“It’s hard to say what I want my legacy to be when I’m long gone.”-Aaliyah

“My work… is my legacy.”-Patrick Swayze

“Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.”-Bill Gates

Hey, let’s talk about being lazy! It’s pretty great, right? Just sitting around not trying hard, and always doing as little as possible is really something to treasure. I definitely think it’s something that is wrongfully frowned upon in society. I mean, shit… I’d stick sloth right up there with gluttony and lust as my top deadly sins, which makes my chicken wing boners from ordering on Grub Hub my ultimate damnation cocktail. Now, while I cherish the act of inaction as much as possible in people, I expect more out of my methods of entertainment, which brings me to Puppet Master: The Legacy. If you are going to be THIS lazy in your creative endeavors, you might as well not do the movie at all. This might be the most offensively unindustrious piece of trash ever committed to film. I thought that part 6 was going to be the high point for rage and confusion in this series. I was wrong.

Even the box art is infuriatingly lazy!

Basically, what this movie amounts to is around 10 minutes of new footage intercut with around an hour of clips from the previous movies, trying to recap the series chronologically. Sounds awesome, right? It gets better. Not only is the lack of effort in the premise apparent, but the new footage is literally just two actors talking in a completely black room. So the amount of work they put in to the new footage is basically hiring a couple people, not worrying about sets or props or locations, and just having them shit on the series.

It’s pretty much just 10 minutes of these two assholes

Now, that would be bad enough, but in a series with such wonky continuity, telling a chronological story using past installments is pretty problematic. They glossed over important stuff from the previous movies, and added things that were even MORE confusing. Remember Rick from parts 4 & 5? Remember how in my review for part 6 I was wondering what happened to him? Turns out he was murdered by someone looking for the puppets. Yeah, the fact that one of the series’ main protagonists was murdered happened off screen, and was mentioned as a throwaway line in a piece of garbage sequel.

You remember this laser tag playing muthafucka, right?

Ok, so I guess i should at least try to talk about the sad excuse for a plot here.  There’s this sexy sexy secret agent type chick stirring shit up, looking for Toulon’s secrets to reanimation. She finds her way to the Bodega Bay Inn (which, if she’d been studying hardcore about Toulon, probably should have been the FIRST place she looked), and finds his diary. She tries reading it, but it bursts into flames for some stupid reason. She goes in the basement, and finds an old dude fiddling around doing something or rather. The old dude turns out to be a grown up fat wiener kid from part 3, in which is i guess a plot twist? Old fat wiener kid goes on to recap the previous 65 Puppet Master movies. In another shocking twist, after getting jumped by a puppet, the sexy sext secret agent lady reveals that she’s not trying to steal the formula… she’s trying to find out how to kill the immortal puppets for good, apparently upon request from Toulon’s older puppets who are kinda pissed about being stuck in tiny wooden bodies for all eternity. At least, that’s what I think it was. It’s remarkably convoluted. She says that the legacy (TITLE DROP!) of the puppet master is having a lot of tiny pissed off abominations gunning for you. The old dumb kid turns around to look at something off camera, look scared, and shoot a gun… and the movie just ends.

Also, cheap wrong-looking puppets

I wish there was more to talk about here. I’m kind of handcuffed by the lack of movie, unfortunately. I guess that’s the drawback of this type of movie. I guess I could take a page from their book, and copy-and-paste entire unedited paragraphs from my previous reviews to pad my word count, but I clearly care more about my readers than Full Moon does about the fans of its flagship franchise. While I appreciate the attempt to piece together the muddled continuity of this series, I really wish they had found a more organic way to do it. Aside from the presentation of it, they also actually failed at piecing together the continuity, which makes it all even more infuriating. I think the only thing I really enjoyed about this thing is that it acknowledged how little sense it made for Toulon to be evil in Part 2, given the context of the rest of the series. But that’s kind of like alternate universe nitpicking, where i’m grasping at straws to find something gold in a pile of animal shit.

In the end, this is either the only movie in the franchise you have to watch, or the only one specifically to avoid. It’s a bizarre conundrum, I guess. Continuity wise, this marks the latest entry in the time line, as the next two movies are more prequels. And if you’re keeping track, that means that in a series of 10 movies, we have 4 prequels and a recap. That’s not even taking into consideration the fan theory that part 6 took place between part 2 and part 4, but explaining that any further would hurt my brain. Bottom line was that this wasted my time, and I’m not at all pleased about it. I’m gonna take a cue from this movie, and sit idly on my couch, reminiscing about the highs and lows of my life, and trying my damndest to piece together a half assed narrative. I might shove an entire hoagie in my face… I haven’t decided yet.

-you can find Johnny cramming hoagies into his maw here