In fact, it took so much effort to get this bitch into heat that the proverbial birth father of both flat lining franchises (i.e. Full Moon Pictures) wasn't even responsible for the movie's release! Nope, those ever-lovin' bad movie bastards at the Sci-Fi Channel and Anchor Bay released it instead... after it's debut as a "Saturday Night Sci-Fi Channel Originals" movie, whose victims already include Bruce Campbell, Jeffrey Combs and the Return of the Living Dead flicks. So, though this stands as an evil omen from the darkest depths of the cinemasochist Inferno, at least the Puppet Master and Demonic Toys titles have both been promoted to a level away from stuff like Gingerdead Man... though I'm sure it's going to be more of a horizontal relocation rather than some kind of glorious, money-out-the-butt-in-the-religious-sense ascension for Andre Toulon and his brood of handmade killers.

But, let's not drown too deep in the fret just yet my friends. The flick is directed by Ted "Subspecies" Nicolaou (what, was David DeCoteau too busy making more shitty vampire frat movies?!), so let us instead embrace the potential!... and see what kind of epic shit-eating tortures these last 13 years have wasted time and resources creating!

The sad part is that I'm actually so excited for this moment that I'm watching this at 2 in the morning on my laptop, which tends to emit a loud and terrible hum when I play DVDs on it. I had a long and painful day of failures and physical labor and up until an hour ago I was welcoming sleep like Tom Hanks welcoming an AIDS infected pecker in his pooper ala Philadelphia, but now I'm all eyes, ears and fingers for this nightmarish little play-by-play. Come on people, it's a brand new DVD and it only cost me $8!? I haven't been this excited since I found out there was a sequel to Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare!

Andre Toulon is no longer an elderly puppeteer with designs of vengeance toward the servants of Adolf "Captain Moustache" Hitler and the Third Reich. Gone are the days when Guy Rolfe would send wooden toys imbued with the essence of his dead friends to hack, slash, mutilate and smash those whose turn-ons include goose-stepping, long marches on the beach and the smell of freshly baked Hassidics. No longer does a young prodigy set his miniature do-gooder toys to do battle with foot tall totem demons and giant muppets with scrotums for mouths. No, instead we now have Robert Toulon, great grand-nephew of Andre, who's bitter because the capitalist swine at Sharpe Toys have rejected him and screwball ideas for "living" toys.

Well, that or he's just pissy because he's Corey Feldman and is therefore a complete and utter joke in the footnotes of b-Hollywood to whom very few people would tag the prefix of "great" or "grand” with any level of seriousness or admiration.

Bob's your typical kooky inventor type: harmless for the most part with little more than a little smoke and bad smells to show for his work. If he didn't hiss and grimace so much, you'd half expect him to shrink down some neighborhood kids, then spend 2 hours trying to fix 'em while many a wacky hi-jink ensued. Then he'd come back for a couple fuck awful sequels and endanger the lives of several more kids before being burned alive in a boiler by the unhappy members of the PTA. Speaking of kids, this guy somehow has custody of his daughter Alexandra, with whom he re-enacts the life giving experiments of Uncle Andre thanks to a journal (that was no doubt illustrated by an eight-year-old... missing several fingers... that probably resulted in him/her drawing some fucked up looking turkeys at Thanksgiving) and several familiar looking tiny killers discovered in a flea market.

Speaking of the father-daughter relationship, it's kinda creepy the whole time I'm watching this because Corey Feldman, no matter how many gray streaks he puts in his hair or how much beard scruff he tries to grow, will always look like he's 16, so the idea of him having a teenage daughter just looks unsettling. Let's just hope "The Feld" is lucky enough to look this young when he's pissing in a bag and eating food in a state of Primordial Ooze.

Meanwhile, Sharpe Toys presidente Erica Sharpe (Vanessa Angel, who's showing every day of age since Kingpin last played a multiplex, made all the worse since her lips look like an enflamed anus now...) spies on Bobbie’s work courtesy of a hidden Ladybug spy camera while she sips sparkling cider with her "is she fucking that guy, or is he gay?" assistant Julian... who may or may not be played by one of those hitmen with the ear-raping accents from Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. (Note: after checking imdb, turns out I was wrong on that assumption… though he has had small parts in shit like Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon and other non-shark related crap cinema projects).

