although there is an unavoidable shot-on-DV flatness to the image. Editors Adam Biskupski and Richard Graham are also to be commended for stitching together such a potentially disjointed story. A fine orchestral and piano score by Simon Lambros (The Last Horror Movie, Puritan) is augmented by a handful of sparsely beautiful songs by Tally Koren. Mark Stevenson, who was so great as the assistant in The Last Horror Movie, appears as a monk with a mask even beakier than the one in HellBride.

Though it kept me gripped to the very end, Man Who Sold the World left me slightly niggled because I don’t know whether I was even supposed to understand the denouement. The whole film goes somewhere - but where? Undeniably skilfully constructed and resolutely intriguing, here is a movie which raises more questions than it answers. Take a look - maybe you’ll spot something I missed.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 29th June 2007

Nazi Zombie Death Tales

Directors: James Eaves, Alan Ronald, Pat Higgins
Writers: James Eaves, Alan Ronald, Pat Higgins
Producers: James Eaves, Alan Ronald, Pat Higgins, Laura Tennant, Debbie Attwell
Cast: Tina Barnes, Lara Lemon, Jess-Luisa Flynn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: unfinished screener (Safecracker Pictures)

[I have been asked by one of the film-makers to point out that this is (as usual) a detailed review which may contain spoilers. - MJS]

As I write this review, the web is full of negative comments about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, released just a few days ago. Not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t (and could never) live up to the ridiculously high expectations that people have built up for it.

My cinematic tastes and interests are, as you may have gathered if you’re a regular reader, somewhat different to most people’s. So although I’ll probably go and see Prometheus, I’m not really too arsed about it. On the other hand, I can sympathise with these people because I feel very much the same way about the motion picture formerly known as Battlefield Death Tales. If you were to stop me at random any time in the past few years and ask which films I was most looking forward to, high on my list would be (a) the next Jim Eaves movie, (b) the next Pat Higgins film, and (c) whatever the next thing is that escapes from inside Al Ronald’s mind.

These three gentlemen previously collaborated on Bordello Death Tales, one of the first in the current vogue for horror anthologies and a corking trilogy of tales which was even better than the sum of its parts. Separately, Jim made The Witches Hammer and Bane; Pat made TrashHouse, KillerKiller, HellBride and The Devil’s Music; and Al made Jesus vs the Messiah. Having enjoyed their initial collaboration, they decided to switch from the horrors of sex to the horrors of war and set to making three new half-hour shorts that could be bolted together. Unlike Bordello DT, there is no framing story, although there is a very brief narrative cross-over between Al’s tale and Pat’s. I like a framing story in an anthology personally, and one of the previous film’s strengths was that Madam Raven was actually relevant to all three tales rather than being just a detached narrator. But for Battlefield DT, each story is separate and complete and the only connection is a Second World War setting.

We kick off with Jim’s Medal of Horror, which starts with British Captain George (David Wayman: Death, The Dead Inside) in a bar watching burlesque fan-dancer Daisy (Jeanie Wishes). Clever editing moves the story forward through his seduction of the young woman and her receipt of a letter confirming Captain George’s death. Starting the film with a full five minutes of dialogue-free narrative is a brave move, rendered even braver by the subsequent scene of Captain George, very much alive, reporting to a US Army Major (Paul Kelleher: Spirits of the Fall, The Demon Within, Simon and Emily). What follows is ten minutes of two men in a room, one sitting, one standing, just talking. Some casual viewers might turn off after a while, wondering when we’ll get to any Nazi zombies, and I’m not sure that Medal of Horror wouldn’t be better as the middle segment.

The major does introduce the Z-word in an apparently unrelated anecdote about a dead US soldier who returned to base and took a great deal of effort to subdue. But mainly he is castigating George for being a shit by sending a fake condolence letter to Daisy, who turns out to be the Major’s daughter. And who has been captured, for no obvious reason, by the Germans. Specifically by “Hitler’s high priestess of the occult” Jezebel (Tina Barnes: A Day of Violence, Bane, F).

George sets off on what is effectively a suicide mission to rescue Daisy and on the way has some rather random encounters including a German soldier in a dark blue greatcoat who exemplifies one of the films’ main problems: costumes. With a big budget, a film can afford to hire lots of historically accurate WW2 uniforms and create/adapt any additional ones required. But when shooting on a shoestring, you take what you can get. I’m no military historian but none of the uniforms on show in any of the segments really convinced me. George’s greatcoat for example has no Captain’s pips. Jezebel, when we meet her, is wearing black leggings below her smart, black SS jacket. Some of the background British soldiers seem to be wearing outfits that are distinctly post-WW2. And this particular German soldier has a coat that might pass for a French uniform in World War 1 but doesn’t look like anything warn by any German troops ever.

