The Strings Are Showing
You know that feeling when a movie sounds like it could be awesome? Nazis, killer puppets, secret formulas, ninjas—it’s the kind of fever dream that should either be brilliant or banned by the Geneva Convention. Puppet Master: Axis of Evil(2010) somehow lands in the middle—too boring to be good, too weird to be bad, and too wooden to feel alive.
Directed by David DeCoteau (who’s clearly trying to direct and nap at the same time), this ninth entry in the long-running Puppet Master franchise proves that even homicidal dolls can suffer from franchise fatigue. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching a marionette show in slow motion, narrated by someone who just learned what “plot” means from a fortune cookie.
The Setup: Toulon, Tragedy, and Terrible Acting
We open at the Bodega Bay Inn, the franchise’s favorite haunted Airbnb. Our hero, Danny Coogan (Levi Fiehler), is a nice enough guy with a limp, a heart of gold, and the charisma of a damp pinecone. Danny works making chairs for his uncle’s hotel and dreams of joining the war effort, but apparently, the military has a strict “no protagonist with visible emotional baggage” policy.
Meanwhile, the legendary puppet master André Toulon (played here by the late William Hickey via grainy archive footage—because nothing says “continuity” like recycling dead actors) is hiding from Nazis who want his secret formula for reanimating puppets. The Nazis show up, shoot him, and Danny finds the corpse just in time to make an awkward face and grab the puppets before anyone calls the police.
That’s the inciting incident, folks: a wooden craftsman inherits a box of demonic dolls and thinks, “Yeah, this seems fine.”
Enter the Axis of… Something
The villains arrive like a community theater version of Inglourious Basterds: two evil Nazis, Klaus and Max, team up with Ozu, a Japanese saboteur who looks like she escaped from a 1940s comic book. Together, they plan to destroy an American bomb factory. Why? Because apparently, Hitler outsourced to the cheapest available talent.
Ozu, played by Ada Chao, brings the kind of exaggerated villain energy that belongs in a Godzilla movie, not a $1 million puppet flick. Her performance is 60% glares, 30% sword waving, and 10% explaining her evil plan to people who don’t care.
And Max—the blond Nazi infiltrator disguised as an American factory worker—is about as subtle as a man goose-stepping through Kansas. He’s supposed to be cunning and charming, but he looks like he just lost an audition for “generic villain #3” in a toothpaste commercial.
Meanwhile, in Puppet Land
Danny discovers Toulon’s diary, reads a few lines of “puppet necromancy for beginners,” and suddenly he’s a master of reanimation. He breathes new life into Toulon’s famous murder squad: Blade, Pinhead, Leech Woman, Jester, and Tunneler—all back for another round of awkward stop-motion violence.
This should be the best part of the movie. It’s called Puppet Master, after all. You’d expect some gruesome kills, maybe a few creative deaths involving saw blades and leeches. Instead, we get ten-second bursts of puppet movement sandwiched between long, empty conversations about “honor,” “freedom,” and “the formula.”
The puppets look embarrassed to be here. Blade spends half the movie lurking like he’s waiting for catering. Pinhead has all the emotional range of a potato. Leech Woman spits her slimy leeches in glorious 240p quality, and Tunneler drills into things with the enthusiasm of an underpaid construction worker.
There’s even a new addition: Ninja, a black-clad puppet that moves like a ninja in theory but more like a Lego minifigure in practice. Toulon supposedly made him for stealth missions, but watching him “fight” looks like two toddlers playing Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in slow motion.
The Human Drama (or Lack Thereof)
Danny’s girlfriend, Beth (Jenna Gallaher), works at the bomb factory targeted by the Axis of Evil. She’s sweet, loyal, and completely devoid of personality—basically a 1940s pin-up who got lost on her way to a Hallmark movie.
When Danny warns her about Max, she shrugs it off, because of course she does. The only thing less believable than her skepticism is the chemistry between her and Danny. Their scenes together feel like a hostage negotiation between two actors who’ve never met.
Then there’s Danny’s family: his mother, Elma (Erica Shaffer), who exists solely to get shot; and his brother Don (Taylor M. Graham), the standard-issue war hero who exists solely to die dramatically. When Don dies, Danny weeps for approximately 15 seconds before saying, “Time to put his soul into a puppet.” That’s the kind of grief we like to call efficient storytelling.
The Climax: Nazis vs. Puppets (and Logic)
The movie builds toward its big finale—a showdown at the opera house where the Nazis, the Japanese, and the puppets all converge for a battle that somehow manages to be both ridiculous and lethargic.
Tunneler drills a guy. Leech Woman regurgitates a leech. Blade does his usual stabby routine. And Ninja, bless his little puppet heart, somehow avenges Danny’s brother by impaling the bad guy with Ozu’s sword.
It should be epic. It should be absurdly fun. Instead, it’s like watching your action figures fight after you’ve already outgrown them.
When the smoke clears, Ozu escapes with a few puppets in a bag, setting up a sequel that literally nobody asked for. Danny vows revenge, delivering a line so wooden that the puppets probably felt secondhand embarrassment: “She has a war coming to her.”
Sure, Danny. Right after your next oil change.
The Horror of Mediocrity
Puppet Master: Axis of Evil isn’t the worst movie ever made—it’s just aggressively uninspired. The low budget shows in every frame: stiff acting, recycled sets, and visual effects that look like they were rendered on a toaster.
The film wants to be both a World War II action thriller and a supernatural horror flick, but it fails to commit to either. It’s too tame for horror and too cheap for action, leaving it stranded somewhere between History Channel reenactment and fever dream community theater.
Even the moral themes—patriotism, heroism, the nature of evil—feel like filler between puppet cameos. Toulon’s mythos is treated with the reverence of a high school book report, and the dialogue sounds like it was translated from English into German and back again via Google Translate circa 2005.
A War on Entertainment
The real enemy here isn’t the Axis powers—it’s pacing. For a movie about killer puppets fighting Nazis, it’s astonishing how often nothing happens. Whole scenes drag on like the director forgot to yell “cut.”
When action does arrive, it’s a disorienting mix of jerky stop-motion and awkward stunt doubles. The puppets, once the franchise’s saving grace, now move like arthritic retirees. You can practically hear their joints creak.
Even the kills feel phoned in. Gone are the gleefully gory days of earlier Puppet Master entries. Here, everything’s sanitized, subdued, and shot from angles that hide more than they reveal—like a slasher film directed by a Victorian librarian.
Final Verdict: The Real Evil Is Boredom
By the end, you realize that Axis of Evil isn’t so much a movie as it is a tax write-off wearing a trench coat. It’s proof that even sentient puppets can’t escape the horrors of lazy sequels.
If you’re a diehard Puppet Master fan, this movie offers mild nostalgia and a few unintentionally funny moments. If you’re a newcomer, prepare to be bewildered, bored, and vaguely uncomfortable about cheering for wooden dolls fighting Nazis.
Final Grade: D
A limp war story with less life than its puppets. Not even Blade could cut through the tedium.