Sure enough, not only do Bob and Al do in five minutes what the Nazis and Kandarian demons couldn't do over the course of 8 movies, but they get it right in the first try when the puppets are resurrected on a diet of Kool-Aid™ infused with Toulon blood. :::Anubis proceeds to smash through a wall, wielding a picture of dyed sugar water laced with acid::: OH YEAH!

No sooner are Jester, Pinhead, Blade and Six-Shooter back to working order than my Kool-Aid™ smile takes a NesTea™ plunge down the proverbial shit pipe... only in this case it's literal. The puppet models being used here are by far the worse to date. Much like the rationale used on Pamela Vorhees' baby (freak monkey murderer) boy for Freddy Vs. Jason , you can tell the diseased minds behind PMvDT wanted to make the Puppets the heroes of the flick, so they changed their appearances to try and invoke a better comfort level with the audience (or lack thereof). The result? Jester and Six-Shooter no longer look like a child molesting clown and drunken rapist cowboy respectively, but instead like "empathic harlequin" and "child friendly old west kids show host" types that make me ill. Additionally, Pinhead looks like he's been sucked into the Hollywood scene since his last movie appearance, slimming down immensely to a sickly, heroined out, Olsen Twins-esque look! He's the fucking Kate Moss of the animated death toy crowd and it's pathetic! He doesn't even have that squinty-eyes Popeye quality to his face anymore. Instead, he looks like an anorexic old queen in a shitty brown sweater he knitted for himself! Seriously, I think Feldman would've been better complimented if he was acting opposite 90 minutes of badly edited stock footage than what these half-assed action figures are going to give us.

Anyway, it's Christmas time and Sharpe Toys needs that one thing to put their manufactured plastic crap above everyone else's manufactured plastic crap, so Erica sends her henchman and some goon's to Bob's "Puppet Hospital" (I shit you not) to do a little corporate raiding and acquire her some hot, wet puppet action. In standard fashion, the puppets defend themselves, a ruckus breaks out, Bob gets socked in the shnoz by an FDA approved goober with a fucking dollar sign tattooed on the back of his hand (see now, if Gene Simmons had achieved his lifelong dream of trade marking the dollar sign, he would've made $0.03 off of this purchase!), Six-Shooter accidentally sets the place on fire and he and his compadres get their stupid new plastic faces melted off... to which the puppets react as if there was somebody holding them by the leg and simply flailing them around... wonder why that is.

And with that, it's time to introduce the other half of the titular equation as, back at the Sharpe offices, Ms. Sharpe introduces (i.e. sacrifices the cleavage of) her virginal Christian Youth receptionist (I swear this chick waited on me at Uno's last night...) to her "Board of Directors", better know to followers of the Church of Chuck (as in Band) as Baby Oopsie-Daisy, Teddy and Jack-Out-Of-The-Box... which is a "pulling out" innuendo if I ever heard one. Once again, I have to state-the-hate on these new character models. For the most part Teddy doesn't seem all that different and, well, I think I actually like this new Oopsie-Daisy better, but as far as Jack goes, he looks like shit! I don't know if they were aiming for some kind of Pennywise take on the fanged box occupier, but whatever the reason it's COMPLETELY WRONG. The original Jack's design was the star of the Demonic Toys movies and unless the Killer Klowns people were threatening legal action, there was NO reason not to have stuck with it. Blegh.

Back to our story (I guess that's what you'd call it, right?), it looks like Erica has made a pact with the demon Bael (who forgot to take off his "orc mercenary" costume following his earlier Everquest™ cos-play meeting...) to bring Hell to Earth by distributing 9 million Sharpe toys to homes around the world, all of which are to be brought to murderous life on Christmas Day following the shedding of the final drops of Toulon blood. It's almost Christmas Eve and 'Ric's done her part, spreading the viral Cabbage Patch Creatures™ across the country. Will the greed demon be able to put the little beasts into blood-letting action, or will Bob and Al save the day with their new line of "burn unit victim" Puppet Master action figures? It's a rhetorical question kids, we all know how this is going to end... and yes, I know that's not what rhetorical means, I was just waiting to see if you caught on or not.