This sort of historical inaccuracy takes one out of the film, as do a number of very obviously modern locations. But it really is all down to budget. At this level of film-making, beggars can’t be choosers and if you know someone with a military-looking outfit that might pass muster if the viewers don’t look to closely and have never seen Where Eagles Dare, or a hall big enough to film in that’s empty for a few days, you say thanks very much. Those of us who love B-movies have to rely on the energy, originality, enthusiasm, excitement and generally daft scary fun of the movie to gloss over such things, as they assuredly do. But it would be remiss of me not to note their existence.

Anyway, George’s most random encounter is with the zombified Red Baron. He comes across a crashed scarlet triplane in the woods; a frankly dodgy model shot to which, honestly, my initial reaction was: “What is a radio-controlled model aircraft doing in a 1940s-set story?” Once again we must asume/hope that the viewers have not even rudimentary knowledge of military history, because of course Manfred von Richtofen was not shot down in a wood, and both his plane and his body were recovered. However, in this alternate history, the bright red Fokker Dr.1 has somehow remained undiscovered, and in extremely good condition, for more than 20 years.

As George stares at this, the Red Baron himself (Eaves regular Sam Smith) leaps up from the ground, although it’s not clear whether he has just been hiding there or whether he too has lain undisturbed since the last war. Clad in a red flying outfit that matches his plane, even down to a red eye-patch, and bearing absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the real von Richtofen (or indeed any German pilot!), this is very much a cartoon character. We must regard him as a character called ‘the Red Baron’, inspired extremely loosely by the legend, rather than the actual Red Baron himself.

But because a cartoon zombie WW1 flying ace isn’t weird enough, a karate-kicking Japanese zombie then appears and fights the German zombie, with both seeking to attack George if the other will let them. Quite what a Japanese soldier, living or dead, is doing in Northern Europe defeats me. Although it is worth noting that if this zombie is also meant to be a WW1 veteran then his fight against the Kraut is valid because the Japanese were on the Allied side during the 1914-18 war. On the other hand, his headband suggests he perhaps is supposed to be a kamikaze pilot, which would make him a WW2 airman and hence part of the Axis forces. While the two colourful undead tussle among the ferns, George makes his getaway through the woods and this utterly random weirdness is left behind.

In a bunker, he finally locates Jezebel and a single extraordinary German robot soldier, plus Daisy herself. Tina Barnes hams it up in her SS uniform and clearly had an absolute blast filming her extended death scene, although I can’t honestly say that I was convinced by her accent, whch at times seemed closer to Melbourne than Munich.

Medal of Horror runs about 35 minutes and, like the two stories which follow it, seems somewhat constrained by the format. I don’t know if there’s a feature here but it just doesn’t seem to fit the half-hour(-ish) restriction, especially given how slow most of the first half is. It seems a curiously disjointed tale. Fun, undeniably, but not totally satisfying.

Alan Ronald has the ‘golfing story’ slot with his tongue-in-cheek Harriet’s War which is completely different to the announced story. When the three plot synopses were revealed in January 2012, Al’s tale was called Monsters of the 4th Reich and went like this:

“Harriet Price tracks down monsters for the British Government. Armed with an array of inventions and contraptions she deals with everything from ghosts, demons, werewolves, vampires and once, she claims, even Churchill's Black Dog. But, along with her newly assigned partner; the cross dressing gunslinger 'Trixie Antoinette', this latest investigation will bring her face to face with the greatest monster of all... Hitler himself.”

The title may have been changed to avoid confusion with forthcoming British Nazi-zombie film The 4th Reich, but that’s just cosmetic. In fact, all that remains of this synopsis is Harriet Price herself, beautifully played by Lara Lemon in a costume to die for. She was in Al’s as-yet unreleased second feature Chinese Burns, which was written by and stars Julian Lamoral-Roberts - who was in Al’s Bordello DT story Stitchgirl and here plays the local vicar. Cy Henty turns up as the befuddled local copper, wearing an extraordinary policeman’s helmet and an even more extraordinary moustache.

