When Puppets Attack (Your Patience)
Let’s get one thing straight: I love bad movies. I love them the way some people love burnt popcorn—ironically, nostalgically, with a pinch of self-loathing. But Puppet Master: Axis Termination? This is beyond “so bad it’s good.” This is “so bad it’s government torture under the Geneva Convention.”
Directed (and possibly regretted) by Charles Band, this 2017 straight-to-streaming spectacle is the eleventh film in the Puppet Master franchise—yes, eleven—and the alleged conclusion of the Axis Trilogy. I say “alleged” because “conclusion” implies the story had a beginning, middle, and end. In reality, it’s 75 minutes of toy-based war crimes, psychic mumbo-jumbo, and dialogue so wooden it makes the puppets look like Daniel Day-Lewis.
Axis of Evil, Axis of Stupid
The movie opens by shooting the last remaining shreds of continuity right in the face. Danny and Beth—our heroes from Axis Rising—are killed off in the first five minutes. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a franchise sending a “we’re done pretending” memo to its audience.
Enter Captain Brooks, played by Paul Logan, who looks like he escaped from a protein shake commercial. Brooks inherits the magical murder puppets from the dying Beth and brings them to his superior officer, who decides the U.S. Army can weaponize voodoo dolls. Because that’s exactly how the Allies won World War II.
From there, we meet a team of psychics led by a Russian dwarf scientist named Dr. Ivan Ivanov—because subtlety died several sequels ago. Ivan’s daughter, Elisa, is also psychic, and for reasons never explained, everyone’s acting like this is totally normal wartime protocol. “Sure, forget radar and tanks; bring me the clairvoyant toddler and a suitcase full of wooden homunculi.”
Nazi Sorcery and Discount Cosplay
If you thought this movie was just about killer puppets, you’ve clearly underestimated Full Moon Entertainment’s ability to overcomplicate nonsense. The villains are psychic Nazis, because apparently the Third Reich’s secret weapon wasn’t the V-2 rocket—it was interpretive telepathy.
Our big bad is Sturmbahnführer Krabke (played by Kevin Scott Allen, who deserves hazard pay), a psychic Nazi with a fashion sense that screams “Spirit Halloween clearance sale.” His evil power? Making people fall over dramatically. He uses it several times, and every time, it looks like the actors are pretending to faint during a high school production of The Sound of Music.
The movie’s title promises “termination,” but what we get is “mild inconvenience.” Krabke spends most of his screen time smirking, occasionally glowing red, and talking about power as though he’s been reading the world’s worst Dungeons & Dragons fanfic.
The Puppets Are Back (Unfortunately)
Blade, Tunneler, Leech Woman, and Pinhead return, though you wouldn’t know it from how little they actually do. Most of their scenes involve standing still while the camera pans dramatically over them, as though to remind us that, yes, we are watching a Puppet Master movie.
Leech Woman does get one shining moment when she spits a leech onto a Nazi’s eye. It’s the kind of scene that sounds grossly entertaining on paper but plays out like someone dropped a wet raisin during filming. The rest of the puppets mostly serve as glorified props in the psychics’ battle against the forces of evil. Imagine The Avengers, but if all the superheroes were six inches tall and moved like stop-motion interns were on strike.
Pinhead, bless his big rubbery hands, actually kills Krabke in the finale by choking him. This should be triumphant, but by that point, you’re too numb to feel anything except confusion and caffeine withdrawal.
Psychic Soldiers of Mediocrity
The psychic team assembled to fight the Nazi occultists is a masterclass in cinematic padding. There’s Dr. Ivan, the stereotypical Russian mystic; his daughter Elisa, the token “innocent medium”; and several other characters whose names and powers are as memorable as wet toast.
There’s even a scene where the psychics read each other’s thoughts and uncover traumatic war memories—a bold creative choice in a movie whose primary audience is stoners and masochists. It’s like watching Inception if Inception were written by people who thought the mind was just another hallway to set on fire.
At one point, the entire psychic squad goes to investigate a power station blackout, only to be ambushed by Krabke. Their counterattack involves Leech Woman’s ocular assault and a lot of slow-motion falling. It’s less “psychic warfare” and more “Zoom yoga gone wrong.”
The Dialogue: Written by a Puppet, for Puppets
Screenwriter Roger Barron must have had a word count quota, because the script sounds like it was generated by ChatGPT after a séance. Every line is either exposition, pseudo-science, or accidental comedy gold.
Take this gem from Captain Brooks: “I don’t believe in living puppets or psychic phenomena!”—a sentiment that would be more convincing if he weren’t literally holding a talking puppet while saying it.
Or this from Dr. Ivan: “The Nazis tap into dark energies. We must do the same.” Nothing says “heroic war effort” like moral equivalency.
Every conversation sounds like it was recorded underwater and then translated through Google. There’s so much dead air between sentences that you start wishing one of the puppets would stab the script supervisor just to pick up the pace.
Special Effects (Or: How to Stretch $75 Across 75 Minutes)
The budget for Axis Termination could probably buy you a nice dinner and a midrange blender. Every explosion looks like a stock GIF. The gunfire resembles flashlights having seizures. The puppets move with the grace of animatronics suffering an existential crisis.
Full Moon has always been known for its “resourceful” effects, but this one feels particularly tragic. The CGI looks like it was rendered on a 1998 Dell Inspiron. There’s one scene where a psychic blast is represented by a glowing red circle drawn in Microsoft Paint. If this movie cost more than $10, someone needs to be investigated.
Charles Band: Puppet Master or Puppet Disaster?
Charles Band has been milking this franchise since the Reagan administration, and you have to admire his persistence. The man has turned “killer puppets vs. Nazis” into a lifestyle brand. But even for Band, Axis Termination feels tired.
The pacing is glacial, the editing choppy, and the tone schizophrenic. One minute, you’re watching a war drama; the next, you’re watching a puppet choke a telepathic fascist. Band directs it all with the enthusiasm of someone who’s been locked in a warehouse full of rubber dolls for thirty years and just wants to go home.
The Grand Finale (If You Can Call It That)
After all the psychic nonsense, Nazi monologues, and puppet cameos, the film ends with Brooks and the puppets triumphing over evil. Everyone you don’t care about dies, and the surviving characters nod solemnly at the trunk of puppets, as if to say, “We did this—for America.”
Then the credits roll, mercifully ending one of the longest 75 minutes in human history.
Final Thoughts: Axis Termination, Audience Termination
Puppet Master: Axis Termination is what happens when nostalgia, low budgets, and bad decision-making form an unholy alliance. It’s part war movie, part supernatural thriller, and part fever dream of a man who owns too many tiny mannequins.
It’s not scary. It’s not exciting. It’s barely coherent. But it is oddly fascinating—like watching a ventriloquist argue with himself about the meaning of life.
If you’ve made it through all eleven Puppet Master films, congratulations: you’re either a hardcore fan or a prisoner of your own curiosity. As for the rest of us? Let’s honor the puppets by cutting their strings and letting them rest in peace.
Because after Axis Termination, the only thing that really needs terminating… is this franchise.