While Bob and Al prepare for their miniature war with the unholy playthings, a female cop (who has to have all of her lines dubbed) gets involved because Corey Feldman needs someone to stumble over and sweat in front of. The puppets get "cyber upgrades" that include a plastic knife and hook for Blade, pillow biting smashing thunder ball fists for Queenie Pinhead, a can crushing mace arm for Jester and an array of plastic gun arms for Six-Shooter... that somehow shoot lasers, because plastics are apparently well known for their abilities to generate intense beams of light and heat...

The good guys get caught “unawares” (to be more specific, while Bob's christening the S.S. Porcelain Bowl) and they and the puppets are at the mercy of the upstanding staff at Sharpe Corporation. Vanessa Angel puts on an outfit that would've looked a lot better on those legs when she had legs to speak of and Al's to be used as the blood sacrifice for Bael's big global conquest thing. Finally, after over an hour of waiting for it, the title bout (literally) goes into effect and the heroes break free. As the norms around them shoot at each other (and Bael cavorts around in a Santa outfit while the countdown to Judgment Day continues), the puppets and toys trade blows. Blade (and his so obviously plastic knife and hook) hacks the stuffing out of Teddy and liberates his huggable head, Pinhead squishes Oopsie's head into a geyser of goo (following one-too-many Oopsie ass blaster joke attacks) and Jester and Six-Shooter make short work of Jack... and it all happens in less time than it takes to cook minute rice. The goodies save the day, no Toulon blood is spilled, the great Christmas Holocaust is prevented, Bael takes Erica back to Hell with him as part of their agreement and Al and Bob have holiday feastings with Bob's new would-be cop girlfriend.

... Whoop-di-shit. I waited over a decade for that?! Fuck! I didn't have a whole lot of faith that this was going to go anywhere, but I didn't think these guys would forget the whole point of the movie! You take a movie called Puppet Master Vs. Demonic Toys and you spend 80 minutes pitting the two sides against disposable human fodder while the two C and D-list actors you get for the lead roles hog the screen time, only to climax with a limp-dick, one-sided conflict of Custer's Last Stand proportions?! Maybe if I were into anal intrusions I'd love this movie, but as it stands I'm against getting dicked around, especially in a 90 minute marathon of it! At least Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys lived up to it's name, and even then managed to fit in all it had to in just a little over an hour! Fucking waste of time.

As far as the acting goes, was Corey Feldman intentionally acting so over-the-top as a sign that he wasn't taking the role seriously or is he really so misguided in the thespian arts as to think he wasn't making a total ass-hat out of himself? I'm sure it's the latter, but I'm hoping it's the former, for the Feld's sake. Vanessa Angel’s never been a good actress and the fact that she’s lost 70% of her sex appeal only throws this fact into our movie watching faces all the harder. Everyone else was pretty much by the books (those of course being the “How to Act But Not Get Noticed for Doing So” series) with the glaring exception of Sylvia Suvadova. Sylvia played the part of the Feld’s law enforcing would-be girlfriend, with the stand-out of her performance being the matter of ALL OF HER LINES WERE RE-DUBBED. Does she have a horrible, ear drum grinder of an accent that the producers felt “retracted” from the film? Or, could it be that her actual acting is so bad that it couldn’t even work with the rest of this bowel obstruction? Inquiring minds want to know!... well, my slightly interested minor curiosity is kinda interested in a short and simple answer.

As you can tell from the numerous bitches and complaint dropped elsewhere as my recipe for hate called for them, the special effects ingredients involved were a good use for a dollar store budget, but otherwise a slap in the face to the series following the otherwise groovy efforts of the first three films. Granted, they didn’t go for the cheap fuck like other recent entries by relying on the same stop-action stock footage born of Toulon’s Revenge, but I’m starting to think I’d rather watch those for a 12th time as opposed to the high school jerk around we got instead. While I'm ‘picking here, the title graphic is terrible too. Why has the classic Puppet Master logo been replaced by toy alphabet blocks?! Though I understand the use of the flaming logo for the latter half of this "Rumble in the Toy Box" title, I always liked the alphabet blocks look for the original Demonic Toys design, considering they’re toys and alphabet blocks are toys and… fuck it, nobody’s even listening at this point. The movie’s shite and every fiber of my being is nagging at me to go get my eight bucks back. Guess I should go do that now before all this talking to myself gets me another run at Arkham...

Disengaging Complaint Drive Warp Engine™… now!