Harriet Price is some sort of Government operative who visits the cosy little village of Chapelton to investigate a mysterious death, reporting to her superiors via a glorious sort of steampunk dictaphone. A young man has been found, dead and with multiple swastikas carved into his skin, while his girlfriend has disappeared (but later turns up in a similar condition). We saw in a prologue that they were killed by an apparently supernatural, German soldier with similar scars and a swastika blindfold

This is probably the simplest and most coherent of the three tales, let down only by the revelation of what is really going on, when Harriet suddenly proclaims to the plod and the priest, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, the name of the only other significant character. Nevertheless, I think this is my favourite and it has that mannered surrealism that we have come to expect from Al’s work. Still, one can’t help wondering whatever happened to cross dressing gunslinger Trixie Antoinette...

Finally we have Pat’s tale Devils of the Blitz. This is the least comprehensible of the three stories and, truth be told, without having read the synopsis I don’t think I would have had a clue what was going on. Jess-Luisa Flynn (Adele in The Devil’s Music) plays the sister of a serving soldier with Liza Keast (The Witches Hammer) as her concerned mother and Geoffrey Sleight (also in The Devil’s Music) as her intolerant, rationalist grandfather. There are some sort of monsters in their house, grandly portrayed by rubbery puppet things instead of that modern CGI nonsense, and there is a subplot about the brother/son (Paul Cousins) being seriously injured which must have some connection to the main story but I couldn’t work out what.

As with Medal of Horror, this feels like it has been compressed to fit the format at the expense of explanation. It also suffers from being set during the Second World War’s quitest, gentlest air raid. Although we are told that the bombs are dropping outside, little can be heard and the house never shakes; a curious repetition of the silent off-screen gun-battle in HellBride.

Battlefield Death Tales is a fun little film but it’s not, in my opinion, as good as its predecessor. However, I’m in two minds about whether I’m being objective in this assessment (in a subjective way) or whether my disappointment is coloured by my high expectations. In one sense, I got exactly what I expected, because once again the segments are individualistic and identifiable. With a Jim Eaves film I expect action and startling imagery. In a Pat Higgins picture I expect strong characters and relationships. And when Al Ronald sits in the director’s chair I expect off-beat ideas and that thing I have mentioned before: mannered surrealism. And hey, I got all this from Battlefield DT. Never, in the field of indie horror movies, has so much scary fun been created by so few.

What I didn’t get was neat little vignettes of horror - and that’s what people expect in an anthology like this. Each of the tales in Bordello DT was ‘high concept’ but the stories here are more complex and none of them really succeed completely in what they set out to do.

There is also the question of the title. When the film was picked up for UK distribution by Safecracker, who had recently released Bordello DT, it was renamed Zombie Death Tales, with Amazon and other etailers mistaking promotional artwork for a finished DVD sleeve and listing it as The Red Baron in Zombie Death Tales. I can see that ‘zombie’ in a title has more marketing cachet than ‘battlefield’, and this matches the similar retitlng of US B-movie Horrors of War as Zombies of War by UK distributor Point Blank a couple of years ago. But of course, all zombie films are ‘death tales’ so that title didn’t really work and it was swiftly amended to Nazi Zombie Death Tales, which is what was on my screener. [The film was subsequently released in the USA as Angry Nazi Zombies and in Germany(!) as Nazi Zombie Battleground, meaning it now has more titles than the average Jess Franco flick. - MJS]

But here’s the problem. So far as I can tell, there are no Nazi zombies in this film. There are Nazis, and there are zombies, but no actual Nazi zombies. And truth be told, both Nazis and zombies are in short supply. Nazi-wise, there’s Tina Barnes as a sort of latter day Ilsa, there’s that briefly seen soldier in the blue coat, and there’s one more character who provides the explanation for the blindfold thing in Harriet’s War. There are no zombies at all in Al’s and Pat’s stories and although there is one zombie bite that sets up the climax of Medal of Horror, the only other possibly undead characters are those two bizarre figures who fight in the forest.

These two feature on Safecracker’s sleeve alongside the Nazi robot thing, and they have cheekily photoshopped a swastika badge onto the ribbon around the Red Baron’s neck. But in the film that ribbon supports an Iron Cross and the character is devoid of swastikas because of course he is a remnant from the First World War.

Nazi Zombie Death Tales isn’t really a zombie film, unless you’re ultra-completist. And while putting ‘zombie’ in the title may shift more units, I can’t help feeling it will shift them to people who will be pissed off when they find that they have bought a film with few if any zombies in it. Mind you, none of the stories are set on a battlefield either...

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 7th August 2012

Postscript. I did go and see Prometheus. It was shit.

The Ghost Train

Director: Walter Forde
Writers: Marriott Edgar, JOC Orton, Val Guest
Producer: Edward Black
Cast: Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Carole Lynne
Year of release: 1941
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

The Ghost Train is basically the British equivalent of The Bat or The Cat and the Canary, a creepy story derived from a stage play, in which a group of people find themselves in a creepy location menaced by an unseen threat, possibly supernatural but ultimately revealed to be merely criminal. And just as Hollywood shoe-horned Bob Hope into The Cat and the Canary, Gainsborough Films stuck ‘Big-Hearted’ Arthur Askey into this version of The Ghost Train.

A group of rail passengers find themselves stranded in the waiting room of an isolated station, having missed their connection. When the station master is unable to persuade them to leave - it’s bucketing it down outside and the nearest village is miles away - he warns them of the local legend of the ghost train, and how all who see it perish. Later, a strange couple turn up out of the blue, the man claiming that his sister is an escaped lunatic while she protests her innocence and begs the disparate group to protect her from her brother.

Those waiting in the waiting room include drippy couple Herbert Perkins (Stuart Latham, who was in a 1939 TV version of The Tell-Tale Heart) and Edna Hookey (Betty Jardine), who are to be married the next day; teetotal spinster Miss Bourne (Kathleen Harrison: Mrs Huggett in the Huggetts films and radio series) and her pet parrot; booze-sozzled Doctor Sterling (Morland Graham: Whisky Galore!); arrogant cricketer Richard (RG) Winthrop (Peter Murray-Hill: Bell-Bottom George) and his charming cousin Jackie (Carole Lynne, who apparently made only one other film). Then there’s music hall comedian Tommy Gander (Askey) and suave Teddy Deakin (Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch), both of whom are enamoured of Miss Winthrop. Askey and Murdoch were huge stars in Britain at this time on the basis of Band Waggon, the first ever BBC comedy series. This was their fourth film together in two years.

It must be said that, much as I enjoy Arthur Askey’s comedy, he is spectacularly irritating in this part, but deliberately so. He is endlessly cracking weak jokes, his cheery face falling when he sees how little reaction he gets, and constantly dodging the entirely justifiable annoyance of Winthrop and Deakin. Still, there’s some good visual comedy, as when Askey/Gander tries to fill a tea-cup with water using a water tower pipe in a rainstorm. Essentially Askey is playing himself, slipping in some of his catchphrases (“Ay thangyew!”) and referring to himself as ‘Big-Hearted’ Tommy.

The Ghost Train was written by Arnold Ridley - yes, Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army, when he was a young man - and is packed with red herrings and diversions. Ridley’s original play script was adapted by Marriott Edgar, JOC Orton and Val Guest (later director of The Quatermass Xperiment, The Day the Earth Caught Fire etc.). All three had written the bulk of Will Hay’s classic comedies, including Oh Mr Porter! - which was loosely based on The Ghost Train. Orton later co-wrote the early SF comedy Time Flies. Director Walter Forde is one of the forgotten greats, a former silent comedian who in his time was a serious rival, as far as British audiences were concerned, to Chaplin and Keaton. He also directed the 1931 version of Ridley’s play, starring Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, as well as a previous Askey/Murdoch comedy, Charlie’s Big-Hearted Aunt.

Interestingly, the dialogue actually pinpoints the exact night that the action takes place, 22nd January 1940 - 43 years to the day since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In deference to wartime concerns, the ‘ghost train’ turns out to be a front not for smugglers but for Nazi-sympathising gun-runners.

The film was shot at a studio in Shepherd’s Bush in November and December 1941, when the London Blitz was at its height. Consequently, Askey and most of the cast lived permanently in their dressing rooms, within easy reach of the studio’s air raid shelters. So far as I can tell, the only surviving member of the cast is Carole Lynne, who subsequently packed in acting to become Lady Delfont! Askey went on to make a few more comic horrors on TV. His 1956-58 series Before Your Very Eyes featured a Frankenstein sketch in one episode (16th December 1957) and a spoof of House of Wax in another (23rd March 1956) using figures borrowed from Madame Tussaud’s. A 1960s series of comic playlets, Arthur’s Treasured Volumes also included a horror episode, entitled ‘The Curse of the Bellfoots’.

This big screen version of a periodically revived theatre classic is good fun for those of us who enjoy 1940s comedy, but will be of only academic interest to horror fans who lack a penchant for wartime whimsey. It only just scrapes into the horror genre by virtue of the ghostly legend behind which the smugglers/gun-runners hide their criminal activity. Finally, viewers are advised not to think about the plot too closely: with the revelation that almost the whole village is in on the nefarious goings-on, why go to all the trouble of staging disappearing dead bodies, etc. to frighten the passengers, when it would have been so much easier to simply find a bus or van and transport them away from the station?

MJS rating: B

review originally posted before November 2004